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The Irish Model Redux?
After reading about the disastrous agricultural policies in Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, it occurred to me that, like millions of other Americans, I was born here as the direct result of 19th-century Irish agricultural policies and practices. Those farmers practiced green, environmentally sound agriculture–no pesticides, no GMOs, no artificially manufactured fertilizers, and sustainable low-intensity, low-output methodologies.
There was, of course, that natural ecological correction around 1847 that cause about a million planet-friendly deaths in Ireland but hey, shouldn’t we all stand ready to take one for Team Earth?
Rather than locally owned medium and large farms, absentee rich guys owned everything in Ireland except for small subsistence-farming patches. That way, both incentives and local markets could be distorted. When all the currently middle-class farmers start going broke (an apparent goal of Dutch government policy) we can get closer to returning to the old Irish model of land ownership.
If we undo the Green Revolution in its entirety, it will take at least twice as much land to produce the same amount of food. (a) Such land use is not planet-friendly, and (b) the six or seven rich guys who will soon own all that land won’t allow farming anyway.
I think the climate models need to factor in the emissions from all the torches soon to be carried by the mobs that will be coming for the geniuses in charge.
Published in General
“Some of you may die. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
It will take a whole lot more land than that.
#metoo
Great post.
Interesting.
I’ve studied the history of the Irish Famine, and in every account except this one, the principal cause was interventionist restrictions on free trade and other property rights.
Mostly bad government policy. 1/8th of the people died and another 1/8th emmigrated (mostly to USA). This was a
genocidedemocide.English policy was the major cause but the trigger was the blight. Keep an entire nation poor and separated from their own produce and it does not take much to descend into disaster.
The Lovely Ones gathered in Davos will no doubt advise against too much land used for burials and against emissions from cremation. Soylent Green? “Nutrient recovery” through corpse processing?
I was told it was the fault of the English.
Here you go:
Eminent Domain.
Who will all starve to death anyway because they think food comes from the grocery store. The people at the top right now are like Pharaohs, divine intercessors with absolutely no ability to function in the real world and so isolated from it that they don’t understand how it works.
My own family history yields some similar events and outcomes. In the early 17th century my ancestor Captain Alexander Thompson was among those Scotsmen sent to Ulster to face Irish Catholics on behalf of the English landlords. After three generations in Ulster those English landlords reportedly raised rents that caused many of those in the same situation as my ancestor to leave Ulster and return to Scotland. Many of these then, as in my ancestry, emigrated to the American colonies in the 18th century where they have been known as Scots-Irish or Ulster-Scots. We are now again seeing properties being acquired by the rich or corporations and rental costs rising beyond levels most people can afford. Some more hard times for the people caused mostly by the Elite.
I think it was AOC who once said that energy prices weren’t a concern for her because she has an electric car, and she could even ride her bicycle to the grocery store.
This last made me laugh out loud.
P.S. There’s a pretty good Irish Heritage/Cultural Center in Phoenix, where I used to live.
AOC is definitely the poster child of this group. I actually think she is proud of her ignorance.
More likely, as Reagan said, she doesn’t think she’s ignorant; she just knows so much that isn’t so.
Exploitative rents forced the tenant farmers to focus on the high value potato for export to England. The blight caused an economic disaster, but the famine came because England strictly controlled imports of grains to Ireland. Democide is reason #1 for the 2nd Amendment. The English navy is reason #1 for owning canons ;)
She rides there every day with Milton Keynes.
On an aside I always get a kick out of the people who say the 2nd Amendment didn’t protect private citizens from owning cannons in 1776 when private citizens basically owned the equivalent of Frigates and Destroyers in 1776.
Sorry to realize you are one of tens of millions of Americans who were taught the story of the “ignorant Irish shanty farmers” who planted one crop and even as those potatoes died from a blight, continued to plant only that crop.
I was taught that tale myself. It was an ironic tale, as those teaching it were Irish Catholic nuns who any individual might think would have investigated the British propaganda before spewing it out over and over.
The potato blight was a natural disaster that hit other countries as well, but British policy in Ireland favored private landowners’ rights to make money over the welfare of the people.
Lots of crops were grown in Ireland besides the potato, but they were grown for export, to sell at a profit for the landowner. So much land was devoted to cash crops that Irish tenant farmers only had tiny plots to grow food to feed themselves and their families. They were heavily dependent on the potato because it was the only crop that would give them enough calories from such a small plot of land to survive. When the crop failed, they had nothing else.
Over the prior decades, heirloom cattle and fowl had been seized from the lower classes by both landowners or the British.
Like the horrific Scottish Highland Clearances, this is another example of the heavy handedness of The British Imperial aristocracy. The fact that some Irish, including of course the Catholic clergy, participated in the British programs for their personal gain and did not a thing to help their fellow country men, does not absolve the British from the genocidal policies inflicted on the nation.
That’s what the elite do, pretty much everywhere always and the result is more or less the same. We did it differently, tried to build a bottom up approach. Bottom up worked everywhere until wealth and land became concentrated which happened very rapidly everywhere always. The same happened here, but we lasted longer than usual by design, long enough to create the modern industrial state and develop technology that accelerated the whole process. It can’t work top down, especially in a place as vast and heterogenous in every aspect as the US. Moreover, we are unlikely to be able to fix it, and it will end here as it always does, but faster. The US had to split off and defeat the Brits to establish our system. We have to do that again. The Chinese are the beneficiaries and behind the entire insanity and they’re ruthless and getting more powerful every year. They will rot and decline as well, but know how to do top down and will last long enough to help these idiots destroy us. Our idiots stooges don’t have a clue.
I don’t remember learning all that much about it in school, it was covered in primary school only I think. It was taught within the wider context of the British rule in Ireland and how laissez faire policies of the new government combined with the potato blight led to the great famine. There had already been previous famines.
I remember finding it quite hard as an 11 year old to grasp what laissez faire meant.
Maybe Pope Francis can an Ireland stop to his apology tour ;)