[timthelion]

It might be possible to make a living growing and selling it, but it is actually quite unrealistic that a sizable portion of the population could choose to start doing so. %100 of the land in the US is owned now. Its not like the fronteir days when anyone who wanted to start a farm could just go out west. If 1 million americans wanted to start a fresh foods farm within driving distance of a city, that wouldn't be possible. The price of land would skyrocket. And that would only be one third of one percent of all Americans. Not even a significant shift. What if 20 or 30 million Americans wanted to make that transition. Is that economically possible in todays world? What if the government were to give anyone who wanted to start a familly farm a million dollars to buy land. Would it be possible then? I don't think so. I think that it isn't about choice. I think that it is litterally impossible for our society to change without the fundamental ideas regarding property rights or urbanization changing.

[leereeves]

You just said you know families who owned land who couldn't make a living growing and selling it anymore.

So it's not lack of land that stopped them.

[timthelion]

"So it's not lack of land that stopped them." You're missing a sense of timescale here. For a long time the number of familly farms has been decreasing all across the country. Recently, it has become possible to make a living selling fresh food if you live within driving distance of a city where you can sell the food for a premium. The high cost of a fresh head of letuce in LA in 2016-17 doesn't help a small time farmer in rural Colorado in the 90s.

[leereeves]

Still leaves the question of why people in the 90s weren't buying fresh food from the small farmers.

[timthelion]

That's true. It is a good question. And its the question we should be asking. We should be trying to debug this problem, rather than pretending that it is a non-problem.

I personally don't see my own anti-capitalistic views as being a matter of politics or political direction. I see the problems posed as being similar to aging or the need to find better forms of transportation. No one argues that aging is good. Everyone agrees that the outcome of aging is bad, people get slower, less inteligent, suffer and die. That is bad... I see the current outcome of American globalist capitalism to be similar. Obviously, the outcome sucks. Most people are unhealthy, unhappy, there are advertizements everywhere, we are destroying the earth, and living in smelly toxic concrete filled cities. I'm not a communist, or a socialist, or a progressive, I'm an engineer who is baffled by a huge problem that I don't know how to solve. I am totally baffled by the huge number of people who seem to question whether these problems are real. Its like if this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419352 was full of people writing that "well you can point to some problems with aging, but really, we're all better off getting old and dying". My response would be similar, it would be like WTF? I don't have a solution to American corporate globalism and the problems it causes, I don't have a solution to aging either, but I want a solution to both.

[leereeves]

I'm not pretending it's a non-problem.

It's a much much bigger problem: human nature leads us to make bad choices, willingly.

But short of a miracle pill or a totalitarian regime that forces us all to live healthy lives, I don't see a solution.

[timthelion]

You are also not the OP who I origionally responded to. thisnotmyacc wrote "By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone." And that is pretending we have a non-problem and that our society is functional.

Edit:

I think that it is worse than just a problem with human nature. As I wrote, previously, I think it is economically non-possible for Americans to choose to go back to growing local food. %100 land is owned, and most owners are not selling, the price of land is high, and most Americans cannot afford to buy that land. Perhaps charging large farms land rent (aka, only charging land rent to large corporations) would help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism but I'm not sure if I believe that democracy is capable of implementing any sort of reform non-corruptly.