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.The root of the problem is the Third World, where (a) agriculture isoverwhelmingly the most important industry, and (b) the people are notaffluent enough, in any crisis, to purchase foods from abroad.Hence, toThird World people, agriculture is the most precious activity, andit becomes particularly important that it not be hobbled or discouraged inany way.Yet, wherever there is production, there are also parasitic classesliving off the producers.The Third World in our century has been thefavorite arena for applied Marxism, for revolutions, coups, or dominationby Marxist intellectuals.Whenever such new ruling classes have takenover, and have imposed statist or full socialist rule, the class most looted,exploited, and oppressed have been the major productive class: thefarmers or peasantry.Literally tens of millions of the most productivefarmers were slaughtered by the Russian and Chinese Communist regimes,and the remainder were forced off their private lands and onto cooperativeor state farms, where their productivity plummeted, and foods productiongravely declined.And even in those countries where land was not directly nationalized,the new burgeoning State apparatus flourished on the backs of thepeasantry, by levying heavy taxes and by forcing peasants to sell grain tothe State at far below market price.The artificially cheap food was thenused to subsidize foods supplies for the urban population which formedthe major base of support for the new bureaucratic class.The standard paradigm in African and in Asian countries has been asfollows: British, French, Portuguese, or whatever imperialism carved outartificial boundaries of what they dubbed colonies and establishedcapital cities to administer and rule over the mass of peasantry.Then thenew class of higher and lower bureaucrats lived off the peasants bytaxing them and forcing them to sell their produce artificially cheaply tothe State.When the imperial powers pulled out, they turned over thesenew nations to the tender mercies of Marxist intellectuals, generallytrained in London, Paris, or Lisbon, who imposed socialism or fargreater statism, thereby aggravating the problem enormously. 78 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic SenseFurthermore, a vicious spiral was set up, similar to the one that broughtthe Roman Empire to its knees.The oppressed and exploited peasantry,tired of being looted for the sake of the urban sector, decided to leave thefarm and go sign up in the welfare state provided in the capital city.Thismakes the farmer s lot still worse, and hence more of them leave thefarm, despite brutal measures trying to prevent them from leaving.Theresult of this spiral is famine.Thus, most African governments force farmers to sell all their crops tothe State at only a half or even a third of market value.Ethiopia, as aMarxist-Leninist government, also forced the farmers onto highlyinefficient state farms, and tried to keep them working there bybrutal oppression.The answer to famine in Ethiopia or elsewhere is not international foodrelief.Since relief is invariably under the control of the recipientgovernment, the food generally gets diverted from the farms to line thepockets of government officials to subsidize the already well-fedurban population.The answer to famine is to liberate the peasantry of theThird World from the brutality and exploitation of the State ruling class.The answers to famine are private property and free markets.24Government Vs.Natural ResourcesIt is a common myth that the near-disappearance of the whale and ofvarious species of fish was caused by capitalist greed, which, in a short-sighted grab for profits, despoiled the natural resources, the geese that laidthe golden eggs from which those profits used to flow.Hence, the call forgovernment to step in and either seize the ownership of these resources, orat least to regulate strictly their use and development.It is private enterprise, however, not government, that we can rely on totake the long and not the short view.For example, if a private investor orbusiness firm owns a natural resource, say a forest, it knows that everytree cut down and sold for short-run profits will have to be balanced by adecline in the capital value of the forest remaining.Every firm, then, mustbalance short-run returns as against the loss of capital assets.Therefore,private owners have every economic incentive to be far-sighted, to replanttrees for every tree cut down, to increase the productivity and to maintain The Socialism of Welfare 79the resource, etc.It is precisely government or firms allowed to rentresources from government but not own them whose every incentive isto be short-run.Since government bureaucrats control but do not own theresource owned by government, they have no incentive to maximize oreven consider the long-run value of the resource.Their every incentive isto loot the resource as quickly as possible.And, so, it should not be surprising that every instance of overuse and destruction of a natural resource has been caused, not by privateproperty rights in natural resources, but by government.Destruction of thegrass cover in the West in the late 19th-century was caused by the Federalgovernment s failure to recognize homesteading of land in large-enoughtechnological units to be feasible.The 160-acre legal maximum for privatehomesteading imposed during the Civil War made sense for the wetagriculture of the East; but it made no sense in the dry area of the West,where no farm of less than one or two thousand acres was feasible.As a result, grassland and cattle ranches became land owned by thefederal government but used by or leased to private firms.The privatefirms had no incentive to develop the land resource, since it could beinvaded by other firms or revert to the government.In fact, their incentivewas to use up the land resource quickly to destroy the grass cover, becausethey were prevented from owning it.Water, rivers, parts of oceans, have been in far worse shape than land,since private individuals and firms have been almost universally preventedfrom owning parts of that water, from owning schools of fish, etc.In short,since homesteading private property rights has generally not beenpermitted in parts of the ocean, the oceans and other water resourceshave remained in a primitive state, much as land had been in the daysbefore private property in land was permitted and recognized.Then, landwas only in a hunting-and-gathering stage, where people were permitted toown or transform the land itself.Only private ownership in the land itselfcan permit the emergence of agriculture the transformation andcultivation of the land itself bringing about an enormous growth inproductivity and increase in everyone s standard of living.The world has accepted private agriculture, and the marvelous fruits ofsuch ownership and cultivation.It is high time to expand the dominion ofman to one of the last frontiers on earth: aquaculture.Already, privateproperty rights are being developed in water and ocean resources, and we 80 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic Senseare just beginning to glimpse the wonders in store.More and more, inoceans and rivers, fish are being farmed instead of relying on randomsupply by nature [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]