The Rural Voice, 1980-12, Page 20KEITH ROULSTON
Common sense is what counts
"Well, that's progress." The phrase
usually comes with a shrug of the
shoulders.
It may be varied slightly. "Well, that's
life," it may be instead. It's an express-
ion of fatalism for the o passing of
something that once was, that supposedly
can't continue. Joe down the road has to
sell out his farm because farm prices just
don't match mortgage, and production
crops: "Well, that's life."
A small company in town is gobbled up
by a larger company: "Well. that's
progress." People move continually from
the farm and rural community toward the
big cities: "Well, that's progress."
The phrase nearly invariably comes
from the survivors, the winners. It seems
to accept the fact that the event may be
unfortunate but it's just a fact of life, an
inevitability. The reaction is like a
father's reaction to a child's tears when
the family cat kills a pretty bird in the
yard: we may not like it but that's part of
the world.
You don't hear this kind of fatalism
from the victims of "progress." They
may use the same words but there is
almost always a sense of anger, frustrat-
ion and bitterness in their voices when
they use it. In a system where the losers
get ever more numerous and the winners
get fewer and fewer it is hard for the
majority of people to believe the universe
is unfolding as it should.
THINGS TOUGHER?
You listen to the winners and you'd
think that if anything, things should be
tougher. There should be more open
market plundering they say. Survival of
the fittest, they say. Only by having the
most competitive survive can we build a
stronger economy. They say that, of
course , because they expect to be the
survivors. They are the people with the
good luck to have been born with enough
money to get a good start or with the
special knack of being able to find the
way to make it to the top, the knack only a
small percentage of people have. Or they
may have been just plain lucky to have
stumbled onto something at just the right
time and made a killing.
For them the competitive "free mark-
et" economy has obviously been proved
just and right. But only while things are
going right. Listen to the free enterpris-
ers when thing go wrong. Listen to the
big money boys at Chrysler. Listen to
Massey Ferguson. Listen to one of the
successful big beef farmers if something
he can't control happens: if there's an
outbreak of disease that deci mates his
herd,Listen then and you'll hear these
same people who are so strongly against
government intervention calling for, no
demanding, government action to do
something about their plight.
The truth is that the system must work
to give control of the system to the
majority of the people. We must have a
system that neither delivers too much of
our control into the hands of people from
outside the country or of too few people
inside the country. For a country to work
it must be decentralized in power. We
can't afford to let huge blocks of our land
be bought and controlled by people
outside the country (or absentee owners
of any kind) and we can't afford to let
control of our resources fall into the
hands of too few people.
TRUE COMPETITION
The free enterprise system, after all,
was based on true competiton, the fact
that there were thousands of buyers and
thousands of sellers. Well, farming today
PG. 18 THE RURAL VOICEIDECMEBER 1980
is one of the few places left where there
are thousands of sellers (in terms of
production) or buyers (in terms of
consumption of farm services). The "free
market" system is not really in effect
when a few machinery companies make
all the machinery or a few chemical
companies control the petroleum and
fertilizer industries or a few packing
houses buy all the farm products. While
they talk about the glories of competition
(particularly when they're comparing
themselves to government-owned
businesses) nearly every top
businessman I've known would just love
to be in a position of having the market to
himself, of having 'a monopoly. Often all
that has kept him from being in that
position is government legislation.
Farmers who get too caught up in the
dogma of the "free enterprise" system
are suckers as surely as the old time
farmers who bought the sure fire way to
kill potato bugs. Dogma is worthless.
Common sense is what counts.
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