Feed-Lot Electorate

My reading has trended back to food and agriculture and a parallel occurred to me that hadn't before, leading into the area of financialization. I have never understood the argument for the gold standard since currencies are always redeemable for something, whether bullion or hamburgers, unless the currency is hacked or irresponsibly managed, in which case it eventually becomes worthless anyway since a rogue government can't be relied on to do anything right (see: The Rise of the Republican Party After Desegregation.) 

Agricultural investigations lead inevitably to Earl Butz, the great corporatizer and consolidator of American agriculture, a supply-sider. Butz drove agriculture into over-capitalization and over-production, leading to the compression of excess calories into pseudo-foods and feeds which were then forced on farm animals and consumers through the lack of the availability of healthy, cost-competitive alternatives. Similarly, consistent and self-serving Wall Street pressure led to deregulation, mergers and buy-outs. 

Surplus capital was compressed into short-term pseudo-investments, economic crap-meals, high in profits for the providers but low in essential value. Wage structures were also destroyed. In agriculture too many calories are chasing too few consumers and in finance too much capital is chasing too few investments resulting in inflammatory over-capitalization and pressure for untenable returns. Long-term markets are made unstable and are underpinned by nothing, the gold-bugger's bugaboo. Speculators are addicted and need detox.

Wealthier people can afford anything and so they are exempted from the bad effects of this perverse and unsustainable system. There is only one cure--robust and fair regulation designed to ensure long term system-stability and a distribution of the benefits of the use of non-renewable resources to everyone. The promoters of this biased, toxic and subsidized corporate system hate the government for this reason and try to undermine and destroy it, excepting the few services essential to them (see: military industrial complex.)

As for the citizens, the electorate, the inhabitants of a feed lot, we know what happens to them and I sense that the slaughter has already begun. More than a generation of sick agriculture has resulted in sick citizens and the people who made them sick are now trying to deny them access to health care, through a hijacked and commandeered government serving only the needs of an increasingly small percentage of its citizens.