[lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral :Law


On 2005/08/05, at 17:59, JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx wrote:

I'm in a city of roughly 70,000 pop in mis-Missouri and I ALWAYS lock my car -- my husband doesn't and he and his daughter have had 3 cd players ripped out of their vehicles as a result. We used to have a very large black mutt dog whom we took in because his owner, who used him for hunting (he was part hound, part doby, I think) abandoned him. He also probably abused him. The dog was viciously protective of the property and I never had to lock my front door. Once we found the furniture in the foyer upended all over the place and one piece drug as close to the door as possible. We believe someone tried to come in in our absence and the snarling large dog encouraged them to make as quick a get-away as they could. In the absence of said dog I would NEVER leave my house unlocked, or my car. My husband used to live in a town of 11,000 before we got married; sort of a modern Mayberry. He never locked his house or his truck. He's adjusting.....and even there, now, he will lock his office when leaving, which always stood open.


I wonder if size is the relevant variable here and how this town of 70,000 supports itself. My curiosity is driven by the Goldschmidt hypothesis, described as follows at http://www.sectionz.info/ISSUE_3/ Facts_Footnotes.html

"In the US, the crucial question was asked more than half a century ago: what does the growth of largescale, industrial agriculture mean for rural towns and communities? Walter Goldschmidt's classic 1940s study of California's San Joaquin Valley compared areas dominated by large corporate farms with those still characterised by smaller family farms. In farming communities dominated by large corporate farms, Goldschmidt found, nearby towns died off. Mechanisation meant that fewer local people were employed, and absentee ownership meant that farm families themselves were no longer to be found. In these corporate-farm towns, the income earned in agriculture was drained off into larger cities to support distant enterprises, while in towns surrounded by family farms, the income circulated among local business establishments, generating jobs and community prosperity. Where family farms predominated, there were more local businesses, paved streets and sidewalks, schools, parks, churches, clubs and newspapers, better services, higher employment and more civic participation. Studies conducted since Goldschmidt's original work confirm that his findings remain true today."
― Rosset, P. (1999). "Small is Beautiful." The Ecologist, v.29, i.8 (December).
― Goldschmidt, W. (1978). "As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness." New Jersey: Allenheld, Osmun and Company.

"A tremendous amount of attention and research has been devoted to the impacts of farm scale on rural communities. The majority of this research follows in the 'Goldschmidt' tradition… In addition to generating academic research, concerns over structural change in U.S. agriculture have also generated public policies… The laws, called anti-corporate farming laws, vary from state to state but in general are intended to hobble or restrict corporate involvement in agriculture in order to protect family farm agriculture… To test the impacts of the anti-corporate farming laws we construct two variables: a binary variable for whether a state has such a law or not; and a restrictiveness index that allows us to compare states with more restrictive laws to those with less restrictive laws. In addition, a number of control variables are included in the analysis… Rural community welfare is measured by three variables: percent of families in poverty, percent unemployed and percentage of farms in a county realizing cash gains… The results of the analysis indicate that, in general, agriculture dependent counties in states with anti-corporate farming laws fared better (less families in poverty, lower unemployment and higher percentages of farms realizing cash gains) than agriculture dependent counties in states without such laws."
― Welsh, R. and T. Lyson (2001). "Anti-Corporate Farming Laws, the 'Goldschmidt Hypothesis' and Rural Community Welfare." Friends of the Constitution.

"The 'diseconomies of scale' extend beyond the farmgate to affecting the farming community. There is a substantial body of literature that suggests that large-scale agricultural production does not bode well for conditions in farming communities. University of California anthropologist Dean MacCannell wrote, 'As farm size and absentee ownership increase, social conditions in the local community deteriorate. We have found depressed median family incomes, high levels of poverty, low education levels, social and economic inequality between ethnic groups, etc... associated with land and capital concentration in agriculture... Communities that are surrounded by farms that are larger than can be operated by a family unit have a bi-modal income distribution, with a few wealthy elites, a majority of poor laborers, and virtually no middle class. The absence of a middle class at the community level has a serious negative effect on both the quality and quantity of social and commercial service, public education, local governments, etc.'"
― USDA National Commission on Small Farms (1998). "A Time to Act." United States Department of Agriculture, p.19.
― MacCannell, D. (1983). "Agribusiness and the Small Community." Background paper to "Technology, Public Policy and the Changing Structure of American Agriculture." U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.

Living in Japan, I know that the situation is not altogether as rosy as has been depicted in tales of wallets returned untouched and there is growing concern that the social contract which supported the friendly habits these stories exemplify is breaking down. Those stories are part of the world of postwar Japan in which annual government surveys regularly revealed that 90% or more Japanese regarded themselves as middle-class and income distribution was relatively flat. Now we see corporate restructuring, the emergence of a winner-take-all economy, and with it a growing polarization of class differences. As people cease to see themselves as part of a society in which both benefits and obligations are shared, hanging on to the wallet or its contents becomes increasingly easy to do. Sales of home security systems are rising.



John McCreery------------------------------------------------------------------
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