We've become a nation of serfs

The reason I’ve been serving up recipes for potatoes, lintels and beans is we’ve become a nation of sharecroppers and serfs. I prefer we become a nation of peasants so I give you recipes for a peasant. A peasant, after all, is a free man.

Let me explain. A sharecropper or serf farms someone else’s land in agreement to turn over a portion of the harvest to the landowner. Before the land is plowed and seeded, the sharecropper is indebted to the landlord who now has a claim on his labor. Often a claim set so high enough that, while ensuring survival, the sharecropper could never create surplus wealth. 

Meanwhile a similar peasant farmer who has title to his land can sell his surplus crops and gradually accumulate wealth, by paying off the mortgage, through saving or both.

Land and labor are the source of wealth for both farmers. Yet one can never generate significant surplus wealth. The sharecropper’s debt is unsecured and places a direct claim on his labor. He faces a life of servitude.

The farmer with the title on his land, while maybe paying off a mortgage, will eventually own both the land and his labor.  His debt is a claim on the land which in time can be fully secured. The landowning peasant is in charge of his economy. The serf is not.

Our unsecured debt, both personal and our collective state and federal debt, has reduced us to nation of serfs, or wage slaves if you will.

Our kids are encouraged to attend college and take on a mountain of federal student loans.

They and we, literally, have credit cards thrown at us through the mail.

When buying a car or a house, the lenders encourage us to take on as much debt as they believe we can service.

On top of that, our collective debt on the federal level alone, figuring 300 million of us owe $14 trillion, is about $47,000 for every man, woman and child among us. Under that load our options are limited. We have a large nut to cover.

In short, we are at a precipice. We can either turn back toward individual and collective economic sanity. And to be sure it will be very painful. It will require thrift, self sacrifice and willingness embrace self reliance over entitlement.

The other option is to allow ourselves and future generations be bound in totalitarian servitude.

F. A. Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom: “Although the state controls directly the use of only a large part of the available resources, the effects of its decisions on the remaining part of the economic system become so great that indirectly it controls almost everything. Where, as was, for example, true in Germany as early as 1928, the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than half the national income…they control indirectly almost the whole economic life of the nation. There is, then, scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the “social scale of values” which guides the state’s action must embrace practically all individual ends.”

The current federal budget is $3.5 billion. That is about 25% of the U.S. gross domestic product. States and local governments command another large chunk. In addition U.S. government indirectly controls the energy industry, agriculture, medical services, education, financial services and others.

When government controls essentially the whole economy there becomes a need for it to articulate an economic plan to produce prosperity and ensure “common welfare.” Hayek argues economic planning on this scale is beyond the reach of democracy. Competing economic interests, reflected in an elected legislative body, result in gridlock where nothing gets done.

At this point Hayek writes: “The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning…

…Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”