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This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. This can be true for one generation, but the next generation can choose another profession. People don't be
by toohotatopic 6y ago
This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. This can be true for one generation, but the next generation can choose another profession. People don't become farmers if they have to pay too much.
- MiroF 6y ago> This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. How does it assume that?
- toohotatopic 6y agoOtherwise it wouldn't be a monopoly and the farmer wouldn't have to accept the offer. The farmer, or rather, the human, can source resources from other markets and sell goods or services that don't depend on farmland. Once that happens, and nobody accepts the high price, the landlord has to lower the price until somebody accepts his offer.
- MiroF 6y agoThe existence of substitutes doesn't make a monopoly no longer a monopoly. Bell was still a telephone monopoly even if I could have used carrier pigeons instead.
- toohotatopic 6y agoIt's not the same. You cannot transport voice over a pigeon, at least not instantly. If you don' allow substitutes then every brand has a monopoly on the products of their brand. Technically that's a monopoly. But nobody complains about McDonalds having a monopoly on McDonalds burgers.
- MiroF 6y agoAnd you can't farm without farmland. Selling other goods and services is a very imperfect substitute for farming. Other burgers are a pretty good substitute for McDonald's burgers.
- toohotatopic 6y agoWe are back at the assumption that farming cannot be substituted. For a society, it is true that farming can hardly be substituted. But for an individual, it's more than possible to have another profession.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWell no. Becoming a farmer takes years, and our society needs to keep more or less the same number of farmers.
- andrepd 6y agoThat would be true in a perfect world with 0 impediments to social mobility. A socioeconomic "frictionless vaccum" of sorts. In the real world, social mobility is far from perfect.
- toohotatopic 6y agoAnd yet the industrial revolution has allowed children of farmers to take other professions.
- rswail 6y agoAssume a perfectly spherical farmer in a frictionaless socioeconomic vacuum... sounds like physics.
- sudosysgen 6y agoPhysics before computers and differential equations