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It always amuses me that in Australia primary producers identify themselves as conservative and align with the conservative party but have historically been a b
by shirro 14y ago
It always amuses me that in Australia primary producers identify themselves as conservative and align with the conservative party but have historically been a bunch of agrarian socialists. We even had some towns founded as agricultural communes in my area back in the late 19th century and when I was a kid there were still farmers co-ops running lots of local businesses. The patrons at the local hotel will tell you how much they hate unions and socialists while the pub they are drinking in is community owned and actively fights independent competition. Farmers are a strange bunch, they hate government intervention but love a handout. We used to have similar things like a single authority handling grain exports here. The justification was that it allowed us to compete with countries which distorted the market due to subsidies and barriers like the socialist USA :-) That has all gone as far as I know. Now large corporations (still community owned in a sense via the stock market) pretty much perform the same functions but there is the illusion of choice where in fact little exists as dominant players in the market distort things just as much as statutory ones. In fact that is their job.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago>Farmers are a strange bunch, they hate government intervention but love a handout. How is that at all strange? Hypocritical, certainly, but not strange. People want the government to take money from others and give it to them but not the other way around. That is basically the entire basis of politics on the question of government spending.
- mjn 14y agoCanadian politics historically had a similar current, the Social Credit Party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Canada I think part of it is that farmers were historically socially conservative, but not particularly free-market oriented. Given the miscellaneous catastrophic risks to livelihood that small farmers face from fluctuations in weather and prices, from the perspective of economic politics, farmers have typically been in favor of vaguely socialized systems that share some of the risks and stabilize prices. Even when it wasn't done via the state, the tendency was towards agricultural cooperatives and other kinds of economic pooling schemes.