this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Groceries and housing cost way too much for many people to make babies.
Costs too little, you mean. When housing and groceries are actually unaffordable, people have children to help grow food and prepare supplies for shelter. This is why birth rates are still quite high in poor countries and why birthrates fall off a cliff when people have plenty of resources readily available.
Please show me on the map where I can take my future family and farm the land on my theoretical meager wealth.
There is none.
We don't live in a world where the average human can farm their own food meaningfully anymore. Not at scale at least. The lands been bought, built on, or industrialized for large scale crop harvest.
What you are proposing doesn't work in most places on this planet anymore.
Lots and lots and lots of crown land that is more than suitable to provide for a family. If the people are not permitted to settle on that crown land... change that. Said land is literally owned by the people. The people can do whatever they want with it.
Only the super high productive land is used for large scale crops. You do not need anything of the sort to feed a family. You're not becoming a farmer here. Farmers don't need children. They have tractors.
Well, you're not becoming a modern farmer. You're becoming a preindustrial farmer. Modern life has its problems but I'd rather not become a peasant, thanks.
Growing food doesn't make you a farmer. A farmer, by definition, is an owner of a farm business. In Canada, we take it further and require the business has at least $7,000 in gross farm sales to legally consider its owner a farmer.
So, let's say you want to make it a business. Who will be your customers? You are definitely not going to be able to produce the food more cheaply than large scale agriculture working Canada's most prime land. What's your value proposition?
Let's be realistic: You're not becoming a farmer. You are growing food for yourself in this scenario because your time is otherwise worthless. If your time was not worthless, you would use that time to generate value and use that value to buy food from a farmer.
I don't follow. Because food and shelter is still quite affordable (even if not nearly as cheap as you wish it were) and with both starting to fall in price you think you're going to become a peasant? You may want to clarify.
The way I see it, a farmer is one who operates a farm, and a farm is an area dedicated to the production of food or other plant or animal products, but that's irrelevant. We can use the word "homesteader" if you prefer.
Life as a homesteader sucks. It's very hard work with long hours. If you get a few bad crop years in a row, you starve. If you become disabled, you starve. If you become seriously ill, far away from decent medical care, you die. Of course the community can help you, but you're surrounded by other homesteaders with the same problems.
That is, more or less, the way it was for most of human history. These days, we specialize. We assign a few people to produce food, a few people to educate the young, a few people to treat illness, and so on. In most of the Western world, we organize this with money. If I opt out of the system to become a homesteader and work the land for food for my family, that is my full-time job. I don't contribute anything extra to society, and so I have no (or little) money. My life becomes essentially that of a peasant. Oh, sure, I have vaccines and civil rights and maybe running water, so my life isn't as bad as that of a medieval peasant, but it's still fundamentally similar: I give up most of the advantages of living in a modern, industrialized society.
You make it sound like we are talking about actively choosing to become a homesteader.
If you read the thread (a lot to ask, I know) you would know that we are talking about one ending up as a homesteader because they have failed to provide value to society. If one was providing value to society then one could easily afford to live in modern society, including having their food produced by a farmer.
If you did read the thread then you are not making yourself clear. Why would someone purposely stop providing value to society?