School Starting, Cattle Drive, Marxism

We could use some rain. The water source for our whole farm is a developed spring back in the mountain. It’s slowing down. Other springs in the area have dried up. Makes me nervous. Prayers for rain. 

Sunday afternoon we gathered up about 40 head of cattle to sort out the biggest end for Monday’s trip to the processor. Amy and the kids started school this week. They’re off to a good start. Hallie now in 4th grade, Hasten in 2nd, Wren in pre-k, and Carter in the middle of all of it. 

With Amy’s mornings now devoted to teaching the kids, she’s going to be stretched thin when it comes to farm work. So far, she’s juggling it well, taking care of everything around the house, keeping the cabins cleaned, and making three batches of chicken bone broth this week in the on-farm kitchen. We filled this month’s pork herd shares and some of the beef shares on Wednesday afternoon. Hopefully we’ll get the rest filled today while getting orders and coolers filled for tomorrow’s Abingdon Farmers Market. 

Being under stocked with plenty of grass this spring, we grazed about 135 heifers for CH Cattle this summer. On Tuesday afternoon, Amy, the kids, and I eased the heifers on about a 2 mile cattle drive to get them closer to the barn. We rounded them up and sent them out this morning. 

Amy’s parents came up for a couple nights this week to help Amy with house projects. Her dad is a handy man who can do anything. Her husband is not. Ha. They helped block the road and get the cows in and out this morning. 

Still moving chickens daily. I love moving chickens this time of year. With grasshoppers and other bugs in abundance, it seems September is when pastured chickens do their most aggressive foraging. They go after those bugs like it’s their job. Commercially raised chickens certainly don’t have access to the wide variety of bugs and natural vegetation that our chickens get on a daily basis. 

Speaking of aggressive foragers, a groundhog ate all of Amy’s kale in the backyard garden. I shot at it twice this week. Missed twice. 

I moved the pigs to another paddock in the woods again. The bigger they get, the more frequently I move them. Before putting up the new wire, I weed eat around the perimeter of the paddock to keep the electric wires from grounding out. 

On the way to and from the processor this week, I listened to “Marxism” by Thomas Sowell. I had a hard time staying engaged throughout most of it, as Sowell lays out Carl Marx and Friedrich Engles ridiculous philosophical and economic ways of thinking. The last couple chapters, however, were more interesting as they focused on the life and legacy of Marx.

About his early adulthood, “The themes of destruction, corruption, and savagery run through Marx’s poems of this era… There was nothing political about these writings. Marx had not yet turned his attention in that direction. He was simply as one biographer said, ‘A man with a peculiar faculty for relishing disaster.’ A contemporary description of Marx as a student depicts the same demonic personality… a self-assured monster.”

Marx had a lifelong history of financial problems, having been “sued several times for non payment of debts,” with a “prodigious capacity to waste money, a talent he never lost throughout his life.”

“Now fully grown and holding a doctoral degree, Marx had continued his already long standing practice of running up bills that he could not pay and was outraged that his mother cut off his remaining small allowance.”

“The problem was Marx’s chronic inability to manage money” 

In Marx’s own words to his friend Friedrich Engles, “I live too expensively for my circumstances.”

The irony is that this man with a horrible track record with his own personal finances, supposedly has the the financial solutions to all of society’s economic problems. It actually makes perfect sense. Wasting his own money was not enough, he had to figure out how to use the state to waste everybody else’s money. It’s one thing to bring financial hardships solely on himself, but his nonsense socialist way of thinking brings hardships on all of society. It will undoubtedly bring hardships on our society if we ignorantly choose to go down the socailist/communist road.

I am a capitalist, in favor of free markets. Free markets have the surest and fastest way of making proper adjustments and corrections in the economy. Does our current economy have problems? Absolutely. The roots of those problems are not the fault of capitalism, they are the fault of the government’s interference with free markets. The more the government intervenes to “fix” our economy, the more messed up it becomes. The more “socialized” our economy becomes, the more it hurts those it was originally intended to help. And the hungrier we will become.

Sowell reminds us that, “the road to hell is paved with good intention, that everything that has been done wrong, has been done wrong for the very best of reasons.”

Bad policy, even with good intentions, brings hard times. Unnecessarily. I hope we can learn from history, but I fear we may not. The consequences of slowly easing down this socialist road could be devastating for generations. 

We are not too big or too smart to fall. Rome was too big to fall. Then it fell. “It was 1000 years after the fall of Rome before the average standard of living in Europe rose again to the level of Roman times.” 

“In agriculture especially, Marxist's grand dismissals of what they did not understand, had far reaching practical consequences, including desperate food shortages in modern communist nations.”

“Marxism was and remains a mighty instrument for the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Once such an instrument has come into existence, those who wield the enormous power it makes possible, have every incentive to use it and preserve it for their own purposes, regardless of what purposes may have motivated Marx or Engles.”

“Economic competition was what drove prices down under capitalism… Mutual competition ensured that capitalists were in no position simply to tack higher profits onto production costs. Therefore, as production costs were driven down throughout an industry, prices tended to be driven down as well, to the benefit of the consuming public.”

Have a good week.

Will