Also, I must admit I haven't read the thread, but I've seen enough of these quasi-libertarian screeds for a lifetime. I can't be bothered anymore.
The same people who talk about the evils of "fiat currency" talk about starting homesteads? If you believe in bullshit like crypto that means you're a pretty tech-savvy internet addict. Are you going to go out and soil your hands? Butcher chickens? Exert yourself physically under the scorching sun? There's a reason pretty much every developed country keeps importing foreign workers to do this stuff – it amounts to the slave labor that the coddled citizenship refuses to perform.
(btw does anyone still believe that stuff is an actual alternative to government money? I thought even the people who push for it realized it's just a bunch of pump-and-dump scams as early as ~2020. It's why they needed to start talking about NFTs and whatnot)
Pics like this just make my blood boil. This is a fantasy. That is not enough land to live on! It's potentially a nice garden, a cool hobby, but not a viable way of life in the 21st century. Pre-modern peasant farmers required at least 4-5 acres of land to sustain themselves and produce juuust enough surplus to maybe survive a bad year (and not much more; two bad harvest in a row is a death sentence for the weaker members of the household).
Agricultural technology evolved plenty from the days of hand-seeding and sickles, but it's mostly been about
industrializing agriculture. Making it bigger. Using big machines to harvest massive quantities. Not about making the peasantry less backwards and inefficiency, but all about making them
obsolete.
EDIT: Not to mention the problems of
income! How are you going to
pay for all this? And not just to buy it or set it up, but to
maintain it! How are you going to pay for fertilizer? Where are you going to get spare parts or replacements for broken machinery and home appliances? What about everyday products that you actually
can't manufacture on your own (toilet paper???)?
Like, Jesus fucking Christ. This is so stupid. There's a
reason this sort of lifestyle has been pretty much extinguished!
The yeoman ideology runs deep in American (=internet=global) politics. And you know what? I get it. Everyone wants to be a micro-king. And in an atomized, hyper-individualized and extremely lonely society where no pathway to actually improving the system (much less displacing it) seems even remotely plausible, the parochial instinct to just somehow carve out a little niche for yourself and your family outside society is very natural and understandable. To go back to our premodern peasants: It's why it took a lot of force and outright violence to finally enclose their land and send them off to find factory jobs in the swelling urban centers.
The life of small freeholder farmers was always romanticized (e.g.
Arcadia) by the urban elites.
But that's all besides the point. Because posts like this are not serious. I think everyone
knows they're not serious. Nobody
actually thinks and seriously plans ahead for starting a homestead (and the few stupid enough to
try very quickly hit by hard reality), but because our exposure to all this stuff it should the medium of online bullshit.
It's
all theoretical. Posturing. Talking about homesteads and 'decoupling' or whatever are
aspirational rhetoric. Vicarious living through 'trad influencers' you see online.
Stop. Put the phone down or step away from the keyboard. Look around yourself and your life as it
actually is.
