It's not unusual for me to think about the Depression of the '30s. Like most Americans who have been here a few generations, it's part of my family mythology. It's an even bigger part of my wife's family.
Since I'm not huge on posting real names, and I don't think constantly referring to the Most Important People In The World as "my wife" and "my child", as if they are defined solely by their relationship to me is fitting, from here on I shall call her "Notepo" and my child will be "Miniepo" (a naming convention I used in other places on teh t00bs for years). Fair enough?
Back to the ramble, this time let's go under the fold, just for variety.
I was talking to Notepo about the small business credit crunch that thereisnospoon wrote about recently. She pointed out to me that this has happened before, in a big way.
In my family, the legend of the dust bowl went like this: Grampa was a poor sharecropper, and when the Depression came, he went to California to seek his fortune. Did OK. (In reality, it didn't happen that way quite that way. But this is the tale, and grew in the telling over decades.)
Notepo gave me some education about farming in the Midwest in the early 20th century. Farmers took out loans for seed and supplies and equipment. When the drought killed the crops, they couldn't pay the bank. The banks foreclosed and they went west, or moved into town, or whatever.
But the farms were still there. The farms didn't blow away with the topsoil. In Steinbeck, when the Joads were run off their land, it didn't sit fallow, it was plowed up by a neighbor on a tractor who worked for the Bank.
The Dust Bowl was the birth of big agribusiness. Now, they run everything. Giant comapanies more interested in profit margins than sustainability and biodiversity. They were vultures, and very profitable. Imagine what the country and the world would look like today if the small family farm was still the model for agriculture. Small ventures that raised enough food to feed themselves and a modest surplus to take to market. Regional variety, heirloom crops, and a concern not just for the business and the land but for the eventual inheritors. Large corporations don't care about the fate of their stockholders 30 or 20 or even 10 years down the road -- parents who are planning to hand the farm off to their children do.
Finance and insurance is as big a part of the economy as farming used to be. What unforeseen development will come out of all this?
Would anyone in the '30s be able to foresee giant agribusinesses taking government subsidies that were intended to help family farms, becoming international, and persecuting (and prosecuting) farmers for the crime of trying to save some seed to sow next season?
What kind of financial/insurance monster will be born from this crisis?
If civilization continues (and, frankly, I am one of those tinfoil-hatted types who seriously thinks that in the next few years it's all going to come so totally apart that the Black Death is going to look like grandmotherly kindness, and I doubt I will be able to personally survive the collapse unless it's The Stand and there's consumer goods, especially medicine, laying around free for the taking) there's going to be a major shift coming.
Does anyone have any idea what is really coming? What kind of world will we be living in? Will it be universal governance with ubiquitous law enforcement (and if you've ever read Vernor Vinge, you probably cringed when you heard them talk about putting GPSes in all vehicles) or Democratic Anarchy? Will it be a pseudo-Socialist Utopia or a Fanatic's Paradise?
Even if, by some careful and lucky maneuvering, we can pull our way out of this crisis (like we did with the New Deal) what will we create all unknowingly?
The Military-Industrial Complex is dying. Will it be replaced by the Financial-Insurance Hegemony?