How Democratic Institutions and Manners Tend to Raise Rents and Shorten The Terms of Leases is another chapter mixing economics and democratic government. If we remained an agricultural country, I would find this more interesting - the question of whether capitalism came not being as a means for employing people when the population exceeds arable land. But what then of sub-Saharan Africa with its excess population starving? It would seem to me then that capitalism requires a stable agriculture capable of feeding its excess population so that then the excess population can produces goods for the whole population. Images from Soylent Green come to mind - an America incapable of feeding itself and falling apart at the seams. It also brings to mind the Scotland of Adam Smith where oats fed people, not just horses.
Jackson Turner wrote a very important essay on the effct of the frontier on American History [The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893):
The farmer’s advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:
Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a “truck patch.” The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or “deadened,” and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the “lord of the manor.” With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he “breaks for the high timber,” “clears out for the New Purchase,” or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over. sch 8/12/2023.]
I think de Tocqueville caught a glimpse of this idea:
In America there are, properly speaking, no farming tenants; every man owns the ground he tills. It must be admitted that democratic laws tend greatly to increase the number of landowners and to diminish that of farming tenants. Yet what takes place in the United States is much less attributable to the institutions of the country than to the country itself. In America land is cheap and anyone may easily become a landowner; its returns are small and its produce cannot well be divided between a landowner and a farmer. America therefore stands alone in this respect, as well as in many others, and it would be a mistake to take it as an example.
I believe that in democratic as well as in aristocratic countries there will be landowners and tenants, but the connection existing between them will be of a different kind. In aristocracies the hire of a farm is paid to the landlord, not only in rent, but in respect regard, and duty; in democracies the whole is paid in cash. When estates are divided and passed from hand to hand, and the permanent connection that existed between families and the soil is dissolved, the landowner and the tenant are only casually brought into contact. They meet for a moment to settle the conditions of the agreement and then lose sight of each other; they are two strangers brought together by a common interest, who keenly talk over a matter of business, the sole object of which is to make money.
What about Canada and/or Australia? Was land ownership different in those countries? Another item beyond my resources to research at this time.
The chapter discusses the breakdown of aristocratic society. He is not a Marxist, but he sees the feudal breaking down in the face of capitalism.
An aristocracy does not expire, like a man, in a single day; the aristocratic principle is slowly undermined in men's opinion before it is attacked in their laws. Long before open war is declared against it, the tie that had hitherto united the higher classes to the lower may be seen to be gradually relaxed. Indifference and contempt are betrayed by one class, jealousy and hatred by the others. The intercourse between rich and poor becomes less frequent and less kind, and rents are raised. This is not the consequence of a democratic revolution, but its certain harbinger; for an aristocracy that has lost the affections of the people once and forever is like a tree dead at the root, which is the more easily torn up by the winds the higher its branches have spread. In the course of the last fifty years the rents of farms have amazingly increased, not only in France, but throughout the greater part of Europe. The remarkable improvements that have taken place in agriculture and manufactures within the same period do not suffice, in my opinion, to explain this fact; recourse must be had to another cause, more powerful and more concealed. I be- lieve that cause is to be found in the democratic institutions which several European nations have adopted and in the democratic passions which more or less agitate all the rest.
I have frequently heard great English landowners congratulate themselves that at the present day they derive a much larger income from their estates than their fathers did. They have perhaps good reason to be glad, but most assuredly they do not know what they are glad of. They think they are making a clear gain when it is in reality only an exchange; their influence is what they are parting with for cash, and what they gain in money will before long be lost in power.
I cannot let this passage go without comment:
...In ages of equality the human mind takes a different bent: the prevailing notion is that nothing abides, and man is haunted by the thought of mutability....
Changes come for all of us. If nothing else, we all die. Then, or any time while still drawing breath, we have the opportunity to look back and wonder if this is all there is and why did not attain more, reach higher? I look at myself as a child and find a deep well of mystery and disgust at what I became. My behavior led to me being shuffled offstage by the federal government; although as far off as I planned on March 9, 2010. No carbon monoxide fumes choking off the disaster I had become. Others may have reached the saem conclusion I did by a different route.
Nietzsche argued against democracy in his fight against nihilism. I thought he did not know the benefits of American democracy. I thought Albert Camus offered a better solution in The Rebel, but I do not recall him addressing of the problem of what happens when a person tires of fighting, of trying to live creatively. For me, it was succumbing to the feelings of meaninglessness, of suicide as the Great Escape.
I do not know how much of my depression came from a feeling of philosophical despair, or if my depression created the philosophical despair. They are connected, but I am too close to the problem to tell you exactly cause and effect. We can go the way of Camus and essentially ignore the masses for ourselves, or we can go another way. Cannot Sisyphus become Narcissus. I think Camus saw the possibility of life in a democracy that Nietzsche did not. Democracy meaning a community made of all of us rolling our own rocks up a hill. I have only that sketch in mind, but what of such a community? It would seem possible to redefine democracy to be more humane.
sch
[A couple of points came to mind as I look back 13 years. First, that Camus saw up close and personal the effect of a fascistic government on humanity; Nietzsche did not. Secondly, that I wrote of the benefits of American democracy in the way I did seems to be the product of a white man born in 1960, who was overweeningly optimistic. In my defense, a Martin Luther King, Jr would not have been successful in an anti-democratic society; he would have been summarily executed, if allowed to open his mouth. I never believed that American democracy was perfect. It has been quite flawed, in fact. Lincoln's better angels may appear tardily to deal with our flaws, but they do appear. We all need to fear those who are anti-democratic, they raise themselves about humanity, become inhumane, and destructive of all that will not fit within their fear-begotten categories of acceptable people. sch 8/12/2023.]
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