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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSB who wrote (66185)	12/12/1999 1:28:00 PM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

<<'m curious, how much undeveloped property do you own? I'm thinking this might give me a better sense of why you're concerned about personal property rights versus the common good.>> I don't own any undeveloped property at the moment. My concern is that the world's environment will suffer greatly if all the trees are chopped down or all the wetlands destroyed, taking species with them. As I said earlier, I do believe that owners of undeveloped lands should be well compensated if they cannot develop them, but that private property owners do not have complete rights to do whatever they like if it threatens a higher common good. When I did own property it had a stunningly beautiful beach on it. Even though it definitely compromised my rights to privacy, I fully supported the right of the public to walk across the beach and enjoy it, which was the law where I lived and seemed very reasonable to me. There are too many points in your post to address fully right now, because my fingers are beginning to freeze at the keyboard it is so cold in my house, and I can hardly type so I'm going to go do something else and try to warm up. But in regard to family farms in America, our agricultural policy is not to support family farms. In France it is, and that is why they are want to protect them against a flood of cheap agricultural imports that are only possible with massive business-oriented farming practices. They would rather subsidize family farms because they are a very stable part of society and a place to raise strong, healthy families. The French see a social benefit in maintaining these traditions, and I would agree. I am not an expert on American farming, but I do know that families sell their farms when they can no longer make a viable living on them, and sadly and very reluctantly at that. This is much more complicated than free choice, and has to do with extremely unethical banking practices in the '70s and '80s where huge loans caused a lot of farmers to sink into debt, and an unwillingness in America to pay very much for farm produce, even though we could certainly afford to do so. Food is artificially inexpensive here compared to income, much less expensive than in Europe, for example. Our pork is abundant and cheap because large farmers are polluting the ground water and streams and rivers by factory farming them. Is that really good? A lot of people would argue that it is not. It is sort of like gasoline in Europe, really. The European governments believe in public transportation and are concerned about pollution, so they tax gasoline severely so that cars are not driven as much. In Ireland last spring gasoline was about $4.00 a gallon. This seems very reasonable to me, since there is a larger social/environmental good. In America these are principles which are much less important, to our detriment in my opinion, but I pretty sure not in yours.