Holden, I’m not eating 3rd world corn. sorry. How ya been?

What if southerners are really anti-government in all of those instances that Holden listed? Why might that be? Maybe these were all instances in which the federal government, largely representing the desires of the citizens of other regions of the country, attempted to impose unpopular policies on the South.

I’m not saying the feds weren’t absolutely right to do so; ending slavery, integrating, and collecting taxes were absolutely good moves in the grand scheme of things. I guess what I’m trying to say is that southerners developed this allegedly inborn mistrust of government through long experience with having unwanted change forced down their throats.

Why might the changes have been unwanted? Partially because the South was an academic backwater compared to the North for most of history which resulted in a poorly educated population, and partially because slavery, in particular, threatened the South’s economic livelihood. People fear poverty and the unknown, and the federal government has repeatedly forced changes that could understandably be perceived by white southerners as threatening. The North, to my knowledge, has never been invaded by the South, nor had southern troops force social change in its institutions. Again, I’m glad these changes happened, but I think the manner of implementation has a lot to do with what you’re describing as southerners’ anti-government bent.

Furthermore, I don’t see the connection between southerners’ resistance to federal enforcement of abolition, integration, and taxes and local urban planning. Are southerners really that resistant to local government too? I kind of always thought that weak local governments in the South had a lot to do with the historical concentration of wealth in the capitalist class and a lack of labor unions. And I never said developers were mean, but my experience, which I admit might not be generalizable, is that they can have a lot of power over local government.

As for Rome, I would assume that, though a republic, government in Rome was a bit more authoritarian than our form of democracy. I also think that New York at the turn of the 20th century was vastly different in composition and industry than the South during its recent population boom. But again, I defer to Holden’s superior knowledge of history.

I totally agree on ag subsidies.

Maybe we should save the rest of this discussion for the next time we’re drunk in the back of Mark’s car. Then we can force everybody else to care too.

First: New York had the same issues with growth/land speculation, etc. at the turn of the 20th century that cities like Atlanta have had more recentrly. While the modes of transportation available at the time are clearly different than what we have now, the biggest difference is that New York city planners PLANNED for growth. We did not. They subdivided the land for miles before anyone even thought for a second about developing it. We let people destroy our farmland and bottleneck our highways. When they complained about traffic, we built more lanes. Metro Atlanta is bigger than the state of Delaware and has grown at a rate never seen since Rome. But Rome had quaint little thing called a GOVERNMENT. People in the south don’t like government. They didn’t like government when they said “you can’t have slaves”, they didn’t like government when they said “you can’t keep black kids out of your public schools,” they didn’t like government when they said “you can’t force your religion on people,” and they hate government when they say “you have to pay taxes” almost as much as they hate government when they say “you can’t do whatever the hell you want with your property.” No, the southern ethos has much deeper problems than the mean old “land developers”–not that they get a free ride either.

Second: Ethanol is not the answer, but the biggest problem with agricultural prices when it comes to the developing world is not they they are too high, but that they are not high enough. Farm subsidies in the western world, mostly going to huge consolidated corporate farms, encourage overproduction which results in a flooded global market reducing prices to extremely low levels. In turn, farmers in the Third World can get very little for their products. We should be much more concerned with increasing production and exports from the developing world and less on increasing consumption and imports into those countries. Production increases can result in reinvestment in infrastructure and capacity which will cause increases in purchasing power and consumption.

The Times‘ hissy fit about unconstrained growth smacks of paternalism. Were we just supposed to languish in our agricultural squalor down here, while the more developed regions of the country used us as their breadbasket and penal colony? It seems to me that it’s real easy for New Yorkers to wag their fingers at the Southeast and say, “Tsk, tsk. Shoulda slowed down all that economic development,” without considering that the Southeast was desperate for jobs and industry about fifty years ago.

I totally agree that we’re doing a crap job of conserving and planning, but I just get ruffled by the NYT, a monied paper in a gilded city, boxing our ears and accusing us of what amounts to a heap of stereotypical lunacy. I mean, doesn’t the whole world already know that the South is slow, backwards, mystical, anti-science, and self-deceptive? The Times could have done a much better article if they had examined the reasons why the South has a history of poorly centralized local government, which leads to powerful land developers making bank at the expense of the publicly funded infrastructure and urban planning.

And that, ladies and ladies, is my scattershot screed of the day.