Those Damn Farmers

Family farmers have always been among the most serious threats to socialism.  Throughout its history, socialism has fought to destroy the family farm so the Obama Administration's antipathy to Iowa's family farms should come as no surprise. 

The progressives attack on family farming accelerated this week.  The Department of Labor opened an entirely new onslaught on the ability of farm kids to, uh...well, farm.  This proponent's of this attack justify the massive limitation of family farm activity as the protection of children.  The progressives' premise this latest attack on the need to protect children from their evil farm parents who would otherwise risk their children's lives and safety to maximize their farming profits. 

This attack on farm kids follows closely on the heels of last month's EPA regulation of the dust created by farmers driving on gravel roads and working machinery on dirt fields.   Perhaps the Administration feels that dust free hydroponic agriculture, perfected by America's urban marijuana croppers, can replace traditional earth based agriculture.  The progressives seek to justify the ludicrous limitations on farming dust as necessary to protect our planet from evil family farmers who will sacrifice the world's health for their farming profits.

While the attack on family farming is new to the United States it is historically consistent with socialism wherever history has found it.

The original socialist government, the Lenin/Stalin led Soviet Union, starved (and otherwise massacred) almost seven million Ukrainian "kulaks" between 1923 and 1932.  Mere seizure of the private farms and surplus grain was insufficient to protect the Soviet state's interest in controlling the food supply.  The Soviets deemed it necessary to destroy the farmers because the independent nature of private family farming placed the food supply outside government control.  State control of the food supply could not be assured without the annihilation of the entire class of family farmers.

The Chinese communists, led by Anita Dunn's favorite political thinker Mao Zedong, engaged in very similar policies, albeit with somewhat less mass starvation and somewhat more old fashioned execution as the means of extermination.  During the "Great Leap Forward" Chinese agriculture was entirely collectivized and those who resisted were simply exterminated.  State control of the food supply could not be assured without annihilation of tens of millions of family farmers.

Unsurprisingly socialist governments everywhere followed similar, if less violent, policies.  Most recently, President Obama's partner in socializing the western hemisphere, Hugo Chavez, has begun the same predictable process in Venezuela.  Control of the food supply is essential to socialist theory of governance.  Failing government needs something to ensure its continued popular support.  Control of the food supply, much like control of access to higher education and healthcare, provides the currency through which public quiescence is purchased by the always unsuccessful socialist economic economic model.

This is not to say that President Obama is another Mao or Stalin.  However, the need to subordinate production of the food supply to government control is a trait the President shares with every other socialist is history.   The next socialist president may well feel the need to dictate the distribution of food if this socialist POTUS is permitted to advance federal power over production of food.  Something about which every voter should reflect.

The voters in agricultural states like Iowa need to do more than merely reflect-they'd better study socialism's relationship to the family farmer.  If the voters make that effort 2013 will see not only a President Romney but massive extinction of Democrat Congressional careers throughout the Farm Belt.