Free and Fair Elections

I really enjoy reading articles by Peter Heck. He is a very reasonably minded individual who is very good at keeping things in perspective. That's why I'm unsurprised by his take on the subject of this article, as it is a very level-headed analysis, but I cannot help but disagree with it in part.

I don't disagree with his argument that there has been no professionally produced evidence that Trump actually won the 2020 election. He's obviously right. The grandiose promises of the people who were sure they could produce extraordinary evidence that the election was rigged did not come to fruition. That's obviously true. Is confidence in fair and free elections paramount for our particular governmental system to endure? Yes, I'd say it is. To save from going through every little detail, I agree with most of the arguments as standalone statements. The facts are facts, unless they aren't - to make my stance a little more clear. We couldn't know any differently because no hard evidence has come of it. The election process is innocent until proven guilty, persay. But just as many people have been acquitted under shaky and suspect terms, I'm wholly unconvinced that the "judicial process" has confidently acquitted the 2020 election. We're looking at the Casey Anthony of presidential elections.

So do I disagree that it's dangerous and irresponsible to "continue to peddle" the claim that Trump actually won the 2020? It could be interpreted that way, but it's not so clear cut. It's actually a little strange that Heck makes this argument considering that there is no sanctity of the election process from the leftosphere - especially when this is discussed at length in the article. Confidence in the election process is nonnegotiable for the survival of our country as is. Yet we have been seeing Democrats et. al. contesting the results of elections since George Bush in 2000 and 2004. Suddenly, after Obama won, elections are free and fair again. Trump wins in 2016 and the democratic process is hopelessly corrupt and endangered. It's all okay, though, because Biden won in 2020, so all those glaring issues with the election process that allowed Trump to incorrectly win in 2016 have been fixed and now it's dangerous and irresponsible to believe the elections are anything except the freest and fairest in all the land.

Peter Heck insists, essentially, that it's wrong for Our Side to say that the election process is corrupt to its very core because Their Side is saying it, so we must instill confidence in the populace about the integrity of the process by discontinuing to vocally doubt it. If we stop that, then there can be confidence in our election process once again and everything will somehow be fine.

This premise makes little sense if the democratic process is, in fact corrupted. If our elections are not, in fact, free and fair, then we do nothing but doom ourselves to an accelerated takeover by a one party rule. There appears to be little hard evidence of fraud, whether it's 2000, 2004, 2016, or 2020. Very few people are found guilty for voter fraud every year. The amount of fraud or otherwise tampering of the election process would have had to occur in multiple states and affect many thousands of votes for Trump to have actually had the election stolen from him as he so claims.

Yes, of course, there has been no hard evidence. Every lawsuit was denied processing, so evidence they had was never admitted to court. Events that have long passed, like Georgia's conspicuous burst water pipe that was resolved many hours before they sent people home and "stopped counting" but didn't actually stop counting, and every other state that was an all-but-guaranteed Trump win suddenly stopping votes in the middle of the night, shutting out Republican watchers, barring up windows and blocking all oversight, dumping ballots in through the back doors under cover, some states taking many multiples of days to finish counting and the subsequent gaslighting that "this happens all the time" (it doesn't), and then suddenly multiple states inexplicably turning around for Biden at the very last second, are not things we can really go back and examine, as they were real time events that do not have quantifiable numbers. Multiple YouTubers have been suspended and videos taken down for going to registered voter addresses and finding condemned houses or empty lots. People attest to having received many multiples of mail in ballots to their address. But there is no hard evidence, I'll admit. Nothing was admitted in court because all of the lawsuits were not allowed to proceed, so how could we have the evidence? People who investigate are blocked, silenced, and stifled. The mainstream media would never write dozens of highly amplified articles about canvassers going to registered voter addresses who voted in the 2020 election and finding empty lots, so speaking about it is a "conspiracy theory". There's nothing anyone can do except shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, there's no hard evidence."

What all of these events and this, I suppose, softer evidence points to, however, is absolutely a justifiable suspicion that perhaps our elections are not the freest and fairest elections of all time, and that they may, in fact, be compromised. The confidence in our elections is paramount to a continued functioning democratic republic. Which is why it's such a crying shame that it's entirely justifiable to believe that these elections are in fact not free, nor fair, and have been rigged in various covert and unquantifiable ways. We have articles all but admitting the "shadow government" rigged the election ahead of time by changing election laws and altering as many aspects of our democratic process as possible entirely under the radar, without the people's consent and even admittedly illegally in some cases, and yet we are somehow supposed to believe it's all good. Freest and Fairest Election of All Time. Never mind that many of the events that occurred while votes were being counted that night are the same schemes that are pulled in corrupt third world elections. Claiming it is very important for us to stop questioning the validity of the 2020 election to help instill confidence in the election process ignores that questioning the validity of the 2020 election isn't the problem. The problem is the incredibly suspect validity of the 2020 election.

And that's where Mr. Heck and I will simply have to disagree. I watched these bizarre and highly suspicious situations play out in real time the day and night of Nov 3rd 2020. This isn't a random dossier that showed up from an unknown source with unproven claims that got published by every mainstream media outlet who all declared it simply must be true. This is what I saw with my own eyes. I won't allow the MSM to gaslight me into believing it is very normal for it to take many many days to declare the presidential election winner. I have watched the news coverage for the presidential election in 2004 and 2008, as well as of course 2016. 

Trump was declared the winner in 2016 by 2am on Nov 4th 2016. No states suddenly stopped counting, threw out bipartisan vote watchers, had trucks of ballots dumped into the back doors while the vote counters taped poster boards all over the windows, nor had various "counting errors" giving statistically unlikely solid chunks of votes to a single candidate at 4 in the morning. Bipartisan vote watchers were not barred entry despite having been court ordered by a judge to be allowed in. Yet I am to believe no one would have committed any fraud in an election where a significant number of people genuinely believed they were going to "vote out" a literal dictator? Impossible. I contest it is in fact irresponsible to tell people to believe that there was not malicious behavior in the 2020 election. Our democratic republic does not require only confidence in the election process, but actually fair and free elections. The illusion of a properly functioning democratic republic is not an actual properly functioning democratic republic.

I wonder if the real reason Heck insists we should no longer question the integrity of our election process is simply because it's clearly no longer valuable or useful. I don't suspect this is the case, as a man who has written before about the importance of truth. I wonder then if it was not the fruitless endeavor and hopeless doomerism of the burden of knowing the election process is most likely compromised, but there's little any of us can actually do about it which prompted him to simply explain away the problem like this. Simply believing we have fair and free elections will not actually help us have fair and free elections, but it would surely help promote a comforting illusion. 

There is absolutely no reason not to bring up these highly suspicious behaviors by vote counters, the rushed patchwork legislation changes people did not vote for, the non-zero number of registered voter addresses located at empty houses. It is imperative not to simply put our fingers in our ears and sing loudly that we have confidence in the democratic process. We must be able to have dialogue about what kind of behavior is not allowed in order to have that confidence in our elections. Barring watchers, stopping counts at midnight and sending the Other Team's counters home, taping paper over the windows, trucking ballots into backdoors at 4am - these are not behaviors conducive to a fair and free election. Do not bar discussion about these things - and if you believe that casting doubt on the 2020 election while having this discussion does not help the case, then just say that. We can speak objectively about what does not happen when a country's elections are actually fair and free without invoking the alleged "Big Lie". But it's offensive to say that we must simply drop the whole thing and start having confidence in our election process after nothing has changed. 

What Does "Catholic" and Religion Mean to the General Public

The current political discourse is focused pretty heavily on President Trump's most likely choice to fill the Supreme Court seat, Amy Coney Barrett. While large numbers of arguments are bubbling up all over for every possible for and against position, one of the agreed upon main focuses for the mainstream pundits is over her religious faith. She is a Catholic who actually believes in Catholic tenants, which of course is bad according to liberals and progressives. It's not that she's Catholic persay, it's that she actually believes in and practices her Catholic faith. This results in the argument that she intends to legislate through her religious beliefs.

Many have pointed out that the problem is certainly not simply that she is religious - while there is a large number of atheists and anti-theists who claim that having religious beliefs at all is a crime against humanity, anyone who is honest is able to recognize that it's the active practice of the actual beliefs behind what it means to be Catholic that is the "problem". People who are looking only to score "debate points" ignore the obvious, well understood concept here that people are against anyone who actually believes in what they say they believe, and attempt to proclaim that, "no! of course we are not against Catholics! How absurd, clearly, honestly, how could you be so obtuse as to say we don't like Catholics!"

Anyone intellectually sincere understands that the thing that causes the disagreement is when the faithful person in question goes forward with applying their beliefs actively to their life. See, that's the "bad thing" that religious people do - when people believe there is an all powerful, all knowing, merciful but just God who created all things, who created existence itself, and has given us directions on how to navigate through the universe He created, and then apply this knowledge to their everyday existence in a way which is entirely consistent and obviously understandable when you give it more than a passing thought, that's a problem. You can have your "religious beliefs" - that is, that God has given us distinct instructions on what is good and what is bad and that these things apply to all existence at every second of every day - but don't you dare actually believe that.

So, how does this weird inconsistency happen in the first place? Amy Coney Barrett is Catholic, just like Joe Biden, even Nancy Pelosi. All of these people self-identify as Catholic. Amy Coney Barrett is the only one who causes issues, because she actually practices Catholic beliefs. But as far as intellectually dishonest left-wing pundits are concerned, all three are fully and equally Catholic. The American left doesn't have a problem with Catholics, and the followup argument that is either thinly veiled or outright proclaimed is that right-leaning pundits are making up strawmen and being insincere when they say that an anti-Catholic bias exists. Because, you see, Joe and Nancy are Catholic! So, obviously, we see there's nothing wrong with Catholics. This should seem absurd if you are capable of honest analysis - because it is. But how do people get here, to this obviously cognitive dissonant position, without seeing the issue?

The actual root problem lies in what the general public understands about what it means to have a religious belief, and especially Catholic beliefs. To understand how this inconsistent belief persists, we have to look at how people understand what it means to be both Catholic and religious. The problem is quite clear when we first realize that the common American fundamentally misunderstands what religious beliefs even are. The problem is exacerbated by the idea of the Catholic identity, which somehow manages to exist in this peculiar state as almost a separate idea from actual faithful religious beliefs. Let me explain.

America was a Christian nation at its founding. People often talk about how the colonists were seeking "religious freedom" when they came to North America, but sneakily discard the obvious fact that this religious freedom was Protestantism and not, say, Judaism or Buddhism. They didn't seek "religious freedom" so they could practice pagan tree-worship and become Wiccans - England was Catholic and the colonists wanted to be Protestant. Still explicitly Jesus worshippers - the religious freedom they sought was away from the Pope and the theocratic legal atmosphere therein. The purpose of explaining all this is to stress that Americans from their very foundation, and thus American culture from its very beginning, was Christian. This means that the every day person believed in God, spoke of God, prayed to God, and the culture was directly influenced by religious beliefs - what is basically "socially right-wing" today. A cohesive and coherent understanding of who God is was explained to children and adults every day through media, every day conversations, cultural phenomenon, and of course in church, where people actually went very often. The general cultural understanding of God and religious reality was Christian and was much more correctly understood than it is today.

This culture persisted for the next couple centuries of America's history. It has only recently begun to be dismantled, the culture only recently - within the lifetimes of people alive right now - has become abjectly secular. This means that the common man no longer genuinely believes in God as described by the bible, as this information must be sought out individually. It takes a person with intentional desire for faith-focus education to find out the reality of who God is and what it means to believe in Him. These days, it's not taught or explained to the average person without their effort. People come to understand what God is and what faith and religion are via infostreams that do not explain these concepts properly. The Christian understanding of the world is a faded echo in our culture - people use "Jesus Christ" as an expletive without even consciously realizing they're invoking the name of the savior of the world. People believe nebulously in the concept of God without believing anything consistent about Him - not even that they would believe other religion's concepts of God, but that they simply believe in God as a secular, cultural concept - a brand new concept of God that is not reflected in any formal religious understanding. These people have not engaged with religion as an important aspect of their lives and believe very generally things like "good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell" without ever reflecting any further on this idea. Absolutely no recognized religion actually believes in Heaven and Hell this way, these concepts are best described as "secular spiritualism". These people falsely identify as Christian or Catholic due to their upbringing because their parents said "we're Catholic" and then they never actually learned what any of that meant. Or, perhaps, they did learn it, but it became unlearned as they aged within our aggressively secular culture.

These secular-focused and non-Christian ideas have invaded the current culture so that much older people - say maybe 65 and older - were the last generation to experience an actual cohesive religious reality portrayed through media. As the 1970s came and went, the culture became exponentially more secular, and this ever-present general understanding of actual religious reality experienced by the average, every day person has gone away. What this means is that well meaning parents of baby boomers who experienced a constant every day culture of religious reality simply expected their children to grow up the same way, not believing they needed to put actual individual effort forth into ensuring that their children grew up with a coherent religious understanding of God and Christianity. Even people who had strong religious backgrounds growing up may quite easily, and without intending to, fall away from their faith simply because there is such a deficit in the culture of mentioning God. They simply "forget to remember" God in their day to day lives because there is nothing around them reminding them.

This overall failure to understand the importance of our existential spiritual reality that is encompassed by religious faith is the root cause of this strange phenomenon where "Catholics" like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are A-OK by democrats, in a very real and sincere belief by the general public, but Amy Coney Barrett's actual Catholic faith that she actively applies to her life, is not. To the general common man, these three people are all genuinely Catholic. It is a unique aspect to Amy Coney Barrett that she actually applies her beliefs - a concept that, to the general public, is something "people who are religious" can simply choose to turn on and off at will without their underlying spiritual commitment being affected. They in all sincerity do not understand the problem here.

The reason for this is that they don't understand what "makes" someone Catholic. The general layman understanding is, in all actuality, that someone is Catholic by way of the performance of rituals in their upbringing, by way of their parent's faith. They have a confirmation name, and thus they are Catholic. It is understood - very incorrectly - as an aspect of someone's identity in the same way that you graduated from a particular college or, to some, similar to how someone can be Jewish, but not religious. People are for example "Irish Catholic" by birth - despite the fact that Catholic identity is not connected to any race in the way that Jewish identity is, severing the importance behind the actual application of religious beliefs to their lives. "Being Catholic" is a nebulous identity with no actual important underlying aspects to the majority of Americans. 

 

Biden is Catholic because, well, he just is. He was "raised Catholic" and thus, despite not believing anything even vaguely resembling Catholicism, he simply is Catholic as a matter of identity. Barrett is equally as Catholic as Joe Biden, but she is also religious, where Biden is not. People understand this issue subconsciously but fail to fully apprehend it, thus they believe something as ridiculous as "we have nothing against Catholics don't be silly" without seeing any inconsistencies in their beliefs. Someone being Catholic is effectively meaningless, just a box you check on the census indicating a particular series of rituals performed as a child, and nothing more.

Both the people who believe they are Catholic and the secular, existential-reality denying faithless general public do not understand what someone is saying when they say they are Catholic. The concept exists of a "lapsed Catholic" which, at its base, means someone who is simultaneously Catholic and not Catholic - they were Catholic, but do not practice Catholicism anymore, yet in a subtle way they somehow remain Catholic by way of immutable identity. The very existence of the phrase "lapsed Catholic" underlines the issue here - people believe you simply are or are not Catholic by way of circumstance, not by way of genuine committed faithful adherence to a set of religious beliefs. If you've ever attended Mass or been confirmed, you're now always Catholic, allegedly. 

 

But that is not how religion - any religion - works. In fact, we simultaneously seem to believe it's possible to choose your religion due to your preferences while believing someone who was raised Catholic is simply always Catholic. You can choose to convert - religion is just a meaningless preference, like preferring Coke over Pepsi, and yet they are simultaneously concrete indicators of identity of a person. These conflicting ideas exist in the consciousness of society without reflection and people fail to recognize the issue with these inconsistencies. Religious affiliation, in fact, is so meaningless, that we take at face value every claim of religious identity. This should not be the case - if someone says they are Christian, they cannot deny all of Christianity's dogma. 

 

I am not even referring to, here, on matters of popular disagreements like gay marriages or women pastors - there is an unbelievably high number of people who identify themselves as Christians and do not even believe Jesus was a real person. There are people who claim to be pastors who genuinely believe you can actually just believe whatever you want and still go to Heaven if you are "good" - this is not a belief congruent with Christianity. There are bare basic claims Christianity makes that, if you don't believe in them, you cannot in any good conscious claim to be Christian. It would be like saying that you are a vegan, but still eat fish. There is a different name for that classification of identity, and it is not "vegan". When we allow definitions of words to exist in the general conscious that conflict directly with the understood definition of that word, the result is that we communicate nothing. In this day and age, saying that you are a Christian has effectively been made meaningless because it carries with it no consistent outline of expectation - if you can say you're a Christian and simultaneously believe that everyone goes to Heaven, then what does "Christian" even mean?

Now, in regards to the actual theological beliefs that coincide to Christianity, there are certain truth claims that are necessary to say that you believe in Christian dogma. While the cultural problem with the definition of religion in and of itself suffers from this failure to adhere to even the bare basic tenants of a religious affiliation, things like the aforementioned popular disagreements do still come into play in a very real and important way. If you believe in the truth claims made within the Christian religion, then you should, if you are being consistent, thoughtful, and intellectually honest, wind up believing particular claims made within Christianity that are not explicitly existential theological truth claims. Of course I refer to "social issues", and the social issue that is in the forefront here because of this whole current hulabaloo with Barrett is of course the issue of abortion. 

 

Catholics believe in a very specific set of theological truths in regards to God, Jesus, the spiritual world, the value and purpose of human life, salvation, and eternity. When those theological truths are applied thoughtfully, a Catholic should be staunchly against abortion. This is where the issue is coming into play - Biden and Pelosi claim to "be Catholic" in a meaningless, self-identifying sort of way, while Barrett claims to be Catholic in an actual, applied, committed way. Thus, with no actual theological beliefs about truth, the aforementioned duo are in favor of abortion on demand at any time and in any circumstance, while people are "afraid" that Barrett - because they, whether they spell it out for themselves or not, truly do understand the concept that the theological truths put forth by Catholicism ultimately comes to a conclusion where abortion is morally repugnant - will legislate from her religious beliefs against abortion.

The failure of the common man to bring beliefs to coherent conclusions is the root of this problem. The culture will pretend like you can choose a set of religious beliefs that you have, but you never speak about them, you apply them only personally to yourself, and that you should under no circumstance discuss them or apply them to the rest of your beliefs that "aren't about" religion. The very act of having a certain set of beliefs but not applying them to the rest of your thought processes is cognitive dissonance - it is inconsistent and incoherent. When you do not apply your beliefs about one thing to another thing, you wind up with inconsistent beliefs, in regards to anything. It is how hypocrisy occurs. This idea that we should keep our "religion out of politics" or "religion out of ____" is nothing more than social pressure to be hypocrites. If we were to be sincere - intellectually honest, thoughtful, self-reflective people - then we should, absolutely, under every circumstance, apply our religious beliefs to our politics and every other aspect of our lives.

The failure to recognize this comes from a failure to understand what religion is. I'll help - religion is the term we use to describe the mechanisms by which we believe the entire world operates. It would be an aggressive act of intentional mental disconnection to have the beliefs I have about God, how we got here, why we are here, who Jesus was and what He did, and what will happen to each of us when we die, and then proceed to not think about that in regards to everything else that ever happens to me or anyone else on this earth. If I believe God is active in my life, it would be nothing less than pathetically thoughtless for me to not remember that when I think about other aspects of my life. The very idea that religious beliefs, of all possible things, are somehow relegated to only discussing privately in your own head, is the most offensive scam in modern history. The purpose of religion is describing our very existence in the most fundamental possible ways. People have managed to incorrectly define and identify the purpose of religion to the point where people don't even know what it is for.

Indeed, it is more accurate to define our religious beliefs as our "worldview" - especially because there are a good number of people who claim to "not be religious" while simultaneously holding views about the fundamental reality of our existence. That is what religion is, and thus everyone is "religious" - or at least analogous to it. The modern blunder of inaccurately defining religion has led to a fractured social consciousness - it is totally normal and acceptable to simply have beliefs about things, and as long as you don't imply in any way that you believe the way you do due to your "religion" (i.e., the fundamental understanding of the cause and purpose of our existence) then people will debate you based on the merits of your beliefs. As soon as you attribute those beliefs to your religion, then it is the religion that is the problem, and you should have never applied your religion to your beliefs - despite the fact that the root cause of all belief is "religious" in nature, attributed to the worldview we have about the mechanisms through which existence functions. To say you are "not religious" is truly to say you are not self-reflective or thoughtful - you are drifting through life without ever stopping to think on the whys or hows about it.

This is how we have arrived to this nonsensical future, where anyone can say they are a Catholic and democrats can say they don't have anything against Catholicism, while simultaneously being against everything that Catholicism has to say about anything at all. The failure to adhere to a coherent understanding of the words we are using has created an epidemic of communication failures. Do not be fooled by this flimsy argument - this baseless idea that democrats are fully accepting of Catholics because particular prominent democrats "are" Catholics. The definitions they are using are different from the definitions we understand - and thus, it is fully consistent, in their minds, to make these claims. We differ fundamentally not merely on ideas of law and politics, but the very essence of what makes up our reality. This is the reason why there is such immense failure to find common ground with our ideological rivals - they are speaking a completely different language.

Farming Bailouts and Subsidies

I have seen many an argument online about bailouts and various forms of government money to farmers of all kinds, in multiple countries. It has come up a lot recently, of course, but it's been argued about for years. A recent UK based news organization wrote about farmers who raise sheep making $0 in profit from their actual work, the money they get from government subsidies being the only reason they make money. A vegan complained today that without government subsidies, a big mac would cost $13. I've seen people argue against bailouts for farmers struggling due to the government imposed lockdown restrictions from the coronavirus, saying they should fail like any other capitalist business that "didn't control for risk".

There is a lot going on here, and I of course do not know everything about the inner workings of bailouts and subsidies for farmers, as I suspect basically no one does since it's bogged down to the depths of hell itself with regulations and red tape. Luckily, I don't need to know awfully too much to understand what the problems are, here.

Let's take things one step at a time. We'll start by establishing something important: most farmers do not sell most of their products directly to grocery stores. I qualify this only because there are certainly farmers who have taken it upon themselves to remove the insidious middleman from their work, usually in the form of farmer's markets (which are actually also not efficient in operation, but that's not relevant for this particular post). Nearly all products from farms are purchased from the farmers by packing and processing companies that operate entirely separately from the farm as their own business. They have contracts with the farmers or they buy livestock in a bidding system against other packers, etc., but they are a separate company from the farmer and they seek to buy low and sell high to their advantage, not the farmers'. Cow ranchers do not slaughter, butcher, package, and ship their cows to the store. They sell raw milk in a giant vat, unbagged truckloads of potatoes, and live chickens to the processors who then process these things into their various forms for shipment to grocery stores and restaurants.

This middleman system is, of course, rife with government interference. Packers want to buy the farmer's unprocessed resources for as low as possible and sell them for as much as possible. The processors are the ones who benefit from the supply and demand paradigm, while the farmers make dismal profits regardless of the issues plaguing the market. This was made offensively obvious by the government imposed coronavirus lockdowns that shut down restaurants, making packers unable to move products processed for restaurants and thus artificially reducing the "demand" for farmers' raw product.

What this meant is that while grocery store prices were skyrocketing and the news was flooded with meat shortage and food waste fearmongering, packers were buying low and selling high to a degree that was so intense that they're currently under investigation for price fixing. There was never a shortage of meat or food, there was a shortage of processing for that food, and regulations and red tape stopped farmers from selling their products road side. It's literally illegal to sell raw milk pretty much everywhere and farmers can't sell their any of their other products without them being inspected, which also requires labor and processing, which is where the shortage was.

The supply of raw product was high while the supply of labor to process that product was low resulting in an artificial lower demand for raw product. Government fees imposed on farmers made it cheaper for them to cull - that is, kill and discard - entire cows, pigs, and barns full of chickens than sell them to processors for multiple reasons, but one of the most disgusting reasons is that they pay fees when they sell those things. Packers creating less processed food meant the supply of that ready to buy food was lower, while the demand was skyrocketing. The packers made more money than they have made before, maybe ever, while farmers and consumers lost by and large. A proposal has been in congress far before the coronavirus related economic lockdown and never passed that seeks to reduce regulations to allow animal ranchers to sell their products without being legally required to submit to multiple inspections. Yet, even after this government bungle that caused farmers to suffer so much that many of them needed to sell their entire operations and change professions entirely to allow their families to survive, it has not even been voted on. We can see that our government, by and large, is uninterested in fixing this broken system.

Why is all of this important to mention? First of all, it shows that the imminent failure of farms that did not receive government aid would have been due to the government's interference in the first place. The fees and regulations imposed on farmers to sell the products they make don't exist because the farmers asked for them - it is because our food supply chain is tampered with by the government. The farmers pay fees to packers because the packers pay fees, like how Verizon is allowed to pass on their communications taxes to their customers. We do not actually live in a free market, the government actually controls our economy in many areas, but nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the agriculture business.

Secondly, it's important because it shows that the system from both ends is set up to the detriment of the farmer. The fact that they rarely process their own products and instead sell what they raise and grow to packers results in them making pennies to the dollar for what you buy your food for from the grocery store. There are many instances of farmers actually getting paid to reduce the product they create, or being reimbursed for wasted product - but not if they donate the product. The farmer, sometimes, cannot even try to make more money by producing more crops or producing more milk or animals as packers may not always be interested in buying it. The farmer is at the mercy of the packer's willingness to buy their products and is financially burdened by the government's red tape.

The entire system would have to be overhauled for farmers to start processing their own products for direct sale, including immense initial cost to the already struggling farmer to even get to that point. This is not the farmers' faults - this system arose originally because it seemed like a good idea. It allowed farmers to specialize in just growing the food while packers could specialize in just processing the food. This decent system became drenched in government regulations and now we are all trapped in the muck of this disaster. An overhaul of the system would severely disrupt the food chain, not to mention require intense cooperation from the government to loosen its vicegrip over our food.

There is another important thing to bring up that it seems many people are not aware of. Yet another government interference, the cost of food is artificially reduced by government subsidies. Kicking back to the vegan mad about big mac subsidies, without the government giving money to farmers, healthy food (which includes meat, regardless of what you've heard, but that's yet another post) would be nearly impossible for people to buy, especially with all the costs farmers pay to just grow their food. This is the food supply chain equivalent to getting a rebate for buying a phone, needing to pay upfront far more, but getting money back later. The farmers make next to nothing creating food, paying the government to sell their products, but then the government subsidizes them so that they can stay in business. People who lack the ability to process nuance see the farmers getting subsidies and think it means their business is not valuable since they could not operate without this government money, but they pass by the absurd number of roadblocks faced by farmers in the first place with their eyes closed.

Indeed, if nothing else changed about the cost of farming - the price of the land, the hundreds of thousands of dollars per machine required to plant, harvest, and milk, the labor and time investment - all food would be prohibitively expensive. The risk of the farming business is also unlike any other, since the farmer doesn't risk just regular business-related things like, say, a clothing shop does, but they are also at the mercy of environmental risk - an inland hurricane just destroyed one third of Iowa's crops. This is a risk unlike any other - it should not be surprising that the government has decided to step in to attempt to help food remain abundant and available for its citizens.

This is, clearly, a terrible system. It's held up by frayed strings and chewed bubble gum, but it's not the farmers' faults. It is absurd to tell all the lamb farms in the UK to close shop because their business is "not lucrative" - the government is regulating the cost of their products to the public so that they are "affordable" to people. If the farmers sold their products for an actual profit, everything would double, triple, or even quadruple in price. The reason they "only" make money because of government subsidies is because the government is limiting the profit they can make in the first place. Indeed, if sheep farmers could sell their products for the prices that their labor and effort demand, lamb would be a luxury food item like lobster or goose. Have you ever seen the price of a goose from the grocery store? They're 70+ dollars. For an amount of food the weight equivalent of two large chickens. How can they sell a goose for such a high amount of money, while a whole chicken is $5? The goose represents the market at work. Supply and demand - but most importantly, a lack of government subsidies for a food source not considered essential. This $70 goose represents the actual price of food in the current system.

I actually raise chickens for eggs and meat for personal use (you can read about that and related issues here). Considering the value they give as egg layers and the effort and cost that goes into keeping them safe and fed, $5 per chicken seems rather low. And yet, farmers make absurdly less than this per chicken due to the way the system is set up. The price of chickens is set in a bizarre way - farmers literally compete with one another, setting the initial price per chicken at something offensively low. This article cites 5 cents per pound. An uncooked grocery store chicken is usually $1.50 per pound, or $.99 per pound if you catch a good sale or go to a wholesaler warehouse. The starting price, for the farmer, is about 25 - 35 cents per entire chicken. The farmers compete to raise the fattest chickens, the "winners" with the fattest chickens getting 50% more per pound - so 7.5 cents instead of 5 cents, or 37 to close to 50 cents per chicken. Now, of course they are selling tens of thousands of chickens, so they make thousands of dollars at a time, and there is of course far more to it than this simplified explanation.

The point to be made here, though, is that the $5+ you pay for a chicken goes almost exclusively into the pockets of the store and the packers and does not represent anywhere close to the profit the farmer made growing that chicken. A farmer, thus, would actually make more than double they make with this system if people could go to their farms and pay $1 for a live chicken. My chickens are worth so much more than $1 each, so I can tell you personally that the price being paid to farmers per chicken is criminal. Unfortunately, with this system, there is little recourse - the packers and grocers want to make money, too, and they do so to the detriment of the farmer who did the most important work. People are squeamish at the idea of processing their own chicken. But imagine if a farmer could simply invest in a small processing center and sell a couple dozen chickens from the farm itself for the same price you buy one at the grocery store? Their profits skyrocket compared to what they make now - the profits per chicken would be thirty times their current profits and the price you pay doesn't even increase. Why wouldn't we support such a change to the system?

People want to cry that we need affordable - or even free! - food for everyone, but then they get angry when they find out "the government is bailing out farmers!" Farming is a business, but it's of unimaginable importance. If the government is going to do anything useful at all, enabling farmers to stay in business so that we do not all literally starve to death sounds like an okay deal. They caused this problem in the first place, of course, but fixing this broken system is untying a Gordian knot. You can either work piece by piece to dismantle a system so convoluted and needlessly complicated for years, ensuring that people are fed in the process, or you can cut through the knot with a blade - likely causing disruptions so severe that food shortages we've seen from the pandemic related government mandated economic shutdowns wouldn't even compare.

Of course, it is much more likely that our government will do neither, and simply allow the Gordian knot of overregulated nonsense to persist, simply band-aiding the system by paying off whoever they can to keep things afloat. Unfortunately, it's more likely than ever that the precarious house of cards will simply collapse on its own one day, which is not good news for anyone. Arguments about government bailouts are well and good, except people seem to forget they rely on farmers to survive. We cannot look at farming as "just any other business," unless your actual stance is that you are a-okay with millions of people in civilized, industrial society dying of starvation. We are at the mercy of this sprawling government-created hellscape until people start wising up - which could very well be never, and with the government content to leave the barricades in place, even the collective awakening of society may not be quite enough.

Families Are Not Proof of Concept for Government Systems

I have often seen arguments from socialists that revolve around the concept of a family utilizing "socialism" to operate. The conclusions pushed change depending on what argument the person is trying to make, but ultimately, the concept is that, because families support one another by giving each other money and labor so that they all survive and benefit, this is basically socialism. I have seen the conclusion that we can't be against socialism as a government system if we "utilize socialism" in our family unit, the conclusion that socialism works on a large scale because of the success of the "socialist family unit", and many more.

Today, I saw the "family argument" in another light, from someone who is staunchly opposed to authoritarianism. This person argued that tyranny is ingrained so deeply in common people and parents that people do not question this materialization of authoritarianism within their own families, especially in regards to punishments toward children. There are many people who will die on the hill of whether spanking, shaming, or other punishments many argue to be too harsh are acceptable or not, but my point here is that this is the first time I saw what is basically the "is spanking acceptable" argument phrased in a way that insisted societal utilization and acceptance of authoritarianism is reflected in it.

The problem with both of these arguments, and any other "family argument" that I may ever see, is that the form and function of the family unit both does not reflect, and is not proof of concept for, any government system or operation. The fallacy is easy enough to see, and yet people still attempt to extrapolate "family -> society as a whole" constantly.

The first and foremost most important issue, and easily the only one that really needs to be said, with the family argument is that the government does not love you. The people in power over any number of other people are not invested emotionally in the happiness and success of their people. The guise of love, or at least concern, may appear, but it is merely the costume put upon the fact that the government needs its people to succeed. If there are no people, there is no state, and there is no one to rule over. People are required to labor for any value to come from the society in question. The government is against large swatches of their population dying, under normal circumstances, only because of "human capital". In democratic societies, the voter base for whichever politician in question is in power is important to that politician, only because they require those votes to remain in power.

This undercuts any "family argument" from either side of the spectrum. A parent who punishes their child (usually) does so out of the desire for them to grow up as a functional adult who understands right from wrong and understands the concept of consequences for their actions. This is love from the parent's side, as (the majority of) parents are not merely concerned with their child growing up to be productive and wealthy, but understands that failure to recognize that actions have consequences will more than likely lead that child to poor experiences in their adult lives. Which punishments are good or bad is - for better or for worse - going to be discerned by the parent in question, and their competence in choosing effective, fair punishments may not be the best. They may not understand that the punishment they have chosen is not actually "rehabilitating" their child, but the intentions of the parent and the intentions of the state are too far removed from each other to make this argument work. Governments and parents both suffer the same potential incompetencies in deciding the punishments of those who they have judged to be at fault, but the state does not love the person they have determined to be guilty and the state does not much care for the result of that person's life. They are unforgiving and unloving in their punishments, while the parent (ideally) truly seeks what is best for their child.

On the exact opposite of the spectrum, the family unit that shares wealth and labor does so out of love for each other and a desire for the people they love to prosper and be happy. The family will utilize the resources they have for the betterment of the family, and they may have to make tough financial decisions that not everyone is thrilled with if they lack the funds to provide everything desired. The attempt to attribute this concept to a socialist government fails horribly at this last point. Surely, we see few differences between a socialist government with plenty of money and a family unit, but what happens when the funds start to run thin? We have governments deciding that people are not worth the money to keep alive in hospitals, so far as not even allowing them to travel to a hospital in another country, even if that country has agreed to care for that patient. No parent would ever simply give up on their child, as we see here in these very examples. The NHS said they could not possibly provide anymore help to these children, so the parents sought to move entirely to another country to find the help they needed, and the socialist healthcare system of the UK explicitly disallowed them to do so. We see that the socialist government will sacrifice the weakest ones to save money, even when other options are available. People will spend years, even their entire lives, caring for their families, doing whatever it takes, including going into bankruptcy, to do so. The government does not love you and will let you die if you are too inconvenient. This attempt at extrapolation simply does not work.

There are many other reasons why the family argument does not work, but this is easily the strongest and most easily applicable to any argument that comes up. Further reasons the family unit cannot be extrapolated to government is because the family unit lives within the government - or in the case of a lack of a government, exists independently from the government, the family unit is far smaller than any given state or country, the family unit is a functionally necessary concept, and finally, the family unit cannot be absolved or overthrown. The family unit is not chosen and it exists for a different purpose than the government. A king can argue to have been born with the right to rule, but this is merely traditional, arbitrary nonsense. A president may be voted for, but then he may lose his position later after another vote. Even in the case of adoption, the person who birthed you is your mother and will always be and there is absolutely no possible way this can change. Family units are diverse in good and bad ways, but the weave that creates and holds them is cut from a different fabric than what creates a government. We cannot extrapolate "mother" into "president" - they are vast worlds different from one another.

Veganism Stands in the Way of Animal Welfare

In following chicken lovers and chicken farmers alike, I view a strange juxtaposition. People who keep chickens all have different viewpoints, reasons, behaviors, and motivations. One person I noticed rescues hens from egg operations where they are being mistreated, but normally only after they have been ditched by uncaring chicken farmers. For instance, on the side of the road, feathers a mess, awaiting a death by predator, where their former owner intended for that very thing to happen. It sounds cruel, surely, to dump your domesticated chickens with no survival skills on the side of the road to be eaten at a passing fox' leisure.

Keeping the chickens in the first place, of course, is seen as just as cruel. To the vegan animal activist, the only correct option is to go back in time and stop animals from becoming domesticated for use by humans. Barring that, we should simply stop "exploiting" animals for their products and meat. The whole animal-based food industry should dissolve and we should release all the animals into the wild, or something.

The problem I mainly have with veganism is that we were given dominion over animals. A strictly biblical interpretation reveals we can, actually, use animals for their resources. However, when we love and respect God and His creation, we would treat animals with respect, too. This does not mean not killing them for their meat or keeping them for their products, but doing these things with the reverence of God on the forefront of our minds.

Many of the chickens this woman rescues have missing feathers, wounds, are pale, and scared of the outside. They were raised trapped in a coop with no nighttime - chickens naturally lay more consistently with more exposure to light. Artificially encouraged to lay as much as possible and fast as possible, they are discarded long before they stop laying entirely, but merely when they are not as productive as a young hen, replaced with a new one that lays more reliably. When you make a chicken lay as nonstop as possible, they entirely stop laying, sooner. You burn them out, so to say. Chickens lose feathers because all their protein and energy goes to laying eggs. One of the ways to tell when a chicken isn't laying anymore is actually if her feathers are nice looking - it means fewer resources are going to eggs.

So this woman rescues these chickens, gets them back into shape, and sells them to people who are looking to keep chickens as pets. Her clientele are the kind of people who also think animals shouldn't be used for our benefit, and they give these chickens a "retirement".

All of these behaviors lie in the concept that they believe animals have rights and that each one of their lives is as unique and valuable as a human life. These are bastardized concepts of our broken world - we get our wires crossed and apply truths in a false way. Animals should be respected, and there is nothing innately wrong with giving a chicken a retirement, but their motivations are born out of a warped worldview. If all they were doing was offering to give chickens a retirement as opposed to using them for meat simply because they enjoyed pet chickens, there would be no fault. The fault lies in the application of thought of believing that it is wrong to use the chicken for meat or eggs in the first place.

What does it really mean to "have dominion over animals"? Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Genesis 1:26 - As God has dominion over us, He gave us dominion over animals. In the beginning, people and animals lived in harmony, but immediately after the fall we see God Himself create clothes for his disobedient creation out of animal skins. Now, we are clearly not congruent with God, but what this display shows is that the death of animals is a result of the fall. In this broken world, animals die and are used as resources for our needs.

Even still, we did not have permission from God to actually eat animals until after the great flood. In Genesis 9:3 we see "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything." Of course, some animals were still unclean, and yet later still when Jesus came to fulfill the law, we were given permission to eat what were formerly classified as unclean animals as well. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) Mark 7:18-19 - Why would all these things be in the bible if we were not actually supposed to eat meat at all? We could not fathom being given permission to eat animals without the expectation that we would then eat those animals. It would make absolutely no sense for God to permit these things but then expect us to not do them. It's simply an illogical and absurd claim that should require no further attention. 

Personally, I'm staunchly opposed to raising chickens locked inside, covered eternally in artificial light. I definitely don't condone the process of keeping hens like robots and not animals - but the need to do this arises from the way egg farming and selling in the large-scale is regulated. The farmer is likely operating barely above breaking even, if not merely breaking even. They must, to make a living at all, treat their hens like robots. If the hens must be treated this way to keep the farmers human family fed, then it's acceptable. That's the final truth - human lives are more valuable than animals'. But what situation is making the farmer require such robotic operation of his hens?

I am against not the farmer but the obtrusive regulations of the big government who force the people who make our food to behave certain ways to survive. Ethical animal treatment isn't profitable, not because people don't want to pay for the difference, but because the government forcibly makes it less profitable due to their regulations. Small scale operations where a farmer has perhaps a couple flocks of chickens and sells them on the roadside or to the local grocery store would be great - but the government makes it nearly impossible to get into that business.

It varies state to state, but at least I know here you can't have, say, 35 chickens and sell ten dozen eggs a week to the grocery store - the licenses and fees and government intrusion is excessive. First, you must own enough land to be permitted to have so many chickens. Secondly, you must be open to intrusive and surprise inspection and be held to a standard higher than that of a large operation. As a residential person simply looking to own chickens and sell eggs, you must submit to more regulation than a company or business that operates a chicken based business. Why? It's designed that way on purpose by bloated government regulations intentionally looking to keep small suppliers out of the way of larger operations.

You have to expand to a larger operation to be able to start making money this way - and depending on your state, you may have to bend to intense regulations to sell even one dozen a week, to any human person. It's illegal for me to sell any amount of "unregulated" eggs to any person. If I want to make $3.50 a week selling eggs I have to have a $125 license that needs to be renewed every year and subject to random and unannounced inspections of my single coop containing fewer than 10 chickens. To sell to a grocery store requires an even more expensive license subject to the same renewal fees and additional regulation and intrusion. Once you've expanded to a larger operation, you've spent so much on the whole project - superfluous fees that don't actually have anything to do with raising your chickens - that you're starting out in debt, in the negative, and to push anything close to a profit, you have to cut corners. And for whatever reason, the government lets the larger businesses cut those corners, while tiny operations cannot.

The vegan would say the solution to this is to simply stop eating animal products. No amount of keeping animals is ethical, just because they have concluded so through faulty logic. They magically improvised human attributes to chickens and now it's unethical to keep a chicken for eggs no matter how many, how much attention is paid, how well kept, or whether they will be allowed to live their entire natural lives even after they finish laying. But we see this is simply not the case - that elevation of animals to the level of a human soul is based in a biblical truth that has been warped into something nonsensical. Even removed from a biblical standard, it is nothing more than a fantasy to think humankind could simply forgo animal products entirely in a safe way. Unfortunately I've seen more than one vegan admit - either accidentally or proudly - that it does not matter to them if human lives suffer in exchange for the end of animal suffering. For the most part, vegans know it's impossible to remove animal products from our food web without people dying - but they're okay with it. Not only have they attributed human value to animals, but they've devalued human life in the process.

So the real world, non-fiction solution to animal cruelty in factory farming lies in removing the intense, intrusive government regulations so that people who keep animals can make a living and feed their families while treating their animals with respect, as reverence toward God to His creation. Five modest egg operations could easily supply a grocery store with more than enough eggs to feed a local community. Providing you have the right chicken breeds, you get about as many eggs per day as you have chickens, and if you're operating intentionally to sell eggs, you've surely done your research. The problem has nothing to do with the inability for such a system to exist, the problem is in the intrusive regulations of government. Surely, people say, government regulations are good because they keep people safe. This is naive, as these regulations are not designed to keep people safe, but exist mostly as a result of lobbyists for factory farm conglomerates attempting to keep competition out of their way. Indeed, why else would small operations be subject to harsher regulations than large operations? What is good enough for the chickens living in an enormous egg bunker with 20,000 other chickens is surely good enough for 35 chickens in a modest coop in someone's backyard. It's illogical to propose otherwise - they are the same animal. Varying regulations based on operation size is arbitrary and not based in science, fact, or logic - and especially not in the interest of the animals.

I'll take a couple more moments to address another veganism argument. First, we see the "animals are valuable and should be respected for having souls" juxtaposed to "animals can eat meat because they are unthinking and acting on instinct and don't have a choice" argument. This is even further juxtaposed toward the idea that we could feed our dogs vegan diets (as they are omnivores and "can thrive" on vegan diets). Some vegans would of course say they shouldn't be keeping the dogs as pets at all, while PETA goes around killing as many pets as possible including abducting and euthanizing them.

It should be obvious that these stances are all unable to stand next to one another. The idea is that, as advanced humans who can make choices, we should make the choice not to eat animals. Animals can't make that choice, and so a fox killing an outdoor cat is just nature and the fox is at no moral failure for doing so. It shouldn't take a lot of thinking to conclude that, perhaps, this places the animal on a lower pedestal as far as consideration toward containing a human-congruent soul. This does not forgo respect toward them, but continuing to keep them on the same level of respect requirements as humans would be an illogical conclusion of these stances. And yet they continue to believe both of these things at once.

If dogs can be fed vegan diets opposed to their natural inclinations to eat meat, that would violate the dogs' instincts. So by doing this, I would contest you aren't respecting the natural order of the dogs' behavior. You are forcing a choice on them, your own human-led decisions made with your advanced human brain you already established is capable of making choices while animals' brains aren't. Of course the dog will eat whatever you give it, it's hungry. When I was younger once I put a bunch of vegetables in my dogs' food bowls because I thought they were hungry. They were so excited to see that I put food in their bowls - and they dove in only to stop short, smell everything, and walk away.

Dogs may be biologically omnivores but that doesn't mean they actively eat vegetables. They crave meaty protein, and can merely digest and process non-meat to their advantage as a survival benefit. We all know cats require a strict protein diet and could never be forced by a vegan owner to eat a vegan diet and not suffer immensely for it, but vegans see the omnivore and go rogue, feeding their dogs processed protein feed disguised as being meat flavored by additives and act like their dog is a vegan. Honestly it's nuts.

It's possible to be cruel to animals, and I would contest the main problems here are overbearing governments and humans without reverence for their Creator. Of course, regulations for the safety of consumers are not intrinsically immoral, but many of these are actually money grabs by the government in disguise of "consumer protections". Why should the license to sell one dozen eggs a week cost the same as the one to sell five hundred dozen a week? Why create a roadblock like this? Why make it require renewal every year, for the same initial price? It's just a money grab to the detriment of communities as a whole, which would surely benefit from small scale egg operations providing food to them.

They could have easily made the license not only not require money to be renewed, but free in the first place and only require an inspection - surely a negligible cost to the government, truly only for "consumer safety", for the good of the local community who now has a new source of food. The license fee doesn't help them make money toward insuring small scale agriculture is regulated properly, it does nothing but stops you from starting up entirely unless you have enough money to put in at the get go to make sure you make more money than you're going to spend on regulations and licensing - and make enough money that the additional daily effort you will have to put in to satisfy the intrusive, heightened regulations is worth it.

The fee of $125 is so much for someone looking to sell a dozen or two per week that they wouldn't break even for nine months of selling one dozen a week at $3.50/doz, resulting in a profit of $42 at the end of the year, with the same overbearing regulations as someone making ~$680 a year profit selling give or take four dozen a week (which is still pitiful, if we're honest). Some people do want to keep just a few chickens - two or three chickens will make just short of two dozen a week. Assuming you keep some and sell the remaining dozen a week for profit, the only real option to you in light of the government overhead is to simply eat way more eggs a week, as the effort required to sell that extra dozen "legally" is absurd. Now a potential customer who would love your eggs from loved and nurtured chickens they could stop by and personally watch frolic in your backyard is resigned to mystery eggs from the grocery store. The only winner is the sustainment of the factory farm conglomerates and the government that profits from them.

So, if we are honest, vegans are part of the problem of animals being mistreated because they mask the true problem and provide the incorrect solution as loudly as possible. People with the right solutions are smeared as animal haters by the vegans (keeping animals at all is wrong!) and seen as suspicious and entitled by regulation-lovers (the outrageous fees and upkeep is for our safety!) while the government continues to dictate how we can make, eat, and buy our food. The key to the alleviation of animal suffering is fewer factory farms and an increase in small operations that make it easier to treat the animals like living creatures, but the system is set up specifically to avoid that result. This obvious reality is drowned out by a sea of ideological and impossible cries for the total and complete "liberation" of "animal slaves", making it even more difficult to acknowledge that it is actually bad for animals to suffer without being dismissed out of hand by people tired of loud and obnoxious vegans.