When not busy destroying Iraq’s orchards, the U.S. government finds time to shoot and poison Latin American farmers. Thomas Jefferson’s obsession with agrarianism may not have been pure sentimentality, after all. Having regulated and subsidized America’s small farms to death after 70 years of corporate statism, we have eviscerated the concept of property itself and our empathy for those whose property is trampled. Joseph Schumpeter:
This evaporation of what we may term the material substance of property – its visible and touchable reality – affects not only the attitude of holders but also that of the workmen and of the public in general. Dematerialized, defunctionalized and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did.