[link|http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/jun02/steinbeck.htm|Life's not always how they show it in the movies]

Excerpt:

We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

I say:

Working on it? I'm all for the sweat equity theory of ownership. But what of what the hunter gatherers who were there first? They didn't really work on it or develop it at all, but they did the being born and getting killed parts. (Hey boxley. That's your cue. And don't forget, the mound builders were already many centuries dead and forgotten, so don't bring them up.)

Excerpt:

Steinbeck identified the wrong culprit. In two separate studies of the plight of southern tenant farmers in the 1930s, the historians David Eugene Conrad and Donald H. Grubbs have blamed not the banks but the agricultural policies of the New Deal itself. In the early 1930s, some sixty percent of farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas were operated by tenants. However, during the Depression they found themselves victims of Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, which required landlords to reduce their cotton acreage. Fortified by AAA subsidies, the landlords evicted their tenants and consolidated their holdings. It was government handouts, not bank demands, that led these landlords to buy tractors and decrease their reliance on tenant families.

I say:

But central planning worked in the Soviet Union! Oh wait. No it didn't. never mind.