What Matters?. Wendell Berry
and needs of the local community, and by bankers who are aware that the prosperity of the bank is not and can never be separated from the prosperity of the community.
I know from my own experience and observation that a bank of community scale, owned principally by local investors, understanding its dependence on responsible service first of all to local customers—even in a fevered and delirious economy—can function usefully and considerately as a part of the community. Such a bank does not, because if it is to survive it cannot, adopt the lending practices that resulted in our recent housing bubble. In such a bank the loan officers understand necessarily that their responsibility is to the borrowers as much as to the bank. In a locally owned community bank, the lender is a neighbor of the borrower. You don’t put your neighbors into trouble or into ruin by misleading them to assume debts they cannot pay—which ultimately, of course, would ruin the lender.
It is clear that if interest rates are not limited by a reasonable, workable concept of fairness, enforceable by law, then they will become exorbitant. Moreover, they are apt to become highly variable according to the whim of lenders inclined to “take more than they ought.”
Among its other wrongs, usury destabilizes the relation of money to goods. So does inflation. So does the speculative trading in mortgages, “futures,” and “commercial paper” that gives a monetary value to commodities having no present existence or no existence at all. To inflate or obscure the value of money in relation to goods is in effect to steal both from those who spend and from those who save. It is to subordinate real value to a value that is false.
By destabilizing the relation of money to goods, a financial system usurps an economy. Then, instead of the exchange of money for goods or goods for money, we have the conversion of goods into money, in the process often destroying the goods. Money, instead of a token signifying the value of goods, becomes a good in itself, which the wealthy can easily manipulate in their own favor. This is sometimes justified (by the favored) as freedom, as in “free trade” or “the free market,” but such a freedom is calculated to reduce substantially the number of the free. The tendency of this freedom necessarily is toward monopoly—toward the one economic entity that will own or control everything. The undisguised aim of Monsanto, for example, is to control absolutely the economy of food. It would do so by setting its own price on its products sold to dependent purchasers who can set a price neither on what they buy nor on what they sell.
To permit so much wealth, power, influence, and ambition to one corporation is an egregious error in a polity supposedly democratic. From the point of view of nature and agriculture, it is an error even larger and more dangerous. For by this error agriculture is forced to subserve the rule of industrialism, which is in most respects antithetical to the healthful practice of agriculture and to the laws of nature, by which, and only by which, agriculture can be made sustainable.
The dominance of agriculture by agribusiness is made possible by the dominance of the economy by interests that are industrial or purely financial. Agribusiness is immensely more profitable monetarily than agriculture, which customarily for the last fifty or sixty years has been either barely profitable or unprofitable. Hence the drastic decline in the agricultural population. One cost of this error is economic injustice, characteristic of industrialism, to the people who do the work: ranchers, farmers, and farm workers. Another cost is first agricultural and then ecological: Under the rule of industrialism the land is forced to produce but is not maintained; the fertility cycle is broken; soil nutrients become water pollutants; toxic chemicals and fossil energy replace human work.
We have allowed, and even justified as “progress,” a fundamental disconnection between money and food. And so we are led to the assumption, by ignorant leaders who apparently believe it, that if we have money we will have food, an assumption that is destructive of agriculture and food. It is a superstition just as wicked, and hardly different from, the notion that the world is conformable to our wants and we can be whatever we want to be.
Apparently it takes a lot of money, a lot of power, and even a lot of education to obscure the knowledge that food comes from the land and from the human ability to cause the land to produce and to remain productive. Under the rule of an economy perverted by industrial and financial presumptions, we are destroying both the land and the human means of using the land and caring for it.
We are destroying the land by exposing it to erosion, by infusing it year after year with toxic chemicals (which incidentally poison the water), by surface mining, and by so-called development. We are destroying the cultures and the communities of land use and land husbandry by deliberately slanting the economy of the food system against the primary producers.
We are losing and degrading our agricultural soils because we no longer have enough competent people available to take proper care of them. And we will not produce capable and stewardly farmers, ranchers, and foresters by what we are calling “job creation.” The fate of the land is finally not separable from the fate of the people of the land (and the fate of country people is finally not different from the fate of city people). Industrial technology does not and cannot adequately replace human affection and care. Industrial and financial procedures cannot replace stable rural communities and their cultures of husbandry. One farmer, if that name applies, cannot farm thousands of acres of corn and soybeans in the Midwest without production costs that include erosion and toxicity, which is to say damages that are either long-term or permanent.
The farm population has now declined almost to nonexistence because, since the middle of the last century, we have deliberately depressed farm income while allowing production costs to rise, for the sake of “cheap food” and to favor agribusiness. No wonder that farm-raised young people have been moving into the cities and suburbs by millions for two generations, leaving the farms without heirs or successors. The young people decide against too much investment and too much work for too little return. Even if they love farming or ranching enough to want to stay, paying the inevitable economic and personal penalties, they are more than likely to find that they cannot buy land and pay for it by using it. The one reason for this is the disequilibrium between the economy of money and the land economies. Professional people in the cities, who have done well financially, have been “investing” in farmland and rangeland and so lifting the market value of the land above the reach of farmers and ranchers who are not doing well economically. The result is that we have an enormous population of dependent people with the subservient mentality of industrial employees, helpless to feed themselves, who are being fed by the tiniest minority of exploited people and from land that is more cruelly exploited than the people.
If we are destroying both the productive land and the rural communities and cultures, how can we assume that money will somehow attract food to us whenever we need it? If, on the contrary, we should decide to right the economic balance by paying a just price to producers, then money could revert to its proper function of encouraging and supporting both food production and the proper husbanding of the land. This, if it could happen, would solve a number of problems. The right answer to urban sprawl, for example, is to make agriculture pay well enough that farmers and ranchers would want to keep the land in use, and their children would want to inherit it to use.
To a ground-level observer, it is obvious that the economic failures I have described involve moral issues of the gravest sort. An essentially immoral system of economy-as-finance, or an economy run by the sole standard of monetary profit, has been allowed to flourish to the point of catastrophe by a fairly general consent to the proposition that economy and morality are two professional specialties that either do not converge, or that can be made to converge by a simple moral manipulation, as follows.
In 1986 the “conservative” columnist William Safire wrote that “Greed is finally being recognized as a virtue . . . the best engine of betterment known to man.” This was not, I think, the news that Mr. Safire thought it was, but was merely a repetition of a time-worn rationalization. What may have been new was the “professional” falsehood that greed is the exclusive motive in every choice—that, for example, the only way to have good teachers or good doctors is to pay them a lot of money.
Mr. Safire’s error, and that of the people he spoke for, is in the idea that everybody can be greedy up to some limit—that, once you have made greed a virtue, it will not crowd