Same story with ASML, Siemens and other industrial tools companies.
Things get interesting when the cost (economic value) of the tool is a largest percentage of the total $ of goods produced.
Modern sharecroppers.
Usury, rent seeking, monopsony, wealth transfer.
Institutionalized power imbalances which eventually lead to abrupt disruptions. aka Revolutions.
This story is as old as history.
I've been reading more about the Progressive Era during the apocalypse. (Currently chewing thru Caro's Master of the Senate, which covers New Deal thru Great Society.) Same challenges, rhetoric, social fault lines. Only the cast of characters have changed.
Don't worry, though. The more I learn, the more optimistic I become. We've been here before. Countless times. And somehow, humanity stumbles forward. Though the stakes are quite high for this iteration.
If there's anything "exceptional" about American Exceptionalism, my nomination is that our transfers of power have been relatively more peaceful than most.
I'm not saying things will necessarily work out. Only that it's possible we'll reach the next equilibrium. Kick the can down the road a few more decades. Potentially giving our grandkids the opportunity to revisit this never-ending argument again, on their own terms.
Right now, just knowing it's possible is hope enough for me.
In the 20th century that phrase was written about workers, as in employees, but if even the business owners don't really own the means of production... are they really business owners ?
It seems history repeats itself, just one echelon higher in the society.
Or did JD increase farming productivity in a pareto efficient way, so the farmers are still better off buying JD, even though JD gets to keep most of the newly created surplus?
Or is it just a race to the bottom where farmers that don't buy JD get priced out, even though buying JD makes the farmers worse off as a collective?
Tom Philpott describes this really well in 'Perilous Bounty': there are lots of farmers who are price takers. Their only way forward is to hope to survive weather and price cycles by producing more, more efficiently. This ironically leads to overproduction and poor returns.
Whereas JD are price makers who can use their consolidated power to set terms and prices within the market. Farmers don't really stand a chance.
But it is certainly true that production subsidies serve to make landlords and suppliers rich just as they serve to make farmers rich - your tax dollars at work!
My grandpa probably has a few million dollars in assets, but he saved aggressively his whole life and probably worked 40% more than the average non-farmer over the same time span (longer hours, fewer/shorter vacations, retired in his late 70s, etc).
Yes, farmers have a lot of capital invested in their businesses, but their incomes (i.e., what they take home rather than reinvesting in their businesses) still seem pretty modest.
Compared to my cousins who farm, I’m pretty sure I’m wealthier than they are as a software engineer, certainly with respect to income and perhaps also with respect to total asset value.
It’s bound to happen eventually, but we probably haven’t crossed that threshold yet.
Grain farming doesn't become a full time job until you reach over 1000 acres, if a guy farms one section of land and makes a decent living and chooses to spend that extra time enjoying life, more power to 'em, but farming in that 640-1280 acre pocket scales really well - it is a choice!
The over half of farmers in Iowa, most of which are row-crop farmers, that are running farms under 640 acres, are they dropping out because of economic pressure? Maybe some, but I think mostly it is old-timers that had a great run but they have a business that provides half an income to the next generation at the current scale and the next generation would rather do one thing than two. Either way, Dad's not retiring "poor"!
(This happens a lot in my neck of the woods, lots of 1,000 acre-ish farmers retiring with kids that are professionals that "love the farm" but have no interest in it at this scale.)
The fact that many farmers choose to operate their business in a way that is under-leveraged and often over-work themselves instead of hiring outside help that they can certainly afford is an artifact of culture, not a measure of wealth.
Of course, coming from a rural community there is a pretty good chance that you engage in an unusually high level of personal savings and as such have converted a high income into high asset holdings, I know I do - it is something in the water I think!