All I need to know I learned growing up on a farm ...

In all due respect to Robert Fulghum and his book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten ... (Note: Robert Fulgham's website: http://www.robertfulghum.com/) ... growing up on a small dairy farm north of Duluth, Minnesota, I learned some things about the myths of (1.) the "free" market, (2.) the "positive" effects of globalization, and (3.) "maximizing the benefit" to the collective good by pursuing self-interest.

All of these myths are quite easily debunked with a little reality therapy from living on a small farm with a small number of animals in a community of similar homesteads and families. It helps that we were also the beneficiaries of the Enlightenment and stable government institutions, living in a micro-world where our needs were met out of the rhythm of the cycles of our daily lives.

I will continue to pursue the debunking of these myths here in my blog.

For example, every farmer knows that if you dump manure on someone else's property, the other person had better have asked you to do it ... or they are going to make you clean it up. What's so hard to understand about corporations cleaning up the PCP's they dumped in the Hudson River?

Does "free" and "unfettered" markets mean that the prices of goods and services are free and unfettered from any costs that cannot be "legally" connected to their development, production, and sale? So who pays the costs of New Jersy's air pollution from Ohio and Pennsylvania? Who pays the costs of secondhand cigarette smoke? Who pays the cost of the disruption in lives of tribal villagers who have met their needs out of the rhythm of the cycles of their daily lives for millenia? Who pays these costs?

I will raise other questions regarding these myths as we go along, and have done so in the past. But with Bush(#43) going to India and tossing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty over the side ... my early wisdom included, "Remember now, don't toss the baby out with the bathwater!" ... the whole insane framework of the current globaliztion economic philosophy/mythology must be aggressively called into question ... and so many so-called intellectuals seem loathe to do so ... so it is left to farmboys from Minnesota, like me, to point out the absurdity of the current conventional wisdom in so much of the economic pronouncements eminating from "credentialed" authorities on the subject.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)