With the industrial revolution, almost all famines have happened to farmers and rural people. Urban industrial people almost never have famines. The one exception is when there is a war, or some other sort of violent government action to cut off food from the cities. So if trump has the army surround NYC and cutoff food, there will be starvation. Other than that, NYC will find the food somewhere.
The reason for this is that when farmers do not produce enough food to even feed themselves, they also do not produce enough food to sell, and buy food for themselves. Meanwhile, only a small part of the money that urban dwellers have goes to food. If that doubles, or even triples, it is painful, but they can still do it. Even if they lose their economic production, they have decades worth of food buying assets stored up.
If red states are no longer able to produce food, blue states will just buy the food from other sources. Transportation is cheap and efficient, so blue states can buy from anywhere in the world. The Chinese are also doing this. They are buying from other countries.
There is a new saying among economists that "a bean is a bean is a bean." It is much easier to replace agricultural products than intellectual property products. Beans from Brazil are basically the same as beans from Kansas. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, etc. would be much harder for Brazil to replace.
So without red states, blue states would not starve. In fact, given that almost all the technologies that allow increased farming production come from educated liberals, I wonder whether red states would starve without us.
Do you really believe all Red States are worthless?
No, but it is clear they are not economically worth as much as Blue States. Who is to say what people are worth beyond economics.
But I do disagree with this claim that Republicans are all farmers. About 2% of the labor market is in farming. Many of those are illegal aliens, legal aliens, temporary aliens, poor farm laborers, etc. Let's say 1% of them are your Republican farm owners, that would be a high number, and let's say 40% of Americans are Republicans, that would mean 97.5% of Republicans are NOT farmers.
The vast majority of rural Republicans are not farmers. Even beyond that, most do not even have neighbors who are farmers. They live on marginal land that could not support agriculture.
They are people who want to live somewhere cheap. I can not begrudge them that, but I certainly am not dependent on them for food. Those that live off government checks should be thanking me for paying taxes to support them. Those that live off investments should be thanking me for keeping the financial system going. Those that live off jobs should be thanking me for keeping money flowing into the economy.
And even those that are farmers should be thanking me for being a customer willing to (or forced by the government to) pay a lot more for the food that they sell than would be required by the international market, and also willing to pay taxes to subsidize them.
Blue states like California actually produce a lot of food.
When you total the cash receipts for all ag commodities, California is the leader, raking first with a total of more than $58 billion, according to USDA data. Rounding out the top 10 are:
- California, $58 billion
Exactly, Blue States produce a lot of food, but also a lot of everything else. Farming is 2% of California's economy. If they have a severe famine, and lose half of that, they will not even have a recession. They will outgrow that minor loss. Meanwhile, if Kansas lost half its agriculture, it would be in a deep depression.
But people need food, right? Californians can use all their money to buy food from anywhere on Earth, while Kansas would have to beg other states for money to buy food.
Balance food production against population centers and see what happens if the trains and trucks stop running.
An acre of land is about the amount of land that a plow and horse team can plow in a day. 6 days a week for 5 weeks gets you 30 acres. Throw in a few extra acres that are either fallow that year, or used for other things, and you get 40 acres.
You will keep hearing 40 acres given as the size for a pre-industrial one family farm. The Amish speak of needing 40 acres to survive in a purely Amish farming way. Freed slaves were given 40 acres. English peasants wanted 40 acres each.
When you go above 40 acres, it is always many families having to work the land. Most of those families are usually slaves, peasants, or sharecroppers.
The point is the trucks stop running, there is no way to produce on a full modern farm, and very quickly farmers are in real trouble. They can no longer produce soybeans on 4,000 acres, and do not eat much soybeans anyway. That means they have to try to produce food they can eat on more like 40 acres. And somehow pay the mortgage on 4,000 acres when they have no income.
And that is when the starving starts.