Subsistence economy Quotes

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

This kingdom [Colombia] … does not enjoy an active commerce. It’s subsistence consists of gold taken from its mines, without trade, export of its agriculture and manufactures…. The local officials everywhere are indifferent and careless as to their duty; the people are steeped in poverty; trade is almost extinct; capital is lacking, and there are no opportunities for its investment; the only source of support is the cultivation of small patches of ground. Every one seeks to subsist on the government by procuring some little office.

Coal is not dear for the coal-miner who can use it there and then, nor is khadi dear for the villager who manufactures his own khadi.

Countries that are agricultural can, at a low standard of living, sustain themselves. You can be self-sufficient; the money economy is a relatively insignificant part of the total economy. Singapore never was an agricultural country.

In the state of society in which we now find ourselves, it is difficult to imagine a nation which lived solely on bread and vegetables.

A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infinitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wits' end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every tree around them.

The invention of the other arts must therefore have been necessary to compel mankind to apply themselves to agriculture. No sooner were artificers wanted to smelt and forge iron, than others were required to maintain them; the more hands that were employed in manufactures, the fewer were left to provide for the common subsistence, though the number of mouths to be furnished with food remained the same.

In societies of low civilization, there is no money.

A nation that derives its subsistence, principally from the forest, cannot live in the vicinity of one that relies upon the products of the field. The clearing of the country drives off the wild beasts; and when the game fails, the hunter must starve, change his occupation, or retire from the approach of cultivation.

If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith to pay another for his labor, for each person having only such a quantity of land as was necessary to produce a subsistence, would consume all he should gather, and would not have anything to give in exchange for the labor of others.

When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.

The villagers want bread-not butter-and disciplined work, some work that will supplement their agricultural avocations which do not go on for all the 12 months.

Throughout history households had consumed most of the things that they produced and produced most of what they consumed.

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.

Economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.