Libertarians . . . .. . . siiiiiggggghhhh . . . . .

[Warpy]

9. Knock the dust off those rose colored glasses, willya?

Most homesteaders didn't make it. The husbands left the wives alone on those lonely homesteads to tend the stock and do what they could about growing food and raising children while they went to the cities to find work. The women were extremely lucky if they did and brought back enough cash to get everybody through another year. If they weren't, the husbands drank it up, something that condemned their families to death.

The second wave of homesteading was in the 1960s-70s. They found out that they needed paid work, too, work that took them away from that pipe dream of self sufficiency. The chickens went for Sunday dinners, the goats and other stock got sold, the fields went fallow, and there was only a kitchen garden, if that, within about five years.

It was a wretched existence, trying to farm land that didn't have enough rainfall to sustain anything much but the prairie grasses that had been there, the boom and bust cycle of yearly rainfall wiping out stock as well as crops.

Self sufficiency? Not a chance.