In article ,
John Savard wrote:
1) Black Americans are unable to find land in the West available for
homesteading, and thus they are not able to catch up with white
Americans, who were able to homestead land during a time period when
the ancestors of today's black Americans were already present on
American soil, but were not eligible to participate.

The time for homesteading was in the last century. Very few of today's
black Americans would *want* to homestead now, in the same way that very
few of today's white Americans want to.

This sounds very like many white abolitionists of the Civil War era --
including Lincoln -- who thought the solution to the problem of slavery
was to give blacks the opportunity to return to Africa. It did not occur
to them that most American blacks considered themselves Americans and did
not *want* to emigrate; they wanted a fair deal in America.

The days when the dream of many urban Americans -- black or white -- was
being a subsistence farmer in the West are long gone.

2) Because of the large areas of land required for agricultural
production in the U.S., insufficient wilderness habitat is available
for reintroducing bison to the western plains in sufficient numbers to
permit the return of the Plains Indians to their traditional mode of
food production.

Uh, "traditional mode of food production"? If that's hunting bison on
horseback, remember that there have been horses in the Americas for only
a few centuries -- they were introduced by Europeans.

In most cases, we have *NO CLUE* what the truly-pre-European society of
North American natives looked like. European explorers, plants, animals,
and most especially diseases ranged well ahead of Europeans who kept
records, and often radically altered the local way of life. The De Soto
expedition of 1539-42 -- the first Europeans to venture inland in the
North American Southeast -- found the Indians living in Aztec-style city-
states, with organized agriculture, government, and religion. By the time
serious European settlement of the area began, a couple of centuries
later, this was all gone, and moreover it was all forgotten: the locals
were primitive hunter-gatherers, with not even a tradition that their
ancestors had been semi-urbanized farmers. European epidemic disease was
probably to blame; even the De Soto records speak of epidemics among the
natives. The same thing could easily have happened elsewhere unrecorded,
and probably did.

Automation and cheap imports have been allowed to destroy American
industry, taking away many union jobs, so that it is much harder for
ordinary working-class Americans to get jobs at wages that permit
human dignity.

It has long been hard for people trained for yesterday's jobs to find
well-paying jobs today. This has been a constant in North America since
at least the 19th century. Even back then, industries and occupations
often became obsolete within a single lifetime. (As a particular case in
point, a century ago, most Americans were farmers. Not any more.)

America will not be overpopulated when:
*everyone* has a house in the suburbs; *no one* has to live in a
crowded city apartment for economic reasons;

Many of us actually prefer city living, where population density is high
enough to permit efficient delivery of services like public transit.
(Attempts to expand service into the suburbs have been the financial ruin
of many formerly-self-funding transit systems.)

I could respond to the rest of the rant, but this has already taken too
long to write...
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |