Thorstein Veblen
The Independent Farmer
(The Freeman, June 13, 1923, pp. 321-324)

Republished without change (only some punctuation changed) in Veblen's 'Absentee 
Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times'
(New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1923, chap. VII., sect. II. pp. 129-141). 
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THE INDEPENDENT FARMER
The case of the American farmer is conspicuous; though it can scarcely be called 
singular, since in great part it is rather typical of the fortune which has 
overtaken the underlying populations throughout Christendom under the 
dominion of absentee ownership in its later developed phase. Much the same 
general run of conditions recurs elsewhere in those respects which engage the 
fearsome attention of these farmers. By and large, the farmer is so placed in 
the economic system that both as producer and as consumer he deals with business 
concerns which are in a position to make the terms of the traffic, which it is 
for him to take or leave. Therefore the margin of benefit that comes to him from 
his work is commonly at a minimum. He is commonly driven by circumstances over 
which he has no control, the circumstances being made by the system of absentee 
ownership and its business enterprise. Yet he is, on the whole, an obstinately 
loyal supporter of the system of law and custom which so makes the conditions of 
life for him.
His unwavering loyalty to the system is in part a holdover from that obsolete 
past when he was the Independent Farmer of the poets; but in part it is also due 
to the still surviving persuasion that he is on the way, by hard work and shrewd 
management, to acquire a "competence"; such as will enable him some day to take 
his due place among the absentee owners of the land and so come in for an easy 
livelihood at the cost of the rest of the community; and in part it is also due 
to the persistent though fantastic opinion that his own present interest is 
bound up with the system of absentee ownership, in that he is himself an 
absentee owner by so much as he owns land and equipment which he works with 
hired help, - always presuming that he is such an owner, in effect or in 
prospect.
It is true, the farmer-owners commonly are absentee owners to this extent. 
Farming is team-work. As it is necessarily carried on by current methods in the 
great farming sections, farm work runs on such a scale that no individual owner 
can carry on by use of his own personal work alone, or by use of the man-power 
of his own household alone, - which makes him an absentee owner by so much. But 
it does not, in the common run, make him an absentee owner of such dimensions as 
are required in order to create an effectual collusive control of the market, or 
such as will enable him, singly or collectively, to determine what charges the 
traffic shall bear. It leaves him still effectually in a position to take or 
leave what is offered at the discretion of those massive absentee interests that 
move in the background of the market.(1*)
Always, of course, the farmer has with him the abiding comfort of his illusions, 
to the effect that he is in some occult sense the "Independent Farmer," and that 
he is somehow by way of achieving a competence of absentee ownership by hard 
work and sharp practice, some day; but in practical effect, as things habitually 
work out, he is rather to be called a quasi-absentee owner, or perhaps a pseudo-
absentee owner, being too small a parcel of absentee ownership to count as such 
in the outcome. But it is presumably all for the best, or at least it is 
expedient for business-as- usual, that the farmer should continue to nurse his 
illusions and go about his work; that he should go on his way to complete that 
destiny to which it has pleased an all-seeing and merciful Providence to call 
him.
From colonial times and through the greater part of its history as a republic 
America has been in the main an agricultural country. Farming has been the 
staple occupation and has employed the greater part of the population. And the 
soil has always been the chief of those natural resources which the American 
people have taken over and made into property. Through the greater part of its 
history the visible growth of the country has consisted in the extension of the 
cultivated area and the increasing farm output, farm equipment, and farm 
population. This progressive taking-over and settlement of the farming lands is 
the most impressive material achievement of the American people, as it is also 
the most serviceable work which they have accomplished hitherto. It still is, as 
it ever has been, the people's livelihood; and the rest of the industrial system 
has in the main, grown up, hitherto, as a subsidiary or auxiliarly, adopted to 
and limited by the needs and the achievements of the country's husbandry. The 
incentives and methods engaged in this taking-over of the soil, as well as the 
industrial and institutional consequences that have followed, are accordingly 
matters of prime consideration in any endeavour to understand or explain the 
national character and the temperamental bent which underlies it.
The farm population - that farm population which has counted substantially 
toward this national achievement - have been a ready, capable and resourceful 
body of workmen. And they have been driven by the incentives already spoken of 
in an earlier passage as being characteristic of the English-speaking colonial 
enterprise, - individual self-help and cupidity. Except transiently and 
provisionally, and with doubtful effect, this farm population has nowhere and at 
no time been actuated by a spirit of community interest in dealing with any of 
their material concerns. Their community spirit, in material concerns, has 
been quite notably scant and precarious, in spite of the fact that they have 
long been exposed to material circumstances of a wide-sweeping uniformity, such 
as should have engendered a spirit of community interest and made for collective 
enterprise, and such as could have made any effectual collective enterprise 
greatly remunerative to all concerned. But they still stand sturdily by the 
timeworn make-believe that they still are individually self-sufficient 
masterless men, and through good report and evil report they have remained 
Independent Farmers, as between themselves, which is all that is left of their 
independence, - Each for himself, etc.
Of its kind, this is an admirable spirit, of course; and it has achieved many 
admirable results, even though the results have not all been to the gain of the 
farmers. Their self-help and cupidity have left them at the mercy of any 
organisation that is capable of mass action and a steady purpose. So they have, 
in the economic respect - and incidentally in the civil and political respect - 
fallen under the dominion of those massive business interests that move 
obscurely in the background of the market and buy and sell and dispose of the 
farm products and the farmers' votes and opinions very much on their own terms 
and at their ease.
But all the while it remains true that they have brought an unexampled large and 
fertile body of soil to a very passable state of service, and their work 
continues to yield a comfortably large food supply to an increasing population, 
at the same time that it yields a comfortable run of free income to the 
country's kept classes. It is true, in the end the farm population find 
themselves at work for the benefit of business-as-usual, on a very modest 
livelihood. For farming is, perhaps necessarily, carried on in severalty 
and on al relatively small scale, even though the required scale exceeds what is 
possible on a footing of strict self-ownership of land and equipment by the 
cultivators; and there is always the pervading spirit of self-help and cupidity, 
which unavoidably defeats even that degree of collusive mass action that might 
otherwise be possible. Whereas the system of business interests in whose web the 
farmers are caught is drawn on a large scale, its units are massive, impersonal, 
imperturbable and, in effect, irresponsible, under the established order of law 
and custom, and they are interlocked in an unbreakable framework of common 
interests.

By and large, the case of America is as the case of the American farm 
population, and for the like reasons. For the incentives and ideals, the law and 
custom and the knowledge and belief, on which the farm population has gone about 
its work and has come to this pass, are the same as have ruled the growth and 
shaped the outcome for the community at large. Nor does the situation in America 
differ materially from the state of things elsewhere in the civilised countries, 
in so far as these others share in the same material civilisation of 
Christendom.
In the American tradition, and in point of historical fact out of which the 
tradition has arisen, the farmer has been something of a pioneer. Loosely it can 
be said that the pioneering era is now closing, at least provisionally and as 
regards farming. But while the pioneer-farmer is dropping out of the work of 
husbandry, his pioneer soul goes marching on. And it has been an essential trait 
of this American pioneering spirit to seize upon so much of the country's 
natural resources as the enterprising pioneer could lay hands on, - in the case 
of the pioneer-farmer, so much of the land as he could get and hold 
possession of. The land had, as it still has, a prospective use and therefore a 
prospective value, a "speculative" value as it is called; and the farmer-pioneer 
was concerned with seizing upon this prospective value and turning it into net 
gain by way of absentee ownership, as much as the pioneer-farmer was concerned 
with turning the fertile soil to present use in the creation of a livelihood for 
himself and his household from day to day.
Habitually and with singular uniformity the American farmers have aimed to 
acquire real estate at the same time that they have worked at their trade as 
husbandmen. And real estate is a matter of absentee ownership, an asset whose 
value is based on the community's need of this given parcel of land for use as a 
means of livelihood, and the value of which is measured by the capitalised free 
income which the owner may expect to come in for by holding it for as high a 
rental as the traffic in this need will bear. So that the pioneering aim, in 
American farming, has been for the pioneer-farmers, each and several, to come in 
for as much of a free income at the cost of the rest of the community as the law 
would allow; which has habitually worked out in their occupying, each and 
several, something more than they could well take care of. They have habitually 
"carried" valuable real estate at the same time that they have worked the soil 
of so much of their land as they could take care of, in as effectual a manner as 
they could under these circumstances. They have been cultivators of the main 
chance as well as of the fertile soil; with the result that, by consequence of 
this intense and unbroken habituation, the farm population is today imbued with 
that penny-wise spirit of self-help and cupidity that now leaves them and their 
work and holdings at the disposal of those massive vested interests that 
know the uses of collusive mass action, as already spoken of above.
But aside from this spiritual effect which this protracted habituation to a 
somewhat picayune calculation of the main chance has had on the farmers' frame 
of mind, and aside from their consequent unfitness to meet the businesslike 
manouvres of the greater vested interests, this manner of pioneering enterprise 
which the farmers have habitually mixed into their farming has also had a more 
immediate bearing on the country's husbandry, and, indeed, on the industrial 
system as a whole. The common practice has been to "take up" more land than the 
farmer could cultivate, with his available means, and to hold it at some cost. 
Which has increased the equipment required for the cultivation of the acres 
cultivated, and has also increased the urgency of the farmer's need of credit by 
help of which to find the needed equipment and meet the expenses incident to his 
holding his idle and semi-idle acres intact. And farm credit has been 
notoriously usurious. All this has had the effect of raising the cost of 
production of farm products; partly by making the individual farm that much more 
unwieldy as an instrument of production, partly by further enforcing the 
insufficiency and the make-shift character for which American farm equipment is 
justly famed, and partly also by increasing the distances over which the farm 
supplies and the farm products have had to be moved.
This last point marks one of the more serious handicaps of American farming, at 
the same time that it has contributed materially to enforce that "extensive," 
"superficial," and exhausting character of American farming which has arrested 
the attention of all foreign observers. In American practice the "farm area" has 
always greatly exceeded the "acreage under cultivation," even after all 
due allowance is made for any unavoidable inclusion of waste and half-waste 
acreage within the farm boundaries. Even yet, at the provisional close of the 
career of the American pioneer-farmer, the actual proportion of unused and half-
used land included within and among the farms will materially exceed what the 
records show, and it greatly exceeds what any inexperienced observer will be 
able to credit. The period is not long past - if it is past - when, taking one 
locality with another within the great farming sections of the country, the idle 
and half-idle lands included in and among the farms equalled the acreage that 
was fully employed, even in that "extensive" fashion in which American farming 
has habitually been carried on.
But there is no need of insisting on this high proportion of idle acreage, which 
none will credit who has not a wide and intimate knowledge of the facts in the 
case. For more or less - for as much as all intelligent observers will be ready 
to credit - this American practice has counted toward an excessively wide 
distribution of the cultivated areas, excessively long distances of transport, 
over roads which have by consequence been excessively bad - necessarily and 
notoriously so - and which have hindered communication to such a degree as in 
many instances to confine the cultivation to such crops as can be handled with a 
minimum of farm buildings and will bear the crudest kind of carriage over long 
distances and with incalculable delays. This applies not only to the farm-
country's highways, but to its railway facilities as well. The American practice 
has doubled the difficulty of transportation and retarded the introduction of 
the more practicable and more remunerative methods of farming; until makeshift 
and haphazard have in many places become so ingrained in the habits of the 
farm population that nothing but abounding distress and the slow passing of 
generations can correct it all.(2*) At the same time, as an incident by the way, 
this same excessive dispersion of the farming communities over long distances, 
helped out by bad roads, has been perhaps the chief factor in giving the retail 
business communities of the country towns their strangle-hold on the underlying 
farm population.
And it should surprise no one if a population which has been exposed to 
unremitting habituation of this kind has presently come to feel at home in it 
all; so that the bootless chicanery of their self-help is rated as a masterly 
fabric of axiomatic realities, and sharp practice has become a matter of 
conscience. In such a community it should hold true that "An honest man will 
bear watching," that the common good is a by-word, that "Everybody's business is 
nobody's business," that public office is a private job, where the peak of 
aphoristic wisdom is reached in that red-letter formula of democratic politics, 
"Subtraction, division, and silence." So it has become a democratic principle 
that public office should go by rotation, under the rule of equal opportunity, - 
equal opportunity to get something for nothing - but should go only to those who 
value the opportunity highly enough to make a desperate run for it. Here men 
"run" for office, not "stand" for it. Subtraction is the aim of this pioneer 
cupidity, not production; and salesmanship is its line of approach, not 
workmanship; and so, being in no way related quantitatively to a person's 
workmanlike powers or to his tangible performance, it has no "saturation 
point."(3*)
The spirit of the American farmers, typically, has been that of the pioneer 
rather than the workman. They have been efficient workmen, but that is not the 
trait which marks them for its own and sets them off in contrast with the common 
run. Their passion for acquisition has driven them to work, hard and painfully, 
but they have never been slavishly attached to their work; their slavery has 
been not to an imperative bent of workmanship and human service, but to an 
indefinitely extensible cupidity which drives to work when other expedients 
fail; at least so they say. So they have been somewhat footloose in their 
attachment to the soil as well as somewhat hasty and shiftless in its 
cultivation. They have always, in the typical case, wanted something more than 
their proportionate share of the soil; not because they were driven by a 
felt need of doing more than their fair share of work or because they aimed to 
give the community more service than would be a fair equivalent of their own 
livelihood, but with a view to cornering something more than their proportion of 
the community's indispensable means of life and so getting a little something 
for nothing in allowing their holdings to be turned to account, for a good and 
valuable consideration.

The American farmers have been footloose, on the whole, more particularly that 
peculiarly American element among them who derive their traditions from a 
colonial pedigree. There has always been an easy shifting from country to town, 
and this steady drift into the towns of the great farming sections has in the 
main been a drift from work into business. And it has been the business of these 
country towns - what may be called their business-as-usual - to make the most of 
the necessities and the ignorance of their underlying farm population. The 
farmers have on the whole been ready to make such a shift whenever there has 
been an "opening"; that is to say, they have habitually been ready to turn their 
talents to more remunerative use in some other pursuit whenever the chance has 
offered, and indeed they have habitually been ready to make the shift out of 
husbandry into the traffic of the towns even at some risk whenever the prospect 
of a wider margin of net gain has opened before their eager eyes.
In all this pursuit of the net gain the farm population and their country-town 
cousins have carried on with the utmost good nature. The business communities of 
the country towns have uniformly got the upper hand. But the farmers have shown 
themselves good losers; they have in the main gracefully accepted the turn of 
things and have continued to count on meeting with better luck or making a 
shrewder play next time. But the upshot of it so far has habitually been that 
the farm population find themselves working for a very modest livelihood and the 
country towns come in for an inordinately wide margin of net gains; that is to 
say, net gain over necessary outlay and over the value of the services which 
they render their underlying farm populations.
To many persons who have some superficial acquaintance with the run of the facts 
it may seem, on scant reflection, that what is said above of the inordinate 
gains that go to the country towns is a rash overstatement, perhaps even a 
malicious overstatement. It is not intended to say that the gains per capita of 
the persons currently engaged in business in the country towns, or the gains per 
cent. on the funds invested, are extraordinarily high; but only that as counted 
on the necessary rather than the actual cost of the useful work done, and as 
counted on the necessary rather than the actual number of persons engaged, the 
gains which go to the business traffic of the country towns are inordinately 
large.(4*)
THORSTEIN VEBLEN

NOTES:
1) Cf. Wallace, Farm Prices.
2) As a side issue to this arrangement of magnificent distances in the fertile 
farm country, it may be called to mind that the education of the farm children 
has on this account continually suffered from enforced neglect, with untoward 
results. And there are those who believe that the noticeably high rate of 
insanity among farmers' wives in certain sections of the prairie country is 
traceable in good part to the dreary isolation enforced upon them by this 
American plan of "country life."
3) This civilised-man's cupidity is one of those "higher wants of man" which the 
economists have found to be "indefinitely extensible," and like other spiritual 
needs it is self-authenticating, its own voucher.
The Latin phrase is auri sacra fames, which goes to show the point along the 
road to civilisation reached by that people. They had reached a realisation of 
the essentially sacramental virtue of this indefinitely extensible need of more; 
but the aurum in terms of which they visualised the object of their passion is 
after all a tangible object, with physical limitations of weight and space, such 
as to impose a mechanical "saturation point" on the appetite for its 
accumulation. But the civilised peoples of Christendom at large, and more 
particularly America, the most civilised and most Christian of them all, have in 
recent times removed this limitation. The object of this "higher want of man" is 
no longer specie, but some form of credit instrument which conveys title to a 
run of free income; and it can accordingly have no "saturation point," even in 
fancy, inasmuch as credit is also indefinitely extensible and stands in no 
quantitative relation to tangible fact.
4) It may be added, though it should scarcely be necessary, that a good part of 
the gains which are taken by the country-town business community passes through 
their hands into the hands of those massive vested interests that move obscurely 
in the background of the market, and to whom the country towns stand in a 
relation of feeders, analogous to that in which the farm population stands to 
the towns. In good part the business traffic of the country towns serves as ways 
and means of net gain to these business interests in the background. But when 
all due allowance is made on this and other accounts, and even if this element 
which may be called net gains in transit be deducted, the statement as made 
above remains standing without material abatement: the business gains which come 
to the country towns in their traffic with their underlying farm populations are 
inordinately large, as counted on the necessary cost and use-value of the 
service rendered, or on the necessary work done. But whether these net 
gains, in so far as they are "inordinate" - that is in so far as they go in under the 
caption of Something for Nothing - are retained by the business men of the town 
or are by them passed on to the larger business interests which dominate them, 
that is an idle difference for all that concerns the fortunes of the underlying 
farm population or the community at large. In either case it is idle waste, so 
far as concerns the material well-being of any part of the farm population.
--- The End ---