Buy all the tea and Pineapples you want but daily staples should be produced as locally as possible . This is also the best way to stop Monsanto et al from patenting life
But what if my locality produces mainly olives or beef or tourism? It makes sense to me to specialize in what you're good and competitive at, and in that division of labor trade and exchange.
I'm not against people growing things local. Farm fresh eggs are great.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone
Here's more proof the middle class is dying.
The middle-class share of American wealth has been shrinking for the better part of three decades and recently fell to its lowest level since 1940, according to a new study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics.
In other words, remember the surge of the great American middle class after World War II? That's all gone, at least by one measure.
In this case, "middle class" is defined rather expansively as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans. "Wealth" is the total of home equity, stock and bond holdings, pension plans and other assets, minus debt. As such assets are mostly owned by mid- to higher-income households -- and considering most Americans define themselves as "middle-class" -- it seems reasonable to use the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the "middle class."