I take your point absolutely about the middle class telling the lower orders how to live their lives. (See David on Cobbett).   Except of course, Cobbett wasn’t middle class at all. Cobbett was from a working class family and was known as ‘the ploughboy’.  (Not withstanding he was taught to read and write by his Farmer/Publican father).

For me to take sides in the business of bread making would be silly and would only add to the confusion,

On the surface, Cobbett’s objection to the spud seems odd but when I get a minute I’ll browse through ‘Cottage Economy’ and perhaps clear things up a bit.(or not…)

I’m beginning to have the feeling that Cobbett could see the way the wind was blowing and was railing against the erosion of the cottager’s independence. The consumer society was in its infancy at the end of the eighteenth century. Essential commodities, like food and clothing were being taken out of the independent manufacturing hands of the cottager(which had provided income) and instead being produced in huge factories. This meant that access to wool, cloth, thread etc were only available if you had the money to pay for them.

An interesting point here is that people were required to work such long hours (up to 16 hours per day) that they had neither time nor energy to do anything other than work at the factory and sleep. Cobbett could see how this was contributing directly to the growth of the consumer society. People, more and more, had no access to land. People, more and more, became absolutely dependent on wages to exist. To get their wages required endless toil.As a result of this, they required others to supply goods they had previously supplied, or bartered for, or grown, for themselves. Clothing, wool, boots and shoes, fruit and vegetables, etc. were now commodities which must be bought with wages, with money. This amounts to slavery.

This surely is why Cobbett objects to bought bread, to anything bought that insidiously erodes the cottager’s independence.   With his ‘Cottage Economy’ he is desperately trying to remind people where their real independence lies. He is not ‘talking down’ to people.  (Echoes here of Bageant in Deer hunting with Jesus, this is exactly why the liberal elite in the US today think the poor should spend more time sewing and growing their own food rather than working two or more jobs to put (second rate) food on the table.)

The story of the 19th century is the rise of the consumer society, and the desperately fought battles by employees to establish a living wage. Ludicrously, the moment  a living wage is established, prices of goods increase by just enough to erode the value of that wage.   (Echoes here of the conservative Australian government complaining of ‘high’ wages of fruit processing workers)

In my estimation this wage battle has been, nowadays, well and truly lost and the ‘distribution of wealth’ has ceased altogether.

This ‘system’ has become so unfair, so shamelessly corrupt, that we have arrived today at a point well beyond argument.

As with Castro in Cuba, if anyone remembers, Fidel solved the problem of corruption by taking these parasites outside and shooting them.

I hope it doesn’t get to that extreme, but if people are pushed far enough…