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By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.
Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.
According to that simple math, we should all be starving because we don’t work the land. If the salaries were higher in the cities, so was productivity. In simple terms, they more than made up for the loss of their farming work by producing tools, trading for better crops etc, which allowed the farmers to support them, and enriched society in the process.
They didn’t do it to be dicks, but because it was in their interest, like a boss who refuses a raise. The difference being, that boss wouldn’t take ‘fuck you, then. I’m off’ for a legal answer.
With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different?
What evidence is this statement based on? What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?
Preventing famine is in everyone's interest, the poorest most of all. Again, I'm open to being corrected if it can be clearly demonstrated that a better path was available, and that the people passing the laws should reasonably have been expected to recognize it. I'd even accept evidence that their motivations for trying to keep people farming was something other than "if we don't have enough farmers everyone will starve".
More generally, how was keeping them on the farm supposed to be in the bosses' interest, specifically? If these people moved to the cities and generated wealth as you allege, wouldn't that make the bosses' positions better? Why wouldn't they want that to happen? Why wouldn't they think that would happen?
We'd also be starving if we worked the land. Not starving is not about working the land, it's about all those things produced by people who don't work the land.
Take trade, for example. No need to work the land if you can trade clothes or swords for more polish or egyptian grain than you could ever have produced. And the mere presence of that transport capacity makes famine less likely.
Do you think the highly urbanized low countries were the ones starving when famine struck ? This would be what your theory straightforwardly predicts.
The difference is the benefit doesn’t accrue to them, it accrues to society. 5000 dollars in my pocket has quite a bit more weight than a million for the state.
As always, they were stupid and self-interested. If they honestly believed they were altruistically trying to stave off starvation, they could simply have agreed to the raises. But they wanted to maximize their own surplus at the cost of the peasants, and took away their leverage by force.
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