The majority of the bedding plants grown in Michigan are grown on the west side of the state.
The west side of the state is conservative and votes overwhelmingly Republican.
The bedding plant business is mostly a one-and-done business. They go like a bat out of Hades this time of year and then people stop buying bedding plants.
Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer decided that being able to grow food in your garden is not critical infrastructure and ordered stores to close down their garden centers and greenhouses.
You might think, well, at least the commercial greenhouses can keep growing plants.
The problem is that the vast majority of their plants are sold through the Walmarts, Meijers and Home Depots of the world. If the big-box store cannot sell them, then the big-box will cancel their orders.
Those plants are already growing. Many of them are ready to put on the truck.
Sadly, most of them will end up in the compost pile behind the greenhouses. The commercial greenhouses are looking at losing an entire year's worth of revenue while still retaining an entire year's worth of costs.
From the standpoint of those of us who grow things, it feels like a cheap, political stab-in-the-back. One must wonder, was she smiling as she twisted the knife?
Most everyone I know that gardens added to their garden this spring. It is only logical to hedge your bet when the supply chain is ailing. They only care about power and their ideology. People be damned.
ReplyDeleteWhere does some (dim wit) governor get the authority to outlaw the selling of seed? At one time I was fairly in tune with the Constitution of Michigan; particularly Article 1, Section 6. I have no recollection of any authority vested in the governor, for the direct control of commerce.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, the good people of Michigan need to take action against this crime.
Gretchen Whitmer needs to be removed from office immediately.
And a phrase from the movie Apocalypse Now seems appropriate here...with extreme prejudice.
Almost all politicians are totally ignorant about literally everything that matters. They know and understand virtually nothing about how food is grown, processed, and distributed, or how stuff is made, and how the raw materials are sourced to make the stuff. And worst of all, they are worse than totally ignorant about how an economy actually works.
ReplyDeleteYou would think that it is not possible to be more than 100% ignorant about something, but it is not. Because knowing nothing is the baseline of ignorance. But politicians, the great majority of whom are collectivist to one degree or another, know so very much that is simply not so. (Attribution to Ronald Reagan here.) When you 'know' things about a given subject that are simply not so, then you are below the baseline of total ignorance. You are worse than ignorant. This is most politicians, and most especially those of a leftist mindset such as this Governor Gretchen, are so very destructive in most things that they do.
Most RINOs also are in this category to some extent. There are relatively few actual statesmen and patriots among the ranks of Republicans, and virtually NONE among the Democrats. And there are very few politicians of either party who have worked and earned their living at a real job in the real world prior to entering elective office. This is a big part of their disconnect from the real world that the rest of us inhabit. They have never worked years and then decades at a real job in the real economy, struggling to make ends meet. They have never risked their own savings that took years and years to amass in an attempt to start a small business. They have never had to meet a payroll, paying themselves last IF there was enough left over to do that.
In short, most of them do not know the value of a dollar. They have no concept of just how much blood and sweat went into earning the money that they freely extract from the rest of us. It is just Monopoly money to them. And along with that, they have no clue how any of that money was actually created due to their aforementioned ignorance about all things that matter.
So when your governor decides that garden centers should be shut down, that decision is made out of sheer ignorance on her part and on the part of her handlers and advisors, who are just as ignorant as she is about growing food, supply chains, distribution networks, and everything else. They simply don't know what they don't know. So we have ignorant leaders making disastrous decisions for all of us out here who they view as uneducated rubes. Even though we are the people who produce everything and make everything work. In many ways, the USA has morphed into the old Soviet Union.
VERY well put George- ken
DeleteGeorge, She knew exactly what she was doing. Punishing Conservatives.
DeleteThat was a stupid move... People grow FOOD and get a lot of seeds, etc. from the growers. VT did the same thing... sigh
ReplyDeleteControl the food and you control the people.
ReplyDeleteCui bono?
Sell stuff out the back door in as much as possible. Plenty of folks around here whose small business has been ordered closed are working at home, providing services on a smaller scale. For cash, now.
ReplyDeleteI'm a fan of unofficial markets.
Garden centers in Georgia are declared essential business BECAUSE they sell seeds...
ReplyDelete