Maggie's Farm

I'm certainly no fan of Bloomberg, but if you look at even a little of context of his remarks, it's obvious he's not calling farmers stupid, he was referring to the pre-industrial age when farming was the default position of the low-skill worker for thousands of years. You know, the old feudal serfs and peasants. As evidence of this, farming was so inefficient that it took a majority of the workers in a society to produce the meager surplus of food sufficient to feed the minority of people who weren't farmers. Come the industrial revolution, it was the low-skill assembly line work that filled that position. Now that computers and machinery and robots do so much of the work, where are the low-skill workers to go? As Bloomberg continues his remarks, he says we'd better figure that out. The next part that they cut out:

“Now comes the information economy and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people, who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that is the most important, that will stop them from setting up a guillotine someday, is the dignity of a job.”

Bernie's idea of "free stuff for everybody" appeals to the youths specifically because they're youths, they lack the wisdom to know that "free stuff" is welfare and it's degrading and it's dehumanizing to live on welfare. It's the old teaching a man to fish and a hand up, not a hand-out. Bloomberg at least understands that a man wants to feel useful, that he's a contributing member of society, that he's pulling his own weight. A man feels worthless, he starts thinking less like a man and more like an animal. Nobody wants that.