Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The

First, Berry acknowledges the common understanding "that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves," and that although those governments "have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly," they have, nevertheless, "occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence."232 Such regulatory actions are necessary, writes Berry,

[b]ecause as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions, [and] we need our state and national governments to protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.233

Beyond this, Berry contends that the government's obligation to protect the economic resources of the small fanners and merchants "is the same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders" such that he makes no distinction "between a domestic threat to the sources of our life and a foreign one."234

Berry seems content to allow the government to use its traditional arsenal of protectionist weapons to mount its defense of the local economy. Specifically, he approves of governmental restrictions on "great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations" through "laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining ... one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax."235 He believes in protecting domestic producers and production capacities through "tariffs on cheap imported goods ... justified by the government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens."236 However, he warns, all of these weapons are now "either weakened or in disuse," having been subverted by the global economy,237 and are therefore unlikely to prevail without additional, less conventional support.

Although Berry seemingly justifies his call for governmental protection at least in part on his concern that "as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against... [the] aggressions" of the free market economy, he also recognizes that government alone, even if it chooses to act, will provide an insufficient defense.238 Thus, "[i]n default of government protections against the total economy of the supranational corporations .. . [the] powers not exercised by government return to the people... [and] the people must think about protecting themselves."239 Moreover, as Berry explains, the agrarian vision finds "[a] viable community ... made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities."240 Therefore, in addition to the protective powers of tariffs, progressive taxation, and collective bargaining, Berry urges the local commonwealths to build "an adversary economy, a system of local or community economies within, and to protect against, the would-be global economy."241 Significantly then, Berry proclaims that "agrarian principles implicitly propose-and what I explicitly propose in advocating those principles at this time-is a revolt of local small producers and local consumers against the global industrialism of the corporations."242