Perhaps America, the concept, deserves to be threatened at this point. There is increasingly little binding "us" together as a nation at this point: some historical borders, increasingly irrelevant legal and social structures, a few holidays. There is no common foundational creed or concept.
I disagree with the premise that there is little binding that holds us together. I hope we all still consider the Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness to be of the same high importance as Founding Fathers did.
That isn't the case anymore, and it is becoming less the case as time goes on. Life? Sure, but every country at least pays lip service to that now. Pursuit of happiness? A pretty, but vacuous concept. Liberty? The only concept of the bunch with any teeth, and, since the Irish, German and Jewish immigrations of the 1800's, a concept in decline.
America is no longer a nation, rather it is a multi-ethinic empire, held together by force and historical momentum.
Of all possible secessions, the secession of the big cities from the country that surrounds them is probably the least practical, even if it would probably be welcomed by rural residents.
Welcomed by rural residents until rural subsidies dry up and farmers find that they are competing with produce grown in other countries so they are restricted in how high they can price the food they sell to cities.
A large part of the US culture is homogeneous, and we share more language with each other than we would with anybody else on the planet. There's much more to a culture than rituals and politics.
Don't underestimate though, the power of social pressure to influence the belief system and overall culture of immediate neighbors. Usually first your are born into an area, then you adopt the culture in order to get along. It can be very difficult to hold counter-beliefs in many groups.
I spend significant time in very urban areas and very rural areas, and I'm seeing more convergence because of the net.
There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.
More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad support for personal freedom.
If your thesis was correct, it would be evident to the author who is actually time-sharing (taking advantage of all the things you say). But what he describes in his essay is how even he is of a different mindset...this essay is more about context switching. Its impossible to context switch when you never leave the house/office/facy neighborhood. Or to use some data, look at the dismal % of african americans that go to yosemite or even know how to swim. There's lots of racial and historical bias at play in that data, but the empirical point remains--context switching for urbanites is hard. And the poorer you are the harder it is. The reverse is also true--the poorer and more white you are in appalachia, the less likely you are to context switch with the weathy coastal cities. So we have money and culture paying a part as barriers to context switching, notwithstanding the revolutions in transportation (train, plan, auto, jet) and communications (telegraphy, telephone, tv, internet...etc).
Idea for solving two problems at once: require every prospective college student to spend a certain term (six months, whatever) performing agricultural labour in order to qualify.
If you're going to commit a certain number of resources to solving a problem, you'd better make sure you're not failing to solve a more important problem that could use those same resources.
Reminds me of the Maoist solution to the urban/rural divide: send the urban elites to work on the farms for a period, so they could unlearn their bourgeois attitudes, and learn how the rural masses live [1].
At risk of reductio ad hitlerum -- at the time Jefferson wrote the quote given in the article, the wisdom of the rural folk was that slavery was awesome and should continue forever. It was the out-of-touch urban interlopers who thought it should stop
Are you sure? They rural farmers, in the south, would have competition from the slave plantations. And the farmers in the north were generally of the northern protestant branches which saw modern slavery in a very poor light.
Just to add to your comment, I've always thought of plantation owners more like feudal lords, or the large estate nobility of the Roman era than farmers.
"The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the priviledged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html
"These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."
Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"
Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.
From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...
"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."
...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.
22LR is marginal for taking deer at close range with a rifle. Taking one with a revolver would require almost contact distance to be tenable - and if you shoot it in the lung or heart, it's going to run a long way until it dies.
I doubt the person telling you the story has much experience with taking deer, let alone with a 22.
And the idea that someone is going to poach a deer and throw it in the back of the truck on the way home from work is also laughable. The penalties for poaching are far too harsh for anyone who cares about ever hunting, fishing, or owning a gun for the rest of their lives. It's not something that happens in broad daylight for sure.
Oh man, you'd be surprised - I'm an avid predator hunter and spend ridiculous amounts of time out in hay fields at 2:00 AM with a night vision system, and you would not believe the stories I've got about poachers. One night, I had a couple of good old boys roll up and shoot a deer that couldn't have been more than about 75 yards away from me.
> Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights.
Those big lights on a pole typically located between the house and the (nearest) shed/barn? They're usually left on all night even if no-one's out, and in my experience the justification you'll hear for that is security. Maybe it's a regional thing?
Of course, their actual primary purpose is to ensure that if you have to work late in the shed you're covered in moths and mayflies by the time you make it back to the house. Wouldn't want to enter the house without a good layer of insects all over you. Not proper. They've really done their job when you get a couple in your mouth. In case you missed dinner.
My grandparents' house in a deeply rural part of New England has one of those lights.
Without it it's pitch dark out there, and since the bedroom is on the other side of the house it's easier to just leave it on all the time in case of needing to get something from the car or let one of the cats back in.
I doubt they've ever thought about any kind of intruder, given that it's an obscure dirt road where there's basically no reason to go unless you live there.
"...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live."
Only around 1/3rd of Americans own a gun or live with someone that does, so no, "most people" don't grab their gun if someone knocks after 10pm - most people don't even have a gun.
If someone knocks on my door at 11pm, it's probably someone looking for a neighbor, if someone knocks at 3am, then I'll peek out the upstairs window to see if it's a neighbor, and if not, I might call the police or shout out the window to see what he wants.
These people are shooting deer with .22LR revolvers because a .30 (both gun and ammo) is too expensive? How many a day are they shooting? It's downright irresponsible to hunt deer with a .22, any hunter will confirm - this is not a case of 'urban' v 'rural', it's a case of 'responsible hunter' v 'idiot'.
Except that where I live (rural Southern Oregon) there is some of the highest rates of welfare and foodstamp dependence in the West. Sort of tears apart the premise of this story. Note that the author is with the Hoover Institute.
Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.
Indeed, aside from avocados recently and a few times when there were bacteria scares, I can't think of any time where any American agricultural product couldn't be found in stores.
I definitely believe that the farm subsidies are poorly targeted, but those things above aren't to be snorted at.
I assure you that you could keep America famine free for far less. Indeed pretty much the entire support structure is only 80 years old at the oldest, so america managed just fine for a far longer period of time without supports and without a famine than with them.
Also there are some products (like rice) just shouldn't have 100% availability of US grown products. It isn't like the US will starve without US grown rice, and the US long supported far more rice than was profitable. Importantly the US dropped lots of subsidies on rice, and production wasn't all that impacted (3% declines).
So yeah, you might also say that US support of auto makers is good because never have you been completely unable to find a new US made car to buy, but that doesn't make it necessary and certainly doesn't make it good policy.
America has -- just not in living memory. The single greatest contributor to the absurd American prosperity of the first half of the 20th century is the mysterious extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust, leaving North America the only major landmass with agricultural potential and no native locust species.
To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.
We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water per almond. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.
We export a hundred billion gallons of water per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.
We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.
etc...
I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.
The urban-rural divide does create issues, though the author is very selective and invents a fractious view of reality concocted from stereotypes that does more to perpetuate the problem than help, and blurs cultural and political lines. Politically, rural States are inherently over-represented Federally by virtue of each State having two Senators regardless of population, and that has and will continue work to the detriment of urbanized States. Politically the complaints about government dependence by urbanites selectively ignore that more tax dollars are sent proportionally to rural States than urban states, which are in no small part a product of rural States having immense power over the Feds. relative to urbanized States. Slagging the "The Life of Julia" as a "dependency narrative" ignores that a big point of the narrative was keeping the government out of Julia's reproductive choices and other life choices, freedoms rural religious-minded folks are not keen on protecting. On top of that (and perversely amusingly), rural areas have steadily outgrown proportional rates for use of food stamps and food assistance programs than urban areas. Culturally, rural states idealize a kind of independence that's a product of a political structure that hands out capital and favors to quietly prop those rural areas up while turning a blind eye to their benefit from the government to assist themselves.
This read like a really angry rant against modern culture in general. Yes, politicians don't always make very good choices and yes people spend a lot of time on the web now. This is no reason to call the urban population "clueless."
Rural life is also unscalable. Rural citizens won't always be more knowledge in agriculture. They do not have more or less "common sense" than the urban population.
"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."
In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.
This is strange:
"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"
I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.
I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":
"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."
So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?
Victor is against farm subsidies as well. Just read some of his other writing.
As for Julia, i think his argument is that waste is waste. Sure you might have good intentions by helping Julia and it's a noble cause, but current gov't programs do a terrible job at it.
I think one of best examples of this was the push to make mandatory the National Animal Identification System. The idea was put every farm animal into a database and RFID the larger ones. I'd heard that farmers would need to log the timestamp of every feeding or watering (though I can't find any source for that in 2 minutes of Googling.)
I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal’s ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni
I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would mean logging entry and exit twice a day.
I drove through central Utah; it was on a road with no shoulder and grass growing through some cracks (but well-paved enough to drive at highway speeds). And that was it - the only visible presence of government. There were miles between houses.
Many people reading this are in cities. Step outside and look around for the presence of government: Roads, sidewalks, streetlights, stoplights, road signs, police, buses, power lines, sewer, manholes, turn the tap for city water, fire hydrants, regulated things everywhere - buildings, parking, restaurants, etc etc. And people everywhere, of all kinds, almost all of whom you don't know.
Perhaps that explains the differing perspectives of people who live in urban and rural areas. And consider that that who lives in rural and who lives in urban areas is to a great extent self-selected.
I get what you're getting at, but the difference isn't quite that stark among most of the actual population of rural areas, at least today (pre-1930s is another story). There are some really off-the-grid rural areas, and those people have quite different views, but that's less than 1% of the U.S. population. The vast majority of the population of rural areas has grid electricity, running tap water, mail delivery, a phone line, a sheriff's department, etc. The federal government's rural-electrification push still has visible results all over the place, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative is present in thousands of communities, subsidized rural mail delivery is almost ubiquitous, most people's kids go to public schools, kids get vaccinated, many farmers receive government subsidies and loan guarantees, many people have FDIC-insured bank deposits, many people live on Social Security, etc.
Climate change causes significant losses for farmers, and very likely will cause many more. Yet it's the city folk who vote to do something about it and the rural population that makes it a point of ideology to reject even looking into the possibility of it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadPerhaps its time to politely say our goodbyes.
America is no longer a nation, rather it is a multi-ethinic empire, held together by force and historical momentum.
There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.
More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad support for personal freedom.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Moveme...
Historians are very interested in the losers as well.
Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"
Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.
From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...
"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."
...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.
I doubt the person telling you the story has much experience with taking deer, let alone with a 22.
EDIT: There's a whole cottage industry around robot wildlife that are used to catch poachers, both day and night: http://www.roboticwildlife.com/enforcement_decoys/index.php
Those big lights on a pole typically located between the house and the (nearest) shed/barn? They're usually left on all night even if no-one's out, and in my experience the justification you'll hear for that is security. Maybe it's a regional thing?
Of course, their actual primary purpose is to ensure that if you have to work late in the shed you're covered in moths and mayflies by the time you make it back to the house. Wouldn't want to enter the house without a good layer of insects all over you. Not proper. They've really done their job when you get a couple in your mouth. In case you missed dinner.
Without it it's pitch dark out there, and since the bedroom is on the other side of the house it's easier to just leave it on all the time in case of needing to get something from the car or let one of the cats back in.
I doubt they've ever thought about any kind of intruder, given that it's an obscure dirt road where there's basically no reason to go unless you live there.
Only around 1/3rd of Americans own a gun or live with someone that does, so no, "most people" don't grab their gun if someone knocks after 10pm - most people don't even have a gun.
If someone knocks on my door at 11pm, it's probably someone looking for a neighbor, if someone knocks at 3am, then I'll peek out the upstairs window to see if it's a neighbor, and if not, I might call the police or shout out the window to see what he wants.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...
http://farm.ewg.org
Indeed, aside from avocados recently and a few times when there were bacteria scares, I can't think of any time where any American agricultural product couldn't be found in stores.
I definitely believe that the farm subsidies are poorly targeted, but those things above aren't to be snorted at.
Also there are some products (like rice) just shouldn't have 100% availability of US grown products. It isn't like the US will starve without US grown rice, and the US long supported far more rice than was profitable. Importantly the US dropped lots of subsidies on rice, and production wasn't all that impacted (3% declines).
So yeah, you might also say that US support of auto makers is good because never have you been completely unable to find a new US made car to buy, but that doesn't make it necessary and certainly doesn't make it good policy.
I'm not sure I agree:
* We've had massive production problems, such as in the Dust Bowl.
* Many Americans are malnourished; the US is not getting enough food to them by whatever mechanism (supermarkets, food stamps, etc.).
Also, is it true that there were no famines in the 150 years before the Great Depression, even localized ones (i.e., not nationwide)?
To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.
We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water per almond. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.
We export a hundred billion gallons of water per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.
We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.
etc...
I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.
Rural life is also unscalable. Rural citizens won't always be more knowledge in agriculture. They do not have more or less "common sense" than the urban population.
/rant
"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."
In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.
This is strange:
"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"
I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.
I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":
"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."
So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?
As for Julia, i think his argument is that waste is waste. Sure you might have good intentions by helping Julia and it's a noble cause, but current gov't programs do a terrible job at it.
I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal’s ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni
I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would mean logging entry and exit twice a day.
Many people reading this are in cities. Step outside and look around for the presence of government: Roads, sidewalks, streetlights, stoplights, road signs, police, buses, power lines, sewer, manholes, turn the tap for city water, fire hydrants, regulated things everywhere - buildings, parking, restaurants, etc etc. And people everywhere, of all kinds, almost all of whom you don't know.
Perhaps that explains the differing perspectives of people who live in urban and rural areas. And consider that that who lives in rural and who lives in urban areas is to a great extent self-selected.