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Yours portly went down a weird rabbit hole earlier this week:  I was looking into how to grow mushrooms at home.  I have some large mushrooms growing in my yard after some recent rainstorms, and it got me thinking about how feasible (and easy) it would be to grow them myself.

Suffice it to say:  not easy enough.  Apparently, nothing grows easily except for weeds—and stories about how businesses can’t survive without imported slave labor.

That’s what I stumbled upon while searching for YouTube videos about growing mushrooms.  This video from Business Insider sounds innocuous enough—a small town in Pennsylvania grows millions of mushrooms every year—but the entire video is just a mainstream media sob story about how mushroom farmers have to destroy mushrooms because they don’t have fresh slaves:

At no point in the video does the reporter say, “maybe they could pay people more money to harvest these mushrooms, then they could harvest and sell their entire crop.”  The video does mention that demand for mushrooms has increased 15%, which—according to the law of demand—should mean that mushrooms can demand a higher price.  It seems as though mushroom farmers could use sell at a higher price and, therefore, pay their pickers more.

Regardless, the price of mushrooms will increase, but isn’t it worth it to pay a few cents more rather than employing indentured servants imported illegally from abroad?  Not only is mass migration corrosive to culture and law and order; it’s also immoral on two counts:  people break the law, and then end up exploited as slave labor.

Slave labor has another downside:  it massively depresses wages for legal workers.  The rest of us pay an invisible but real tax:  in exchange for cheaper mushrooms (or any produce), we get lower wages across the board.

It’s time for a second abolitionist movement on American farms.

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