The Farmer and The Forty Thousand
Series | Lessons I Wish the Left Would Learn Before the Midterms
An Introduction:
Hi. I’m Nate. I’m your cousin.
I’m left-leaning and happily so. I’m very much the cousin everyone says is smart, or talented, and who got to live in Europe for a while. And who has developed some strange ideas about the US democratic experiment. I frequently wear a sardonic look, as if the current conversation about politics is exhausting in a way that is disproportionate to the number of times we’ve had it. Sometimes they are exhausting, but most of the time I'm happy if I can get you to entertain an idea that you previously thought had little to no merit.
I’m not here to tell you what you’re doing wrong. I’m not here to make you feel ashamed.
I do, however, have something I’ve seen from where I’m standing across the room that I wish you could see too.
Dave and the Farmer
Let me tell you about a very common experience.
Someone brings up a topic — wealth taxes, economic inequality, pick one — and Dave starts talking. Every family has a Dave. Dave is not a bad person. Dave is not stupid. Dave is, in this moment, talking about the "family farmer" who is going to have to sell his land, give up his inheritance, and watch his family legacy dissolve because of the wealth tax you were just discussing.
You’re talking about structure. Dave is talking about the farmer.
And here’s what’s going to happen: Dave is going to win. He wins nine times out of ten. Doesn’t matter what you bring to the table. Doesn’t matter how good your stats are, how solid your sources are, how empirically airtight your argument is. Dave wins.
And I want you to know something before we go any further.
You’re not wrong. I appreciate the sources. I appreciate the stats. I appreciate the time you spent learning this, and I appreciate the sincerity with which you present everything that is so dear to your heart. And. I agree with you.
This is not your cousin telling you you’re wrong.
This is your cousin telling you, with love, that you and Dave are arguing at completely different levels, and that’s why Dave keeps winning.
Dave’s argument is personal. It’s vivid. It’s emotional. It lands somewhere real inside people who aren’t already where you are. And that’s not a character flaw in Dave. That’s not a failure of intelligence in the people nodding along with him. That’s just how arguments work when one person is speaking from the gut and the other is speaking from a spreadsheet.
You’re not wrong. You’re just arguing at the wrong level.
And your cousin is here to help with that.
Three Levels, One Argument
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about economic debates. They’re never actually happening at one level. They’re happening at three simultaneously. And almost nobody says which level they’re operating from. So you end up with people talking past each other with great confidence and considerable frustration, each convinced the other is either lying or stupid, when the actual problem is that they’re answering different questions.
The first level is the individual. This is the level of specific people, specific stories, specific faces. The questions here are about what this person did, chose, experienced, or built. The evidence is personal and vivid. Emotionally, this is the most powerful level. It’s where Dave lives.
The second level is the system. This is the level of institutions, laws, and the rules that structure how things work. The questions here are about architecture — how is this designed, what does it reward, what does it make invisible, who does it assume as its default beneficiary? The evidence here is structural.
The third level is the pattern. This is the level of the whole economy across historical time. The questions here are about trajectories — what happens over decades, what forces shape what’s possible, what emerges from millions of individual decisions flowing through institutional structures? The evidence here is aggregate. Distributions. Trends. Historical comparisons. Piketty lives here.
Here is the crucial thing about these three levels: a claim made at one level cannot automatically answer a question at another level. You need a bridge. And that bridge, the connection between Dave’s farmer and the structural question you’re actually trying to answer, is where most economic debate either gets honest or gets slippery.
When that bridge doesn’t get built, Dave wins. Every time. Because the farmer is right there with a face and a story and three generations, and your structural argument is a graph.
The graph is correct. The farmer wins anyway.
So let’s look at what the farmer is actually doing in this argument.
The Farmer, Up Close
The family farmer argument is emotionally real. I want to be clear about that. I know an actual family that farms twenty thousand acres on the banks of the Mississippi River. Multi-generational. Solid people. They’ve sold the mineral rights to their land. They work hard. They love that ground the way people love things that took generations to build.
And they don’t have $100 million in assets.
Now here’s something important about that farm and farms like it. That land was purchased over generations. Equipment was purchased and serviced over generations. And farmers like them take out seasonal agricultural loans to buy the seed needed to plant for harvest. That land wasn’t purchased at today’s prices. Land that’s worth $3,000 or $4,000 an acre today was worth a fraction of that in 1970, or 1955, or 1938 when the first generation started accumulating it. A family that put together 20,000 acres of Mississippi Delta farmland over three generations might have paid $400 an acre on average across those decades — a total acquisition cost spread over generations of agricultural loans, inheritance, and gradual accumulation. The paper value today reflects appreciation the family didn’t engineer and can’t easily liquidate. The paper value of the land doesn't scale with the operational value and profitability of the land.
That farm — the real one, the one with the operating debt and the mineral rights already sold and the paper wealth that can’t be converted to cash without selling what took three generations to build, is genuinely not who the wealth tax is about. Not because the tax exempts them as a political favor. Because their situation is fundamentally different from the person holding $100 million in appreciated stock they’re borrowing against to fund their lifestyle.
Every serious wealth tax proposal already contains provisions for exactly this situation. Payment plans. Exemptions for operating farms. Illiquid asset accommodations. Because the people designing the policy knew the liquidity problem was real and they addressed it.
The real family farmer is already protected.
So the family farmer in the argument isn’t protecting family farmers.
He’s doing something else.
The Sleight of Hand
Here’s what’s actually happening. And once you see it you cannot unsee it.
The family farmer is an individual-level story — specific, emotional, vivid, sympathetic, being used to answer a system-level and pattern-level question: Should the tax code address the structural accumulation of wealth at the very top?
Those are different questions. Answering the second with the first requires a bridge. The bridge would need to establish something like: the class of people harmed by this policy looks substantially like the family farmer, and the harm is not addressable through exemptions and accommodations. That’s a defensible argument. But it needs to be made explicitly, with evidence about the actual distribution of wealth subject to the tax; not assumed from the emotional weight of a single sympathetic story.
The bridge never gets built. Because the goal isn’t to answer the structural question. The goal is to make sure the structural question never gets traction. And the family farmer is extraordinarily good at that job, because the moment he appears, the conversation moves from how is the tax code designed and who does that design benefit to are you really going to make this man sell his grandfather’s land.
You’re not. Nobody is. That’s already addressed in the proposal. But now you’re defending yourself against a charge that was never accurate, and the structural question has quietly left the room.
That’s the sleight of hand. Individual-level story, emotional and real, used to foreclose a structural debate. The misdirection is the point.
This is not me saying Dave is malicious. Dave received this argument in good faith because it felt true, and at the level it operates from, it is true. The liquidity problem is real. The family farmer is real. Dave is real.
But someone built this argument knowing exactly what level it operates from and exactly what level it forecloses. Dave got handed the wrong answer to the right question by people who needed him not to ask the actual question.
Your job, the cousin’s job, is to hand Dave the right question.
Who We're Actually Talking About
So let’s talk about who we’re actually talking about.
Not the farmer with twenty thousand acres on the Mississippi. Not your neighbor. Not your boss. Not anyone you went to high school with, almost certainly. Not you.
We are talking about people who hold $100 million or more in assets — specifically, in assets like stock that has appreciated enormously in value but has never been sold. Because selling triggers a tax. So instead of selling, they do something elegant and perfectly legal: they walk into a bank and borrow against the stock.
The bank gives them cash. Real cash. Spendable cash. Cash they can live on, invest with, use as a down payment on another asset, deploy as collateral for another loan. The bank accepts the stock as security because the stock is real. The bank knows it’s real. The bank is betting its own money on it being real.
But under current law, that stock — the appreciated value that the bank just accepted as collateral for a multi-million dollar loan — is not taxable. Because it hasn’t been sold. The gain is unrealized. And unrealized gains, in the architecture of the American tax code, are not income.
So we have an asset that is:
Real enough for a bank to lend against.
Real enough to use as collateral.
Real enough to generate the cash that functions as this person’s income.
Not real enough, apparently, for the IRS.
And when that person dies, the stock passes to their heirs with what’s called a stepped-up basis — meaning the accumulated gain, the increase in value across an entire lifetime, simply disappears for tax purposes. The heirs inherit the stock at its current value. The decades of appreciation that a bank happily lent against? Gone from the tax record. Never taxed. Not once.
This is not a loophole in the colloquial sense; the accidental gap nobody intended. This is the designed architecture of the system. This is what the system was built to do.
And roughly 40,000 to 45,000 people in the United States benefit from it at the level we’re discussing.
Forty thousand people. In a country of 330 million.
To give you a sense of what that number means: more Americans will die from cancer this year than belong to this group. More Americans will die in car accidents. We are talking about a class of people smaller than the annual toll of two things we already consider national tragedies, and we have organized a significant portion of our political energy around protecting their tax arrangements.
The chances that you are one of these 40,000 people are smaller than your chances of winning the lottery. I don’t mean that loosely. I mean the math works out that way.
And yet here we are. Arguing about the farmer.
What the "Farmer" Is Actually Protecting
Here’s what I need you to understand, because this is the part that matters most.
Those 40,000 people, the ones with $100 million in stock that is real enough to borrow against but structured to avoid taxation, have something else. Something worth more, in the context of a democracy, than the money itself.
They have access.
Disproportionate, structural, institutionalized access to the political system that decides whether the Social Security you have paid into your entire working life will be there when you need it. Access to the legislators who write the tax code. Access to the regulators who enforce it. Access to the think tanks that provide the intellectual framework for whatever policy outcome they prefer. Access to the media organizations that determine which questions count as serious policy debates and which get dismissed as populist resentment.
You have a vote. They have a phone number.
And while you have been arguing about the family farmer, a real person, a sympathetic person, a person whose actual situation is already addressed in every serious proposal ever written, those 40,000 people have been making sure the conversation stays exactly where they need it to be. At the individual level. With the farmer. Away from the question of whose assets are real enough for a bank but not real enough for the IRS. Away from the question of what a stepped-up basis at death actually does and who it actually benefits. Away from the question of what it means for a democracy when a group smaller than this year’s cancer mortality has more access to the decisions that shape your retirement than the other 329,955,999 of you combined.
More people in the United States will die from cancer this year than have the type and amount of wealth we are actually discussing.
And those 40,000 people have more access to the political system that decides your Social Security than you do.
We did all of this while picturing a farmer.
The Tool
So here’s what you do next time the farmer shows up. And he will show up. He is very reliable.
You don’t attack him. You don’t dismiss the liquidity concern. You don’t tell Dave that his feelings about three-generation farms are wrong. You love the farmer. You love Dave. You are the cousin at this table and you are not here to make anyone feel stupid.
You ask two questions.
First: what does this farmer actually own, and how did he come to own it?
Because the family that built 20,000 acres over three generations paid Depression-era and postwar prices for most of it, and they’re still carrying operating debt. Their paper wealth and their liquid wealth are two very different numbers. And if the concern is genuine liquidity — cash-poor but asset-rich, ask whether the proposal already addresses that. Because it does. Every serious one does. Which means the farmer in this argument is not the farmer being protected by the argument.
Second: who is actually being protected?
Forty thousand people. Smaller than the lottery odds of being one of them. Borrowing against stock that is real enough for a bank but structured to avoid taxation. Passing appreciated assets to heirs with the tax liability erased at death. And spending a portion of the returns on maintaining the political access that keeps this arrangement in place.
The farmer is the answer to the wrong question. The right question is: should assets that are real enough to borrow against be real enough to tax? Should the tax code be designed so that the primary way to avoid taxation is to be wealthy enough that you never need to sell anything?
Ask that question and you’re at the right level.
Ask it warmly. Ask it like you mean it. Ask it the way the cousin across the room asks it — not to embarrass Dave, but because you both deserve an honest answer to an honest question.
And once you’re at the right level, you can start having the right argument.
Which is, I promise you, a much more interesting conversation than the one about the farmer.
Footnotes:
This is part of a series on what I wish the left would learn before the midterms. It draws on a framework for understanding levels of analysis in economic debate — individual, systemic, and structural; and how arguments move between those levels, sometimes honestly and sometimes not. The companion piece applies that framework in full (Why We Never Seem Agree On Economics).
The series also draws on Perceptual Ethics: Toward a Theory of Moral Life That Begins Where Moral Life Actually Begins — an argument that most of what we call political disagreement is actually a perceptual problem, a question of what we’ve been formed to see and what we’ve been formed to miss. The farmer argument is a masterclass in managed perception.
All of it is written from across the room. With love.