The analysis appealed to a nation with an agrarian tradition, in which labor in the earth was fundamental and which deeply distrusted wealth that seemed to flow from mere exchanges of paper; but it was also quixotic, reductionist, and full of unintended consequences. It promised to force owners to expand production to maintain ownership of their land even when there was no market for what they produced. It reduced the natural world to a set of resources, and in this it was not so different from either corporate capitalism or later Progressive conservationists.
