Neither to serve nor to rule.

 The Super Wealthy Absentee Landlord, The Ignorant New Arrival, And the Myth

Prologue

This is a thread about the super, super wealthy who lives in one state and owns a ranch in another, the person who sells their house in California, or whever, and moves to Wyoming and busts a ranch into tiny lots, and the myth of Western Settlement.  Not much else.

Neither to serve nor to rule.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

Edward Abbey

Rupert Murdoch isn't a rancher. . . and that's what's wrong with American agriculture.

And maybe with the United States itself, as it currently is.

It's contrary to the American Dream. The real American Dream.  

We serve, and we are ruled.

For those who might not know, Murdoch, age 90, recently purchased a ranch in Montana from the Koch family, who shouldn't have owned it either. The price was $200,000,000.  Upon buying it, Murdoch stated:

This is a profound responsibility, we feel privileged to assume ownership of this beautiful land and look forward to continually enhancing both the commercial cattle business and the conservation assets across the ranch.

Well, excellent.  If that's the case he'll put a conservation and agricultural easement on it and sponsor an effort to turn the entire thing over, ownership and all, to people who actually want to make their living as agriculturalists and who in fact do.

He won't turn it over to anyone, however.

As it is, he's some sort of modern duke.  And indeed, that's an appropriate way to look at a man of blue blood British ancestry who was born in Australia.  He's a foreign import from a land where his parents were granted peerage but which also has a history of detesting the wealthy.  So, lucky us, he came over to be a pain in the ass to us in all sorts of ways, having already made a lot of money in his native land, to which we might hope he will return.

Now, this isn't to be taken in the wrong vein.  What this is to suggest is that there's a land problem in the United States. And that problem is both big and small.  On the big end, it's that large ranches like this one are now the domains of absentee petty kings and dukes, people with absurdly vast amounts of money who rule from afar and don't live in, and are not part of, the community that the ranch is part of.  And they're all part of a community.  

On the small end, it's people grasping out for a piece of the country and turning it into city lots with large lots.  And these too are often outsiders, who move in with the procedes of a house they sold in California that allows them to buy what they imagine to be a "ranch", but which is actually a large lot in a now busted up ranch, which they'll graze down to stubble and then probably abadon when they figure out that owning a cow, even one, is a lot of work. The damage, however, will be done by then.

The candle burns at both ends.

Indeed, the American wealthy, which Murdoch isn't, are to be lauded in some, indeed many, instances for preserving local farms and ranches in communities they are in fact from or which they become part of. They come in and buy land next to cities that would otherwise be subdivided.  And in extreme cases, they take some really remarkable stands, such as that of the Robinson family of Hawaii, which has preserved the island if Niihau with its small native population, grounding it for many years in agriculture until it just couldn't pay anymore, and whose current owners has threatened to defend its agrarian status literally to the death.

Rupert Murdoch isn't going to defend anything to the death.  

Murdoch, I'll note, isn't the only one in this category.  The largest individual owner of agricultural land in the United States is, or maybe was, Bill Gates.

It's an investment for him.

Some time ago here I ran a Quebec statute which was designed to protect agricultural land in the hands of farmers.  And that's the sort of thing that the US needs.  If Rupert is to be a rancher, so be it, but that's what he should be, and by that I mean give up his publishing loot and actually go work the land, right there.  If he's not going to do that, and he's not, he ought to take a hike. Whoever owns that land in Montana ought to be a real rancher who has bought it to make money ranching or who at least is comfortable in the community which he's impacting.

That indeed was the American dream.

Ringo kid: Look, Miss Dallas. You got no folks... neither have I. And, well, maybe I'm takin' a lot for granted, but... I watched you with that baby - that other woman's baby. You looked... well, well I still got a ranch across the border. There's a nice place - a real nice place... trees... grass... water. There's a cabin half built.

Stagecoach. *

Putting it simply, but with a task that isn't simple, we need to get back to what Abbey noted for a variety of reasons. And one is that the land candle has to quit being allowed to burn at both ends.

And while we at it, let's take a look at how we got here, somewhat.

First of all, we'd note, we got here because as a society we've confused "free markets" with capitalist economies.  The United States doesn't have a free market.  It has a capitalist economy.  Capitalism is an economic theory that allows natural partnerships to be organized as a person at law, thereby shielding its individual partners, now shareholders, from liability and accordingly also limiting their risk to their economic investment.

Now, a person can truly say that's ingenious, and it is, but it's not "free market".  Even free market hero Fredrich Hayek, who was somewhat ambivalent and somewhat troubled about corporations, didn't hold that corporations were a free market institution.  Indeed, troubled enough to write a treatise on it, stating:

My thesis will be that if we want effectively to limit the powers of corporations to where they are beneficial, we shall have to confine them much more than we have yet done to one specific goal, that of the profitable use of capital entrusted to the management by the stockholders. I shall argue that it is precisely the tendency to allow and even to impel the corporations to use their resources for specific ends other than those of a long-running maximization of the return on the capital placed under their control that tends to confer upon them undesirable and socially dangerous powers, and that the fashionable doctrine that their policies should be guided by “social considerations” is likely to produce most undesirable results

Hayek, The Corporation in a Democratic Society:  In Whose Interest Ought It and Will It Be Run?

Hayek may not have reached the conclusion I have, but he did acknowledge that "long-running maximization of the return on the capital placed under their control that tends to confer upon them undesirable and socially dangerous powers."  Not exactly a huge endorsement of corporations as they've come to exist.  

Well, we haven't heeded Hayek's advice, and now we're bearing the brunt of it, all the way from the farmer's fields to the corner bookstore. 

Gone to a small appliance store recently, have you? 

I didn't think so. Walmart was your option, wasn't it.

Road to Serfdom indeed.

But let me get back to the matter of people on the land, claims to the land, the landed, and the unlanded, and claims to ancestoral fielty.

This post was started  prior to November, on our companion blog Lex Anteinternet, and I have dragged it over here.  It was started before any of the current political advertisements were released.

The opening scene from the movie Red River.  A scene, frankly, that's considerably more honest than many might like to imagine.

It's political season, which means that we're going to get a lot of homage to ancestors in some cases, and omissions of any discussion of them in others, at least in this state.

Maybe that's the way in every state.

This post doesn't apply to one or two politicians, but rather to things, as it were in general.  And like a lot of posts here, it starts off with a meandering post.

One of the blogs only recently linked in here is the Foothills Agrarian blog.  One of the things the honest poster there notes is that he wanted to be a full-time sheep rancher, but it didn't work out, so he's part-time.  I'm like that. When I was young I dreamed of being a full-time rancher.  Well, it didn't work out.  I’m a full-time lawyer, a part-time rancher, and a part-time writer.  This is the way things are.

But that fact, and perhaps an unusually introspective nature, gives me a view of things that probably causes me to appear as a contrarian to many who know me.  There are a lot of things in the law that I think are grossly wrong and that lawyers, while they have reason to be proud of things, have a lot of things to be deeply ashamed of.  It nearly balances out, at least in terms of litigation.  We don't as we listen to our own propaganda, however.

The same is true, about propaganda, for agriculturalists as well  For some reason, we've entered into a state of being in which we flat out believe everything that the GOP says about anything, even when it's directly contrary to what we can plainly observe, let alone to our own best interests.  People in urban areas tend to do the same thing with the Democrats.

In the West, one of the things we like to believe is pioneer stories advanced by politicians.  Lots of agriculturalists like these too. And there's real reason to like them, and even give some weight to them.

I've sort of just done that.

For one thing, that a person comes from a third generation ranch family means that they are local, rather than some import who moved in and decided to get into politics.

And it might mean that they're really farmers or ranchers.

My parents had a coffee table which, set in the table are a set of tiles.  I loved to look at it as a kid. They portrayed scenes of European American advancement into the West, such as covered wagons.  If you listen to some politicians this time of year, it's like they're narrating that.

In other words, it's common to hear things like "x was born and grew up on the family ranch and is a third generation Wyomingite. . . "  That does mean something.  It'd mean as much, however, to say "x was born in the county hospital and his father was a banker, and was a second generation Wyomingite".  The thing you are really getting is that the person is a typical Wyomingite.  Truth be known, as much as I wish it were not true, being a son or daughter of a banker probably is more meaningful, in terms of representing the average, than being a son of a rancher or farmer is.

Again, I wish that weren't true, as I wish it was still an option for the son of a banker to become a rancher or farmer, and by that I mean, let's say, by age 25, not by 55 or 65 after you've made a pile of cash doing something else.

At any rate, something to keep in mind, when the son or daughter of a rancher thing is thrown in, it should be the question of whether or not that's what you do.  We draw a lot of lawyers as candidates around here, and two out of our three folks in D.C. are members of that profession. The top two contenders for the GOP ticket for the House are lawyers.  It may be fine to say that you grew up on the family ranch, and that means something, but are you there now?  That would mean more.

Indeed, the answer to that might tell us a lot about a lot.

What it might tell us is that there wasn't room on the family place.  It used to be common that the younger sons (and it was usually sons) of ranchers and farmers had to move on, after land became too expensive to buy, and they often entered the professions.  I knew one dentist, for example, who became that as his older brother was stepping into the family ranching operation.  Daughters were almost always just expected to move on as it was going to the sons.

Or what it might also tell us is that the younger "grew up on the family ranch" person was shoved into it by the Great American Delusion, which is that everything is bigger, brighter and niftier in The Big City.  "Go become a lawyer, Jed. . . you'll make lots of money".  Indeed, it's interesting to note that at one time a lawyer candidate who pitched his humble origins tended to emphasize he'd escaped them, which may be a more realistic point. . maybe.

Or might just mean that's where the person's career goals were, rather than on the soil.

Anyway you look at it, saying "I grew up on a ranch" doesn't mean a lot unless you are willing to address why you aren't on it right now.

Another interesting aspect of this is that people really don't like emphasizing family dynasties much.  Both of the GOP candidates are part of them, one more notable than the other.  Neither seems to emphasize that.  At one time, they would have. Roosevelt's ran as Roosevelt's, for example, even when they were from different parties.

Anyhow, getting back to theoretical point here, there's an fascinating aspect to all of this.  Part of it is that we can't really claim too much virtue from the work of our ancestors unless we shared in it.  My ancestors helped build modern Montreal into what it is now, for example, but while I can be proud of it, it probably doesn't give me a bunch of street cred anywhere, and for good reason.  On the other hand, my grandfather had a packing house here in town and that is even now part of who I am.  If I ran for office, and I'm not going to, I could note that legitimately, I think.

Another part of that, however, is being honest about the backs we're standing on.  We rarely are.

The usual claim in this area, when it comes up, is "I grew up on the family ranch and my family is an "x" generation rancher".  Okay, that's great.

Truly, it is.

But that means that your parents either inherited the place or had the means, probably from working agriculture back in the day, to buy a place. That involves real hard work and sacrifice, and it's admirable.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you did that.

It also means, for most multiple generation ranchers, that they benefitted from one of the various Homestead Acts, which means that the land was originally cheap as it had been forcibly expropriated from the original occupants.

Indeed, the original idea was that the Indians didn't really own anything, and to encourage settlement of the West, which was seen as a good national policy for some reason, people on the bottom end of the agricultural ladder could get a start by homesteading.

The entire policy was sort of shockingly socialist in a way, if you will.  The Government owned the land, and in exchange for working it, they'd give it to you. That wasn't socialist in the Karl Marx sort of way, but it wasn't exactly free market capitalist either.

Modern ranchers and farmers ought to remember that.  The "we built this country with our own two hands and sweat" sort of view is sort of right, but only if you throw in that the added part that the Federal Government expropriated it by law from the rightful owners and backed that up with an Army composed of poor German and Irish immigrants who were backed with American industrial might.  Nobody really wants to say, however, "we came to occupy this land after some poor Irish sots got killed taking it from a bunch of people we corralled into large-scale internment camps.". Truly, now, it wasn't thought of that way, which doesn't mean it wasn't actually that way.

Now, none of that diminishes the hard work of your ancestors, and it wasn't intended to invoke a Vine Deloria, Jr. sort of attitude, but we really didn't build everything out of nothing, and there were some folks here before.

And, as noted, the folks who stepped on to the scene weren't Siegfried, Tristan and Siglinda, but regular folks who were benefitting from a government program that had its own aims, with that aim being settling the unsettled region in a way that the Prairie Farmer celebrated when the Homestead Act hadn't quite made a century

Prarie Farmer centennial edition. This is copyrighted and is posted here under a Fair Use commentary exception.

I don't know that I'd celebrate that now, i.e., the massive cities rising up behind the plains, but that perhaps sort of was the homestead act had in mind.  The result, I suppose, also noted in the final scense of How The West Was Won, which always, frankly, makes me a bit sad.

Which might be why I tend to root for the side losing out in the movie Shane.

Be that as it may, Abby was right.

And Chesterton too:

Footnotes:

*It's worth noting that a really interesting treatment of Stagecoach by Catholic Culture's movie podcast, Criteria.  A guest whose an expert on the film was interviewed and noted how deeply natural the scence quoted above was.  As it does justice to it, and I cannot, looking that up would be worthwhile.