A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5a. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact. The Professions.

 

We'll look at that a bit later.  Let's turn towards the agrarian element next.

So we said last time and now, well now we're not doing that.

The reason is that I didn't really dwell on this topic, and it matters.

In the era in which I was a kid, up through my kid's early years, if I needed to go to a physician or dentist, they were local, usually with individual practices.

With physicians, that's now radically changed.  My physician is the same one I had twenty years ago, but his practice is part of a larger practice that covers two cities.  They had to do that in order to continue to really keep operating, and there were other consolidations prior to that.

The local hospital was owned by the county. There's been complaints about it since I was a boy, but not like there are now. The County Commissioners sold it to a national company.* 

Thirty years ago, when I was first practicing law, all of the law firms were Wyoming firms, something that was reinforced by the fact that we had a state specific bar exam.  The Supreme Court sold us down the river on that, with there being a persistent rumor that this was to aid a struggling UW law school.  The admission was made "transportable" in that a person passing the Un-informed Bar Exam in another state could simply pay their toll and practice here.  That transported much of the work to Colorado.  Over time, that, and technology, have destroyed small town practice to the extent that many small towns and cities in the state no longer have lawyers in many significant areas of practice.  One major I80 city in Wyoming will soon lack any lawyers doing civil litigation or serious general civil work.  When I started, and I'll note at that time that city was in extreme economic distress, it had two major law firms doing that work within it.

So this is an aspect of Distributism that would change things as well, and which could very easily be implemented simply be restoring a state specific bar exam.  Better yet, residency requirements of some sort should be implemented. Beyond that, the corporate packing up of the professions, like the corporate packing up of retail, could and should be eliminated.

That would restore local professions.

And that restoration would be that professionals in this area would quite frankly make less, but have more stable practices, which would benefit their clients/patients for the good of all.

Last prior:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact

Footnotes.

*The dissatisfaction is epic, and the County ought to file suit to get it back.  It won't, but it should.

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact

So, having published this screed over a period of days, and then dropping the topic, we resume with the question.

Why, exactly, do you think this would do a darn thing?

Well, here's why.

A daily example.

When I started this entry on Monday, March 4, I got up, fixed coffee and took the medication I'm now required to as I'm 60 years old, and the decades have caught up with me. The pills are from a locally owned pharmacy, I'd note, not from a national chain, so I did a distributist thing there.  It's only one block away, and I like them. Distributism.

I toasted a bagel, as in my old age the genetic "No" for adults consuming milk has caught up with me.  I got that at Albertson's and I don't know where the bagels are made.  Albertson's is a national chain that's in the process of trying to merge with another national chain. Corporate Capitalism.

The coffee was Boyers, a Colorado outfit. Quasi distributist there.

I put cream cheese on the bagel.  It was the Philadelphia brand. Definitely corporate capitalist there.

I'd already shaved (corporate capitalist, but subsidiarity makes that make sense).

I got dressed and headed to work.  My car was one I bought used, but its make is one that used to be sold by a locally owned car dealer.  No more. The manufacturers really prefer regional dealers, and that's what we have.  All the cars we have come from the dealer when it was locally owned.

I don't have that option anymore.  Corporate Capitalism.

In hitting the highway, I looked up the highway towards property owned by a major real estate developer/landlord.  A type of corporate capitalism.

I drove past some churches and the community college on the way in. Subsidiarity.

I drove past one of the surviving fraternal clubs.  Solidarity.

I drove past the major downtown churches.  Solidarity.

I drove past a collection of small stores, and locally owned restaurants adn bars, and went in the buildings.  Distributism.

I worked the day, occasionally dealing with the invading Colorado or other out of state firms.  Corporate Capitalism.

I reversed my route, and came home.

So, in this fairly average day, in a Western midsized city, I actually encountered a fair number of things that would be absolutely the same in a Distributist society.  But I encountered some that definitely ran very much counter to it.

Broadening this out.

A significant thing was just in how I ate.  And I eat a lot more agrarian than most people do.

The meat in our freezer was either taken by me in the field, or a cow of our own that was culled.  Most people cannot say that. But all the other food was store bought, and it was all bought from a gigantic national chain.  In 1924 Casper had 72 grocers, and it was less than a quarter of its present size.  In 1925, just one year later, it had 99 grocery stores.  The number fell back down to 70 in 1928.

August 1923 list of grocers in Casper that sold Butternut Coffee, which was probably every grocer.

When I was a kid, the greater Casper area had Safeway, Albertson's, Buttreys and an IGA by my recollection, in the national chains.  Locally, however, it had six local grocery stores, including one in the neighboring town of Mills.  One located right downtown, Brattis' was quite large, as was another one located in North Casper.

Now the entire area has one local grocery store and it's a specialty store.

Examples like this abound.  We have a statewide sporting goods store and a local one, but we also have a national one.  The locals are holding their own.  When I was young there was a locally owned store that had actually been bought out from a regional chain, and a national hardware store that sold sporting goods.  So this hasn't changed a lot.

And if we go to sporting goods stores that sell athletic equipment, it hasn't either. We have one locally owned one and used to have two. We have one national chain, and used to have none.

In gas stations, we have a locally owned set of gas stations and the regional chains.  At one time, we only had local stores, which were franchises. The local storefronts might be storefronts, in the case of the national chains, as well.

When I was a kid, the only restaurants that were national were the fast food franchises, which had competition from local outfits that had the same sort of fare and setting.  The locals burger joints are largely gone, save for one I've never been to and which is a "sit down" restaurant, and we have national and regional restaurant chains.  We retain local ones as well.  

We don't have any chain bars, which I understand are a thing, and local brewing, killed off by Prohibition, has come roaring back.

We used to have a local meat processing plant that was in fact a regional one, taking in cattle from the area, and packing it and distributing it back out, including locally.  There are no commercial packing plants in Wyoming now.  The closest one, I think, is in Greeley Colorado, and the packing industry is highly concentrated now.

We don't have a local creamery, either.  We had one of those at least into the 1940s, and probably well beyond that.  The milk for that establishment was supplied by a dairy that was on the south side of town.  It's no longer that and hasn't been for my entire life.

We've been invaded by the super huge law firms that are not local.

Our hospital is part of a private chain now, and there's massive discontent. That discontent took one of the county commissioners that was involved in the transfer of that entity out of county hands down in the last election.  But that hasn't arrested the trend.  My doctor, who I really like is part of a regional practice, not his own local one, anymore.  This trend is really strong.

And then there's Walmart, the destroyer of locally owned stores of every variety.

So would distribution make anything different?

The question is asked by a variant of Wendell Berry's "what are people for", but in the form of "what is an economy for?".

It's to serve people, and to serve them in their daily lives, as people.

It's not to make things as cheap as possible.

On all of the retail things I've mentioned, every single one could be served by local retail stores.  If we didn't have Albertson's, Riddleys and Smith's, we'd have a lot of John Albertson & Son's, Bill Riddley & Family, and Emiliano Smith's stores, owned by their families.  If Walmart didn't exist, and moreover couldn't exist, it would be replaced locally, probably by a half dozen family owned retailers. . . or more.

Prices would in fact be higher, although there would be competition, but the higher prices would serve families who operated them, and by extension the entire community.  And this is just one example.  

Much of the old infrastructure in fact remains.  As discussed above, numerous small businesses remain, and according to economic statistics, small business remains the number one employer in the US.  But the fact is that giant chain corporations have made a devastating impact on the country, making all local business imperiled and some practically impossible to conduct.

Reversing that would totally reorient the local economy.  Almost everyone would work for themselves, or for a locally owned business, owned by somebody they knew personally, and who knew them personally.

And with that reorientation, would come a reorientation of society.

We'll look at that a bit later.  Let's turn towards the agrarian element next.

Last Prior:

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Thomas Sowell

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Will and Ariel Durant

A democratic society, let alone a just, functioning society, can't survive or function without its citizens being solidly educated.  And that means learning things you (or your parents), don't want you to, and some will fall behind, and drop out.

In envisioning how a more just society, in every fashion, and one that comports with reality, might be constructed, we have to concede that it can't be if people operate in a state of ignorance.

Unfortunately, we live in a manifestly ignorant age.  This year's national political contest is ample evidence of that.  On one side we have a body that's contemptuous of human nature and thinks it can be existentially and individually remade.  On the other, we have a group that effectively assumes that everything that came after 1958 is existentially wrong, including every real advance in science or knowledge.

We let one generation somehow proceed into barbarity, and it's running the show right now.  As part of that, one of its pet projects is to create a system where younger generations can be prevented from being educated in anything that suggest that it's really not 1958.

Getting back on track won't be easy, but it needs to be accomplished immediately.

Now first of all, we have to admit that this is not universal by any means. Contrary to what people like to assert, and often the poorly educated, there's no one educational system in the US and therefore there are school districts that are excellent. Wyoming has long been blessed by those, but even in Wyoming, modern inroads of limited education are advancing.

All of this may seem bold when we consider that high school graduation rates and university education is much more common than it used to be.  The national high school graduation rate is 87%, which is massively high. The Wyoming rate is 82%.  Consider this chart, for a moment (which will be hotlinked to its source).

Table 110.

High school graduates, by sex and control of school: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2019-20

School year	High school graduates								Averaged freshman graduation rate for public schools3	Population 17 years old4	Graduates as a ratio of 17-year-old population
	Total1	Sex		Control
		Males	Females	Public2			Private
				Total	Males	Females	Total
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8		9	10	11
1869-70	16,000	7,064	8,936	—	—	—	—		—	815,000	2.0
1879-80	23,634	10,605	13,029	—	—	—	—		—	946,026	2.5
1889-90	43,731	18,549	25,182	21,882	—	—	21,849	5	—	1,259,177	3.5
1899-1900	94,883	38,075	56,808	61,737	—	—	33,146	5	—	1,489,146	6.4
1909-10	156,429	63,676	92,753	111,363	—	—	45,066	5	—	1,786,240	8.8
1919-20	311,266	123,684	187,582	230,902	—	—	80,364	5	—	1,855,173	16.8
1929-30	666,904	300,376	366,528	591,719	—	—	75,185	5	—	2,295,822	29.0
1939-40	1,221,475	578,718	642,757	1,143,246	538,273	604,973	78,229	5	—	2,403,074	50.8
1949-50	1,199,700	570,700	629,000	1,063,444	505,394	558,050	136,256	5	—	2,034,450	59.0
1959-60	1,858,023	895,000	963,000	1,627,050	791,426	835,624	230,973		—	2,672,000	69.5
1969-70	2,888,639	1,430,000	1,459,000	2,588,639	1,285,895	1,302,744	300,000	5	78.7	3,757,000	76.9
1970-71	2,937,642	1,454,000	1,484,000	2,637,642	1,309,319	1,328,323	300,000	5	78.0	3,872,000	75.9
1971-72	3,001,553	1,487,000	1,515,000	2,699,553	1,342,275	1,357,278	302,000	5	77.4	3,973,000	75.5
1972-73	3,034,822	1,500,000	1,535,000	2,728,822	1,352,416	1,376,406	306,000	5	76.8	4,049,000	75.0
1973-74	3,073,314	1,512,000	1,561,000	2,763,314	1,362,565	1,400,749	310,000	5	75.4	4,132,000	74.4
1974-75	3,132,502	1,542,000	1,591,000	2,822,502	1,391,519	1,430,983	310,000	5	74.9	4,256,000	73.6
1975-76	3,142,120	1,552,000	1,590,000	2,837,129	1,401,064	1,436,065	304,991		74.9	4,272,000	73.6
1976-77	3,139,536	1,551,000	1,589,000	2,837,340	—	—	302,196		74.4	4,272,000	73.5
1977-78	3,128,824	1,546,000	1,583,000	2,824,636	—	—	304,188		73.2	4,286,000	73.0
1978-79	3,101,152	1,532,000	1,569,000	2,801,152	—	—	300,000	5	71.9	4,327,000	71.7
1979-80	3,042,214	1,503,000	1,539,000	2,747,678	—	—	294,536		71.5	4,262,000	71.4
1980-81	3,020,285	1,492,000	1,528,000	2,725,285	—	—	295,000	5	72.2	4,212,000	71.7
1981-82	2,994,758	1,479,000	1,515,000	2,704,758	—	—	290,000	5	72.9	4,134,000	72.4
1982-83	2,887,604	1,426,000	1,461,000	2,597,604	—	—	290,000	5	73.8	3,962,000	72.9
1983-84	2,766,797	—	—	2,494,797	—	—	272,000	5	74.5	3,784,000	73.1
1984-85	2,676,917	—	—	2,413,917	—	—	263,000	5	74.2	3,699,000	72.4
1985-86	2,642,616	—	—	2,382,616	—	—	260,000	5	74.3	3,670,000	72.0
1986-87	2,693,803	—	—	2,428,803	—	—	265,000	5	74.3	3,754,000	71.8
1987-88	2,773,020	—	—	2,500,020	—	—	273,000	5	74.2	3,849,000	72.0
1988-89	2,743,743	—	—	2,458,800	—	—	284,943		73.4	3,842,000	71.4
1989-90	2,574,162	—	—	2,320,337	—	—	253,825	6	73.6	3,505,000	73.4
1990-91	2,492,988	—	—	2,234,893	—	—	258,095		73.7	3,417,913	72.9
1991-92	2,480,399	—	—	2,226,016	—	—	254,383	6	74.2	3,398,884	73.0
1992-93	2,480,519	—	—	2,233,241	—	—	247,278		73.8	3,449,143	71.9
1993-94	2,463,849	—	—	2,220,849	—	—	243,000	5	73.1	3,442,521	71.6
1994-95	2,519,084	—	—	2,273,541	—	—	245,543		71.8	3,635,803	69.3
1995-96	2,518,109	—	—	2,273,109	—	—	245,000	5	71.0	3,640,132	69.2
1996-97	2,611,988	—	—	2,358,403	—	—	253,585		71.3	3,792,207	68.9
1997-98	2,704,050	—	—	2,439,050	1,187,647	1,251,403	265,000	5	71.3	4,008,416	67.5
1998-99	2,758,655	—	—	2,485,630	1,212,924	1,272,706	273,025		71.1	3,917,885	70.4
1999-2000	2,832,844	—	—	2,553,844	1,241,631	1,312,213	279,000	5	71.7	4,056,639	69.8
2000-01	2,847,973	—	—	2,569,200	1,251,931	1,317,269	278,773		71.7	4,023,686	70.8
2001-02	2,906,534	—	—	2,621,534	1,275,813	1,345,721	285,000	5	72.6	4,023,968	72.2
2002-03	3,015,735	—	—	2,719,947	1,330,973	1,388,974	295,788		73.9	4,125,087	73.1
2003-047	3,054,438	—	—	2,753,438	1,347,800	1,405,638	301,000	5	74.3	4,113,074	74.3
2004-05	3,106,499	—	—	2,799,250	1,369,749	1,429,501	307,249		74.7	4,120,073	75.4
2005-06	3,122,544	—	—	2,815,544	1,376,458	1,439,086	307,000	5	73.4	4,200,554	74.3
2006-07	3,198,956	—	—	2,892,351	1,413,738	1,478,613	306,605		73.9	4,297,239	74.4
2007-08	3,313,818	—	—	2,999,508	1,466,303	1,533,205	314,310	5	74.7	4,436,955	74.7
2008-098	3,318,770	—	—	3,004,570	—	—	314,200		74.7	4,336,950	76.5
2009-108	3,306,220	—	—	2,991,310	—	—	314,910		75.6	4,311,831	76.7
2010-118	3,251,720	—	—	2,937,170	—	—	314,550		—	—	—
2011-128	3,221,990	—	—	2,905,990	—	—	316,000		—	—	—
2012-138	3,200,130	—	—	2,890,740	—	—	309,390		—	—	—
2013-148	3,176,300	—	—	2,868,100	—	—	308,200		—	—	—
2014-158	3,170,560	—	—	2,872,470	—	—	298,090		—	—	—
2015-168	3,201,060	—	—	2,906,330	—	—	294,730		—	—	—
2016-178	3,223,000	—	—	2,933,220	—	—	289,780		—	—	—
2017-188	3,273,690	—	—	2,988,630	—	—	285,060		—	—	—
2018-198	3,265,020	—	—	2,984,530	—	—	280,490		—	—	—
2019-208	3,245,900	—	—	2,953,060	—	—	292,840		—	—	—

—Not available.

That's great, right?

Well, maybe.

But maybe not.

People have to know how to read statistics and what's behind them.  A really well-educated friend of mine who is in obviously very poor physical shape is an example of this.  HE takes his age, and likes to cite the "at my age, X% of men make it to age 90".

Well, that's because you kill off a certain percentage of men every year, meaning that your odds of making it to 90 are poorer every year.  At age 90 100% of men make it to age 90, if they've lived that long.  It's a diminishing number every year.

With education, the fact that 87% of people graduate from high school means, quite frankly, that extraordinary steps have been taken to make that occur. Some of the steps are good, some of them are bad, some of them are mixed. The rate itself, 87%, is pretty good proof that we run people through high school who really don't have the capacity to graduate a rigorous educational system.

As noted above, Wyoming's schools are very good.  I was stunned, for example, when my daughter was in high school, and she came home and prepared for a test of Weimar Germany that was unbelievably advanced.  This speaks well of our system.  Also speaking well of it is that it offers advanced certificates for high school degrees, something it did not do when I graduated there in 1981.

And frankly, our community college system is excellent as well.  We have only one university (which is another topic) but its good as well.

Still, I think it can be maintained that compared to the mid 20th Century, certain things have dropped off as mandatory subjects.  I have around here somewhere a German novel that was my father's, from high school, and a Latin primer that was one of my uncle's (from a much different school system).  There was a time when learning languages was mandatory in high school , and learning a language broadens out the welatanshung considerably, n'est pas?

One thing that had very much occured is the rise of homeschooling.  People have done this for a long time, but it was almost freakishly uncommon in most areas and often due to remoteness.  Starting in the 90s, however, it really grew for a variety of reasons.

One is that in some areas people lived in bad school districts where there was little opportunity for a good primary education.  But another one is that, particularly amongst Protestant Evangelicals, and then spreading to Catholic Trads, who ironically sometimes hold very Protestant Evangelical societal views, that the education system was educating the young in vice and perversity.  Most recently this has seen its expression by inroads onto school boards by populists who use names like "Mom's For Liberty" for their organizations.

What often characterizes these organizations is a desire to prevent education in something.  It started off as early in the 1960s with an effort to prevent education on matters sexual.  Interestingly, when I was in high school, in spite of living in the least religious state in the US, and one that has always had a rough and transient population, community standards remained so high that what there was in the way of sex ed was pretty minimal.  I can recall that when I was in grade school we were supposed to watch films in 5th and 6th Grade, just as we were hitting our early teens. We watched one of them, but it conveyed so little information that it was truly harmless in the extreme, much less harmful than the information that was later distributed on the playground about what the next installment, which we never saw, was supposed to contain (which was, I'd note, biologically inaccurate).  The next time this came up was in junior high, and then again in high school biology class, in which we were required to tell our parents they could opt us out.  Nobody did.  I think we received a day of education, or not more than two, on the topic, which was biological and accurate.

Of course, I grew up in the 70s for the most part, and most of the kids in school with me were locals.  That might have made a big difference, as even the poor kids were from pretty stable families.  Divorce was incredibly rare.  A significant minority were from ranching families who were well aware of how biological processes worked (that Agrarian thing again) and therefore the knowledge wasn't shocking.  As for the impact, I can recall five girls that I knew to some extent getting pregnant in high school, and one of them was married.  One of the other ones was from a family where that ran through it like wildfire.  The graduating class was 500 or so students, so that's not a huge number.

It's not just sex ed that caused the boom in alternative learning, however.  By the 1970s evolution was an established scientific fact, even if still termed a theory, and it was taught in our schools outright.  The resistance to it being taught, at that time, didn't seem to exist, but it rebounded strongly later on in much of the country.  Overall, moreover, a decline in science teaching set in the U.S. during the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan, whose administration didn't support it.

Indeed, the Reagan administration was big on local control of things, and that has an impact here. As a Distributist, it might seem that this is one of the areas where we'd be big backers of that sort of thing, but in reality, the principal of subsidiarity advocates doing a thing at its most local effective, efficient, and just level.  As knowledge is literally global, it calls for large scale.  Physics and science are the same in Brooklyn as they are in Botswana.

A person might also note that our sometimes romantic attachment to Agrarianism recalls a day when less than 50% of males graduated from high school. That's quite true, but they also lived in an age in which many of them had been already well armed by their educations for the lives they would lead, so it was not accurate to suggest they were uneducated.  One of my grandfathers left school (a Christian Brothers school) at age 13, and yet ran a business successfully and could do calculus.  A major office building in this city is named after a man who was sent here in his early teens to open a branch of his father's pipeyard business and who went on to become a multimillionaire.

Additionally, if we go way back, we'll find that yeomanry, while they could be completely uneducated, could also be relatively well educated as well. Some were educated in basic matters through local churches, but often they were educated through community funded or subscribed schools.  John Adams, who started off life as a yeoman, was educated in that fashion, and his wife ran such a school (integrated, we might note) later on.

While on it, we might as well additionally note that the American South, at least since sometime prior to the Civil War, has been a real backwater of education, something that used to horrify northerners.  Little noticed, however, is that there's been a mini Great Migration of white Southerners out of their native region and into the rest of the country, where they've brought their views, including about education, with them.

And part of this is the byproduct of the 1960s.  Up until the 60s, while education was massively uneven in a country that has no central education system, there was a general consensus on what a person needed to learn in order to graduate from high school.  That can't really be claimed from region to region anymore.

So here, applying the principal of subsidiarity, the national government really needs to take a hand and set some basic standards, including learning the truth on scientific and historic matters.  And it needs to be rigorous.  If that depresses the graduation rate, so be it.

And there's really not a moment to lose.

Last prior:

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.