Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.
Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.:
Some Labor Day Reflections.
Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.
Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off. I worked a full day.
I was the only one in the office.
Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1. Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.
Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s. Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;
Deep Breath
A Labor Day homily.
Sadly, I'm working on Labor Day.
Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work. There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did. Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble. Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.
When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism. Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic. But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part. The advance of technology brought us the other part. Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all. The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking. As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric. Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.
Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult. Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible. Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.
One of those is the law, of course. Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.
Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.
Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades. That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve. Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for. I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.
Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer". I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become. It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.
Oh well.
And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are. And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things. Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.
QC: Japan & the bomb (p12) | Wednesday, October 18, 2023
This the final part of a twelve part series by Fr. Joseph Krupp on the war against Japan during World War Two, culminating in the decision to drop the two atomic bombs in August, 1945.
So why am I linking this in here?
Indeed, this entire series is teed up to appear on Lex Anteinternet in August, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two and the dropping of the two bombs. This 12th installment, however, deals with post war Japan for the most part.
A lot of people know that Douglas MacArthur wrote the Japanese constitution, or caused it be written. Fewer know that he reworked the Japanese economy, although I did. Japan is one of the few modern nations which is regarded as having incorporated a significant degree of agrarianism and distributism into its modern economy, although that's long enough ago that a lot of it is likely lost now.
The discussion on that is well worth listening too here, and goes beyond the situation of Japan itself, and into a agro distributist economy to some degree in general.
Lex Anteinternet: Subsidiarity Economics 2024. The times more or les...
Lex Anteinternet: Subsidiarity Economics 2024. The times more or les...:
From CattleTags.com
Subsidiarity Economics 2024. Electronic eartags Edition.
From CattleTags.com
In other news which will impact a Wyoming industry that isn't going a way, new electronic ear tags are coming to the cattle industry:
Press Release
Contact:
APHISpress@usda.gov
Requires electronic ID for Certain Cattle and Bison Moving Interstate
WASHINGTON, April 26, 2024 – Today, by amending and strengthening its animal disease traceability regulations for certain cattle and bison, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is putting in place the technology, tools, and processes to help quickly pinpoint and respond to costly foreign animal diseases.
“Rapid traceability in a disease outbreak will not only limit how long farms are quarantined, keep more animals from getting sick, and help ranchers and farmers get back to selling their products more quickly – but will help keep our markets open,” said Dr. Michael Watson, APHIS Administrator.
One of the most significant benefits of the rule for farmers and ranchers will be the enhanced ability of the United States to limit impacts of animal disease outbreaks to certain regions, which is the key to maintaining our foreign markets. By being able to readily prove disease-free status in non-affected regions of the United States, we will be able to request foreign trading partners recognize disease-free regions or zones instead of cutting off trade for the entire country. Traceability of animals is necessary to establish these disease-free zones and facilitate reestablishment of foreign and domestic market access with minimum delay in the wake of an animal disease event.
This rule is the culmination of goals established by USDA to increase traceability, one of the best protections against disease outbreaks, and enhances a rule finalized in 2013 for the official identification of livestock and documentation for certain interstate movements of livestock.
USDA is committed to implementing a modern animal disease traceability system that tracks animals from birth to slaughter using affordable technology that allows for quick tracing of sick and exposed animals to stop disease spread. USDA will continue to provide tags to producers free of charge to jumpstart efforts to enable the fastest possible response to a foreign animal disease. For information on how to obtain these free tags, please see APHIS’ Animal Disease Traceability webpage.
The final rule applies to all sexually intact cattle and bison 18 months of age or older, all dairy cattle, cattle and bison of any age used for rodeo or recreation events, and cattle or bison of any age used for shows or exhibitions.
The rule requires official eartags to be visually and electronically readable for official use for interstate movement of certain cattle and bison, and revises and clarifies certain record requirements related to cattle.
A copy of this rule may be viewed today, and the rule will be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks. This rule will be effective 180 days after publication in the Federal Register.
To learn more about animal disease traceability and how APHIS responds to animal disease outbreaks, visit www.aphis.usda.gov.
#
USDA touches the lives of all Americans each day in so many positive ways. In the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA is transforming America’s food system with a greater focus on more resilient local and regional food production, ensuring access to healthy and nutritious food in all communities, building new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices, making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America, and committing to equity across the Department by removing systemic barriers and building a workforce more representative of America. To learn more, visit www.usda.gov.
Frequently Asked Questions: Animal Disease Traceability Rule
USDA touches the lives of all Americans each day in so many positive ways. In the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA is transforming America’s food system with a greater focus on more resilient local and regional food production, fairer markets for all producers, ensuring access to safe, healthy and nutritious food in all communities, building new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices, making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America, and committing to equity across the Department by removing systemic barriers and building a workforce more representative of America. To learn more, visit www.usda.gov.
Lex Anteinternet: Going to the hardware store. A note on taxes.
Lex Anteinternet: Going to the hardware store. A note on taxes.:
Going to the hardware store. A note on taxes.
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.
Richard D. Wolff.1
I saw them there when I went into the hardware store, but they were talking to somebody and I didn't have to engage them. I was not so lucky on the way out. I glanced over as there oddly enough were cookies at the table and I thought for a moment it might be an effort to raise money for something like the Girl Scouts, but there were no girls there. Only two women, whom I'd guess were in their 70s.
Them: Excuse me sir, are you a registered voter?
I'll be frank, I really hate the initiative and referendum process. I figure most people sign the petitions to get something on the ballot, as they are polite and don't really want to offend the signature takers. Eons ago, I was like that myself.
I've long since being that way. Most of the time I refuse to sign the petitions, but I don't engage the petitioners in debate.
And I didn't this time. I wish I had.
The rest of the brief conversation:
Me: Yes (said in an irritated tone).
Them: Would you like to sign our petition? If passed, it would drop property taxes 50%.
Me: No (said in an even more irritated tone).
By the time I got home, I was irritated with myself. I wish I had engaged them in conversation. If I had, what I would have said is this?
Oh? Property taxes in Wyoming, which has no income tax, pay for police, fire departments, basic city sevices and education. Why do you hate policemen, firemen and teachers?
That's brutal, but that's the truth. If we don't tax property for these things, we have to tax something else, or go without.
This city has had two reported teenage murders in the last month, and a lot of killings here just go unreported. We have a developing violent gang problem. I'm not even going to bother with the drug problem that comes with living in a city that's on an Interstate Highway. We have a homeless problem due to other municipalities busing their homeless to our city. All of these ties right into what I just noted.
Badly educated people are a major social problem that ends up being a burden on emergency services.
The "I don't want to be taxed" movement really came about, no matter how it is thinly intellectually justified, as property taxes have risen significantly in the state in recent years. The reasons are several fold, one simply being that county assessors falsely suppressed raising them, as property values raised, as they're elected officers and they were chicken about it. The State, which has the duty to distribute the taxes, finally got after them to do t heir jobs, and they've been having to do them. That's raised taxes.
Another is that a certain attitude in the state has encouraged people to move in, although a large number move right back out. Those who move in are largely older, having made their lives elsewhere, and having educated their children elsewhere. They sold their houses high in those places, where they should have stayed, and don't want to pay for anything here. Additionally, a lot of these people have real populist views, and would be just fine with not educating anyone in their declining years as they'll be dead as a door nail when current children become ignorant voters themselves.
For that matter, some of the recent imports have washed up from regions where education in particular is lacking. This is particularly the case for people who have come up from the South. Steeped in a sort of ignorance themselves, they aren't thinking things through, and regard education as some sort of left wing conspiracy. This has unfortunately seeped into American conservatism itself, and is now sort of a rallying cry.
Property taxes are rising just because of people like this. They sell out their homes for a pile, and then come here and buy new ones at inflated prices.
I'd really like to know what these people would propose to cut, if we didn't have the property taxes. They likely have no idea. The same people who would cut property taxes would go to a city council meeting and complain about a pothole, which is filled, basically, with money from property taxes.
Property taxes are, moreover, more fair than people suppose. If you have property, you have means. It's telling that these complaints come from old people, not young couples. Renters aren't paying property taxes. And if the property taxes are too high, it may mean you exceeded your means, or you have multiple properties. In the latter case, sell one, that will reduce property values and help distribute the scarce resource.
Footnotes.
1. A relative of mine uses this quote frequently, which is where I heard the first part of it.
I looked Wolff up, and he is an academic Marxist, which I'm not in any sense. Marxism is proven murderous crap. But the quote is not without merit. Every democratic society has governments which do a lot of stuff, and by and large the public really likes the stuff it does if it benefits from it, and doesn't if somebody else does. Some of the most subsidized industries in the US completely fail to realize that and their members loudly complain about the government. Trucking is, for example, a prime example.
Labels: 2020s, 2024, 2024 Election, Distributism, Economics, Education, Politics, Subsidiarity, Taxes, Wyoming
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics
James Monroe.
And, yes, we're still not on to the Agrarian finale in this series. That's because we have one more important topic to consider first.
Politics.
If you read distributists' social media, and you probably don't, you'll see that some people have the namby pamby idea that if we all just act locally everything will fall in line. While people should act locally, that's a bunch of crap.
What these people don't realize is that politically, we're a corporate capitalist society, and we are where we are right now, in large part due to that. Corporations are a creature of the state, not of nature, and exists as a legal fiction because the state says they do. This is deemed, in our imaginations, to be necessarily because, . . . well it is.
Or rather, it's deemed to be necessary as we believe we need every more consolidation and economies of scale.
We really don't, and in the end, it serves just itself. We do need some large entities, particularly in manufacturing, which would actually bring us back to the original allowance for corporate structure, which was quite limited. Early in US history, most corporations were banned from being created.
Legally, they would not need to be banned now, but simply not allowed to form except for actual needs. And when very large, the Theodore Roosevelt proposal that they be treated like public utilities, or alternatively some percentage of their stock or membership would vest in their employees, would result in remedying much of the ills that they've created.
Likewise, eliminating the absurd idea that they can use their money for influence in politics could and should be addressed.
Which would require changes in the law.
And that takes us back to politics.
Nearly every living American, and Canadian for that matter, would agree that a major portion of the problems their nations face today are ones manufactured by politics. The current economic order, as noted, is politically vested.
The United States has slid into a political decline of epic proportions, and its noteworthy that this came about after Ronald Reagan attacked and destroyed the post 1932 economic order which provided for an amplified type of American System in which there was, in fact, a great deal of involvement in the economy and the affairs of corporations, as well as a hefty income tax on the wealth following the country's entry into World War Two. It's never been the case, of course, that there was a trouble free political era although interestingly, there was a political era which is recalled as The Era of Good Feelings due to its lack of political strife.
That era lasted a mere decade, from 1815 to 1825, but it's instructive.
The Era of Good Feelings came about after the War of 1812, which was a war that not only caused internal strife, but which risked the dissolution of the nation. Following the war the Federalist Party collapsed thereby ending the bitter disputes that had characterized its fights with the more dominant Democratic-Republican Party.. . . . huh. . .
Anyhow, President James Monroe downplayed partisan affiliation in his nominations, with the ultimate goal of affecting national unity and eliminating political parties altogether.
Borrowing a line from the Those Were the Days theme song of All In the Family, "Mister we could use a man like James Monroe again".
Political parties have had a long and honorable history in politics. They've also had a long and destructive one. Much of their role depends upon the era. In our era, for a variety of reasons, they are now at the hyper destructive level.
They are, we would note, uniquely subject to the influence of money, and the fringe, which itself is savvy to the influence of money. And money, now matter where it originates from, tends to concentrate uphill if allowed to, and it ultimately tends to disregard the local.
"All politics is local" is the phrase that's famously attached to U.S. politics, but as early as 1968, according to Andrew Gelman, that's declined, and I agree with his observation. Nowhere is that more evident than Wyoming.
In Wyoming both the Republican and the Democratic Party used to be focused on matters that were very local, which is why both parties embraced in varying degrees, The Land Ethic, and both parties, in varying degrees, embraced agriculture. It explains why in the politics of the 70s and 80s the major economic driver of the state, the oil and gas industry, actually had much less influence than it does now.
Things were definitely changing by the 1980s, with money, the love of which is the root of all evil, being a primary driver. Beyond that, however, technology played a role. The consolidation of industry meant that employers once headquartered in Casper, for instance, moved first to Denver, then to Houston, or were even located in Norway. As the love of money is the root of all evil, and the fear of being poor a major personal motivator, concern for much that was local was increasingly lost.
The increasing broad scope of the economy, moreover, meant that there were economic relocations of people who had very little connection with the land and their state. Today's local Freedom Caucus in the legislature, heavily represented by those whose formative years were out of state, is a primary example in the state. Malevolent politics out of the south and the Rust Belt entered the state and are battled out in our legislature even though they have little to do with local culture, lands or ethics.
Moreover, since 1968 the Democratic Party has gone increasingly leftward, driven at first by the impacts of the 1960s and then by its left leaning elements. It in turn became anti-democratic, relying on the Supreme Court to force upon the nation unwanted social change, until it suddenly couldn't rely on the Court anymore, at which time it rediscovered democracy. At the same time Southern and Rust Belt Populists, brought into the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, eventually took it over and are now fanatically devoted to anti-democratic mogul, Donald Trump, whose real values, other than the love of money and a certain sort of female appearance, is unknown, none of which maters to his fanatic base as they apply the Führerprinzip to his imagined wishes and he responds.
Distributism by design, and Agrarianism by social reference, both apply Catholic Social Teaching, one intentionally and one essentially as it was already doing that before Catholic Social Teaching was defined. As we've discussed elsewhere, Catholic Social Teaching applies the doctrines of Human Dignity, Solidarity and Subsidiarity. Solidarity, as Pope John Paul II describe it In Sollicitudo rei socialis, is not “a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of others. It is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”. Subsidiarity provides that that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.
We are a long ways from all of that, right now.
Politically, we're in a national political era that is violently opposed to solidarity and subsidiarity. Supposed national issues and imagined remote conspiracies, dreamt up by political parties, swamp real local issues. Global issues, in contract, which require a competent national authority, or even international authority, to deal with, cannot get attention as the masses are distracted by buffoons acting like Howler Monkeys.
Destroying the parties would serve all of this. And that's a lot easier to do than might be supposed.
And more difficult.
Money makes it quite difficult, in fact. But it can be done.
The easiest way to attack this problem is to remove political parties as quasi official state agencies, which right now the GOP and Democratic Party are. Both parties have secured, in many states, state funded elections which masquerade as "primary elections" but which are actually party elections. There's utterly no reason whatsoever that the State of Wyoming, for example, should fund an internal Republican election, or a Democratic one.
Primary elections are quite useful, but not in the fashion that most state's have them. A useful example is Alaska's, whose system was recently proposed for Wyoming, but which was not accepted (no surprise). Interestingly, given as the state's two actual political parties right now are the Trumpites and the Republican remnants, this a particularly good, and perhaps uniquely opportune, time to go to this system. And that system disregard party affiliations.
Basically, in that type of election, the top two vote getters in the primary go on to the general election irrespective of party. There doesn't need to be any voter party affiliation. The public just weeds the number of candidates down.
That is in fact how the system works here already, and in many places for local elections. But it should be adopted for all elections. If it was, the system would be much different.
For example, in the last House Race, Harriet Hageman defeated Lynette Grey Bull, taking 132,206 votes to Gray Bull's 47,250. Given the nature of the race, FWIW, Gray Bull did much better than people like to imagine, taking 25% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Republican state. Incumbent Lynn Cheney was knocked out of the race in the primary, being punished for telling the truth about Дональд "The Insurrectionist" Trump. But an interesting thing happens if you look at the GOP primary.
In that race, Harriet Hageman took 113,079 votes, for 66% of the vote, and Cheney took 49,339, for 29%. Some hard right candidates took the minor balance. Grey Bull won in the primary with just 4,500 votes, however.
I'd also note here that Distributism in and of itself would have an impact on elections, as it would have a levelling effect on the money aspect of politics. Consider this article by former Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau:
Tom Lubnau: Analyzing The Anonymous Mailers Attacking Chuck Gray
A person could ask, I suppose, of how this is an example, but it is.
Back to the Gray v. Nethercott race, Ms. Nethercott is a lawyer in a regional law firm. That's not distributist as I'd have it, as I'd provide that firms really ought to be local, as I discussed in yesterday's riveting installment. But it is a regional law firm and depending upon its business model, she's likely responsible for what she brings in individually. Indeed, the claim made during the race that she wanted the job of Secretary of State for a raise income was likely absurd.
But the thing here is that Nethercott, as explained by Lubnau, raised a total of $369,933, of which $304,503 were from individual donations. That's a lot to spend for that office, but it was mostly donated by her supporters.
In contrast, Jan Charles Gray, Chuck Gray's father donated a total of $700,000 to Chuck Gray’s campaign, Chuck Gray donated $10,000 to his own campaign and others donated $25,994.
$700,000 is a shocking amount for that office, but beyond that, what it shows is that Nethercott's supporters vastly out contributed Gray's, except for Gray's father. In a distributist society, it certainly wouldn't be impossible to amass $700,000 in surplus cash for such an endeavor, but it would frankly be much more difficult.
To conclude, no political system is going to convert people into saints. But it's hard to whip people into a frenzy who are your friends and neighbors than it does people who are remote. And its harder to serve the interest of money if the money is more widely distributed. Put another way, it's harder to tell 50 small business owners that that Bobo down in Colorado knows what she's talking about, than 50 people who depend on somebody else for a livelihood a myth.
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
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 3. Agrarianism.
And what's this thing about Agrarianism?
I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.
Wendell Berry.
Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?
Well, no.
Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society
Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.
Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.
We have noted before:
But Agrarianism goes much further than this. It retains something that the rest of society has tragically lost, which is that we are inseparably bound to the soil, and inseparably bound to nature.
The fact that we have lost this has been massively corrupting and is massively destructive. Indeed, it threatens to destroy us.
Not everyone in a modern agrarian economy would be farmers, as some like to either imagine, or criticize. But society would be family farm oriented. And it would value the land ethic.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.
The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold.
Realizing that agrarianism is, whether we like it or not, and that we ignore it at our ultimate peril and destruction, is the paramount task of agrarians today. No one thing every cures all of a society's ills, but a modern agrarian economy would come pretty darned close.
Which presumes not only a well grounded society, but a well-educated society.
We've lost that.
Last prior:
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 2. Distributism
Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures
Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures:
When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago. It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.
It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either. Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.
I think there's a whole lot to that.
Some background
Contrary to our natures
When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago. It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.
It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either. Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.
The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.
Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself. That's bothered me a great deal thereafter. It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me. And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well. Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.
In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced. I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons. Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health. Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on. Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.
Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in. It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want. I.e., starvation. Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization. Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.
Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that. Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why. So just a tad on that.
Some background
With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.
When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense. People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage. They were also all well educated. There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives. Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.
When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is. However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited. He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.
As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity. Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time. It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.
Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.
That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me. I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor. Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor. I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did. If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer. I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.
Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion. I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life. I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did. By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult. Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology. I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.
Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983. Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts. I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.
It's not impossible
Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years. Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.
Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc. And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing). We owe it to ourselves.
Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here. It won't apply equally to everyone. The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out. And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else. But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.
I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune. Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all. But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers. We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass. Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.
None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong. Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola. But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.
Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983. Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts. I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.So what does that have to do with anything?
Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me). And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.
Our artificial environment
Our artificial environment
So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well. In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.
People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it. People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier. Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death. They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery. You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls. Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.
You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.
Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect and then goes on to conclude:
Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time. All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.
Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time. All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.
Ruin at Bandalier National Monument. The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it. The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans. I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."
Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now. Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of. Only a few decades back this was not the case. Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945. He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."
Louisiana farmer, 1940s. Part of the community, not apart from it.
Now, however this is rarely the case. Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now. "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "
No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.
Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another. Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.
Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls. I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes. Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor. It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire. That says a lot about what people actually value.
Others, however, sink into illness, including depression. Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent. Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset. No wonder. People just aren't meant to live that way.
Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it. From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair. Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold. Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on. And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.
But we really need not do so. So why are we?
"It's inevitable". No it isn't. Nothing is, except our own ends. We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves. We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.
So, what can we do
First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them . Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd. To heck with that.
The ills of careerism.
Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant. In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.
How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it. And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.
In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career. Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career". For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.
Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else. More than family, more than location, more than anything. People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.
The payoff for that is money, but that's it. Nothing else.
The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.
What's that have to do with this topic?
Well, quite a lot.
People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good. Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently. And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.
That's not all of course. Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place. We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires. In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship. For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.
There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe. There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them. At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that? One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves. Not really a good situation.
Now, am I saying don't have a career? No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe. Deep down, that's really still who you are. If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you. But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.
As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way. This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.
Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here. Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities. He noted that; "this is our home". That says a lot.
Get out there.
The ills of careerism.
Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant. In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.
How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it. And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.
In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career. Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career". For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.
Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else. More than family, more than location, more than anything. People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.
The payoff for that is money, but that's it. Nothing else.
The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.
What's that have to do with this topic?
Well, quite a lot.
People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good. Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently. And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.
That's not all of course. Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place. We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires. In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship. For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.
There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe. There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them. At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that? One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves. Not really a good situation.
Now, am I saying don't have a career? No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe. Deep down, that's really still who you are. If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you. But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.
As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way. This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.
Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here. Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities. He noted that; "this is our home". That says a lot.
Get out there.
Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.
And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.
Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding. Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.
Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding. Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.
That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it. That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it. I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty). Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting. Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".
If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better. If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures. Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not. Give it a try. And so on.
Get elemental
At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting. Try fishing. Raise a garden.
Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.
Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass. Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop. I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something. And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.
The Land Ethic
Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic. Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't. He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.
A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic. I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that. Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61. It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.
If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl. In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past. Now, that's very much not the case. I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.
Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however. Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated. Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at. The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that. Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order. As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.
It's not inevitable.
The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so. And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.
There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't. Baloney. We don't exist for business, it exists for us.
If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better. If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures. Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not. Give it a try. And so on.
Get elemental
At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting. Try fishing. Raise a garden.
Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.
Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass. Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop. I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something. And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.
The Land Ethic
Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie. The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations. At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic. I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that. Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61. It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.
If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl. In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past. Now, that's very much not the case. I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.
Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however. Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated. Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at. The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that. Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order. As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.
It's not inevitable.
The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so. And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.
There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't. Baloney. We don't exist for business, it exists for us.
Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic. Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".
The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature. And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist. The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd. Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production. Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.
Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism. That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.
The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature. And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist. The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd. Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production. Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.
Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism. That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.
It's not impossible
Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years. Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.
Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc. And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing). We owe it to ourselves.
Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here. It won't apply equally to everyone. The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out. And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else. But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.
I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune. Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all. But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers. We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass. Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.
None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong. Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola. But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.
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