Donald Trump is systematically accelerating American decline making what might have happened over a two or more decades, had the existing trends remained and the U.S. not corrected itself, take place over a matter of months.
By the end of the Trump presidency, even if that end happens this year with him being taken out of the White House in a straight jacket, the US will not be the world's dominant economic power. China will be, followed by the European Union. The US will not be the leader of the free world, that's already ceased to be the case. The EU is. The US won't even be the moral leader of North America. Canada is.
And thanks to the war with Iran, the US is rapidly ceasing to be the military power it once was. Traditionally declining global powers lose that status last, and I suppose that's what's happening to us, but in a matter of months rather than decades, as is the norm. We are, right now, losing a war with a third rate power and we don't even know why we are fighting it, other than that Bibi Netanyahu wanted it fought while he had somebody he could coax in the White House. Right now, nations that looked to us since 1939 for help are quitting that, or have quit. Maybe only a few remain in the Pacific, but that will end within a matter of months.
Had Trump not pushed this all into high gear, it might have happened over a long period of time anyhow. The US hasn't been in control of its budget for decades and that was going to cause this to occur no matter what. We might have been able to arrest that with a major effort, but that would have required most of the current members of Congress to get new jobs. Now, however, things are so accelerated much of this is just going to happen all on its own.
Americans had better get used to it quickly and, for that matter, they'd better start planning for a post Trump world where we dance to the tune called by others, not to the one we called.
While we can lament this in many ways, not all of it will be bad. We will have to start rebuilding coalitions, but we're going to have to accept that we'll be regarded as a junior, and stupid, member of them. We deserve that. We're going to start building green energy and the like as people are going to tell us to and we're going to like it. People like Chuck Gray who run around screaming "not on my watch" will be looking at green power in California by the end of 2027.
We're going to have to look at reforming our tax and economic structure. A lot of the giant moneybucks people like Musk will be leaving anyhow. They love money, not the country, and the money will be leaving. We're going to have to pay for what we buying, and what the Baby Boomer and their parents bought, in terms of a government. Foreign countries are going to give us no choice. We're not going to be the world's banker within the next two years.
People who worried about "forever wars" and the like, after the war against Iran is over, won't have to so much anymore. They'll get what they wanted, just not the way they wanted it. We'll crawl back to our alliances, but we'll be a comparative minor member in many ways. As we can't pay for the huge military we have, we likely won't have it. I'll look at that in another post.
Nothing lasts forever and you don't appreciate the good things, in many cases, while you have them. Trump hasn't done the United States one single favor in either of his administrations. He'll go down in history as the worst President in American history. His legacy will be the acceleration of the end of the American Century.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.
In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:
I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.
In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.
No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ". In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.
Shakespeare claimed:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Perhaps. But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide. People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.
That's certainly been the case with the United States.
If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:
Lots of people have that view. We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are. The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted. Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.
Timothy warns us:
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.
So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
Revisit the Homestead Act.
Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.
The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression. Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises. Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves. That's about it.
The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else. When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste. It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.
The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop. That was about generating wealth. Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own. When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.
The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.
The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.
The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land. In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.
Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch. I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.
I can personally recall when it was owned by locals At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle. And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.
Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers. This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.
This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.
I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.
Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"
One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well. This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.
I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place. I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it? Why? It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.
Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties. And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.
I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism". It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just. At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into. Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.
Tax the wealthy
Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false. We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.
There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire. Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character. High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this. Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.
An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations. It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.
Final thoughts
What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth. In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776. The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later. They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.
I experience synchronicity in some interesting ways from time to time. Ways which, really, are too strong to put up to coincidence.
Sometime last week I saw this post on Twitter by O. W. Root, to which I also post my reply:
O.W. Root@owroot
Nov 29
Sometimes I have wondered if I should write about being a parent so much, but I've realized that it's one of the most universal things in the whole world, and one of the most life changing things for all who do it, so it's good to do.
Lex Anteinternet@Lex_Anteinterne
Nov 30
It's also, quite frankly, one of the very few things we do with meaning. People try take meaning from their jobs, for example, which are almost universally meaningless.
My reply, was frankly, extremely harsh. "[A]lmost universally meaningless"?
Well, in fact, yes. I was going to follow that up with a post about existential occupations, but I hadn't quite gotten around to it when I heard some podcasts and saw some web posts that synched into it. I've been cat sitting recently and because of that, I've been able to catch up on some old ones (note the synchronicity of that. . . the tweet above was from November 29/30, but the podcast episode was from June). The podcast episode in question is:
That episode discusses a very broad range of very interesting topics, and it referenced this one amongst them: Catholicism Is So Hot Right Now. Why?
I haven't listened to the second podcast, but the first is phenomenal.
These are all linked?
Yes they are.
I've noted here on this blog and on Lex Anteinternet that the young seem to be turning towards social conservatism and traditionalism. It's easy to miss,. and its even easy to be drawn to it and participate in it without really realizing it. This is different, we'd further note, than being drawn to the various branches of political conservatism. There's definitely a connection, of course, but there are also those who are going into social conservatism/traditionalism while turning their backs on politics entirely, although there are real dangers to turning your back on politics.
What seems to be going on is that people are attracted to the truth, the existential truths, and the existential itself.
Put another way, people have detected that the modern world is pretty fake, and it doesn't comport at all with how we are in a state of nature. It goes back to what we noted here:
I think what people want is a family and a life focused on that family, not on work.
As noted above, most work is meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not valuable.
Very few jobs are existential for our species.* We're meant to be hunters and gatherers, with a few other special roles that have to do with the organization of ourselves, and our relation to the existential. Social historians like to claim that society began to "advance" when job specialization, a byproduct of agriculture, began, and there's some truth to that, but only a bit, if not properly understood. That bit can't be discounted, however, as when agriculture went from subsistence agriculture to production agriculture, i.e., agriculture that generated a surplus, wealth was generated and wealth brought in a great perversion of social order. Surplus production brought in wealth, which brought in a way for the separation of wealth from the people working the land, and ultimately ownership of the land itself. Tenant farming, sharecropping and the like, and agricultural poverty, were all a byproduct of that. When Marx observed that this developed inevitably into Feudalism, he was right.
Agriculture, originally, was a family or family band small scale deal. While it's pretty obvious to anyone who has ever put in a garden how it worked, social theorist and archeologist got it all wrong until they made some rather obvious discoveries quite recently, one of the most obvious being that hunter/gatherer societies are also often small scale agricultural ones. How this was missed is baffling as Europeans had first hand experience with this in regard to New World cultures, most of which were hunting societies but many of which put in various types of farms. Even North American native bands that did not farm, it might be noted, were well aware of farming themselves. Even into the present era hunter/gatherer societies, to the extent they still exist, often still practice small scale farming.
It turns out that grain farming goes way, way back. But why wouldn't it have?
Additional specialization began with the Industrial Revolution, and that's when things really began to become massively warped for our species, first for men, and then with then, with feminization, for women. We've long noted that, but given the chain of coincidences noted above, we've stumbled on to somebody else noting it. As professor Randall Smith has written:
It’s important to understand that the first fatal blow to the family came during the Industrial Revolution when fathers left the house for the bulk of the day. The deleterious results that followed from ripping fathers away from their children were seen almost immediately in the slums and ghettos of the large industrial towns, as young men, without older men to guide them into adulthood, roamed the streets, un-mentored and un-apprenticed. There, as soon as their hormonal instincts were no longer directed into work or caring for families, they turned to theft and sexual license.
Randall Smith, A Traditional Catholic Wife?
So, in the long chain of events, there was nothing wrong at all about farming. There was something wrong about the expropriation of the wealth it created, and that fueled the fire of a lot of development since them. That first set of inequities ultimately lead to peasant revolts in Europe on occasion, and to a degree can be regarded as what first inspired average Europeans to immigrate to various colonies. . . a place where they could own their own land. . and then to various revolutions against what amounted to propertied overlords. The American Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, and the Russian Revolution all had that element to them. Industrialization, which pulled men out of the household, sparked additional revolutions to counter the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, with some being violent, but others not being. The spread of democracy was very much a reaction to the the evils of the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, so was the spread of Communism.
Money has never given up, so the same class of people who demanded land rent in the bronze and iron age, and then turned people into serfs in the Middle Ages, are still busy to do that now. As with then, they often want the peasants to accept this as if its really nifty. People like Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are busy piling up money and concubines while assuring the peasantry that their diminished role in the world is a good thing as its all part of Capitalism.
It is part of Capitalism, which is a major reason that Capitalism sucks, and that there's been efforts to restrain its worse impulses since its onset, with efforts to limit corporations at first, and then such things as the Sherman Anti Trust Act later on.
All that's been forgotten and we now have a demented gilded prince and his privileged acolytes living off the fat of the land while people have less and less control of their own lives. Most people don't want to glory in the success of Star Link of even care about it, but people feed into such things anyway, as the culture has glorified such things since at least the end of the Second World War, the war seemingly having helped to fuel all sorts of disordered desires in society that would bloom into full flower in the 1960s. A society that grew wealthy from the war and the destruction that it created, saw itself as divorced from nature and reality, and every vice that could be imagined was condoned.
And we're now living in the wreckage.
I think this is what is fueling a lot of this. Starting particularly in the 1950s, and then ramping up in the 60s and 70s, careerism really took hold in American society, along with a host of other vices. Indeed, again, as Professor Smith has noted:
The “traditional Catholic family” where the husband worked all day and the wife stayed home alone with the children only really existed – and not all that successfully – in certain upper-middle class WASPy neighborhoods during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Working in an office all day is not necessarily evil (depending upon how it affects your family). It’s just modern. There’s nothing especially “traditional” about it.
Most careers are just dressed up jobs, not much else. Nonetheless people have been taught they need to leave their homes, their families, they're very natures, in order to have a career, sometimes abandoning people in their wake. They're encouraged to do so, to a large extent.
Indeed, I dare say, for most real careerist, nearly always abandoning people.
And average people are sick of it.
That's why young men are turning towards traditionalism of all sorts. They're looking for something of value, and they're not going to find it behind a computer in a cubicle. And that's why young women are reviving roles that feminist attempted to take away form them.
I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution. I'm not. Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events. I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either. I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something. The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was. At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.
The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth. To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.
We've been losing that for some time. Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century. It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.
Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.
Aristotle, Politics.
Corporations were largely illegal in early American history. They existed, but were highly restricted. The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs. It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.
Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist. It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition. Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.
Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it. The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.
I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.
This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken. Broken down, broken up, and ended.
The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret. Only wealth and power can explain that. The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class. Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.
It is really time for a third part in this country.
In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party. Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy. Or perhaps local parties might do it. In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally. The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties. New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party. Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties. There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.
Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day. And such candidates will meet howls of derision. Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors. And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.
The reason for that is simple. Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist.
The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets. Ban it. That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit. A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.
The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well. No absentee landlords. People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.
That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land. Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted. The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.
On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity. Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership. You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.
While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level. People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock. It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair. It
Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem. People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.
And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong. Much of what we've addressed would solve this. You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example. And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented. But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing. Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be. The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.
These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day. We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract. Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls. Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist. J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.
And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.
Trump urges US cattle ranchers to lower prices as he touts tariffs
Donny obviously knows nothing about how cattle prices work.
Cattle prices are high, as the herd is down. It's a supply and demand sort of thing. Not a profiteering type of thing. And it isn't just the price at the supermarket that's up, replacement cattle are up too.
And this, from his wee brain:
The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,
Prices have been going up for years, and this dates back to Biden. It has nothing to do with tariffs.
Republicans don't care a whit about agriculture as a rule. Trump's going to hurt us.
I had a draft post at the time of the last election I never published why farmers and ranchers routinely vote to have themselves shafted by voting for the GOP. Democrats typically have farm policies that actually benefit farmers, including preserving the lands. Republicans tend to be in favor of land rape to benefit the wealthy.
I really have no good explanation for it.
Well, no surprise, soybean farmers are getting pounded by Trump's tariff polich. D'uh.
Well, I'm a type of farmer, a livestock farmer, and frankly Ragland, screw you and the John Deere you rode in on. You are getting just what you deserve.
But, have no fear, socialized farming through the GOP will come to the rescue. Trump is going to take $10B from the national sales tax, i.e., tariffs, to bail out farmers.
So, the American consumer is getting taxed, as in the end it's us who pays the tariffs, to bail out soybean farmers.
Good old free enterprise at work there.
Farmers are getting stiffed by Trump's taxes, and will continue to get stiffed by them, and he hopes to balance the table by handing over money the American public handed over via tariffs.
A better plan would just be to let soybean farmers go bankrupt.
Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.
But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.
Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:
Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s. He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker. Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time. There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be. But life was like that then. My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.
People did that.
If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.
He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16. If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.
It was scraping as the military was. The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry. We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times. Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating. The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context. It's relatively hard to get into the Army now. After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape. By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.
Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century. Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports. He went to work in a factory.
Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.
Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.
Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s. Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat. It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape. We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s. The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s. West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice. Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s. Italy really started to in the 60s.
Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new. Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.
Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.
The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955. It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.
Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.
Finally, we had posted on women and careers. Well, sort of. Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:
I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is. I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.
This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.
She's right.
This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".
The world? Well, that's a little too broad. But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West? You bet.
Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer. It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles. Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong. Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.
The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich. Not hardly.
FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive. They no doubt probably save time. Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.
Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares. The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.
At any rate, she's right. The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others. We can fix it.
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I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
Pope Leo XIV.
In the light of the new Pope taking the name Leo XIV, let's revisit a major writing of Pope Leo XIII
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