The Agrarian's Lament

Or is in it?

It's actually hard to get a straight analysis on it. Anyhow, if you look at the White House's synopsis of it, this is what it did:

Build Back Better Framework:
The most transformative investment in children and caregiving in generations:
Offers universal and free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, the largest expansion of universal and free education since states and communities across the country established public high school 100 years ago.
Preschool in the United States costs about $8,600 per year. The Build Back Better framework will enable states to expand access to free preschool for more than 6 million children per year and increase the quality of preschool for many more children already enrolled. Importantly, parents will be able to send children to high-quality preschool in the setting of their choice – from public schools to child care providers to Head Start. The program will lead to lifelong educational and economic benefits for children and parents, and is a transformational investment in America’s future economic competitiveness. In fact, research shows that every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood care and education can yield $3 to $7 over the long-run, as they do better in school, are more likely to graduate high-school and college, and earn more as adults.
Makes the largest investment in child care in the nation’s history, saving most American families more than half of their spending on child care.
For decades, child care prices in the United States have risen faster than family incomes, yet the United States still invests 28 times less than its competitors on helping families afford high-quality care for toddlers. The Build Back Better framework will ensure that middle-class families pay no more than 7 percent of their income on child care and will help states expand access to high-quality, affordable child care to about 20 million children per year – covering 9 out of 10 families across the country with young children. For two parents with one toddler earning $100,000 per year, the framework will produce more than $5,000 in child care savings per year. Nearly all families of four making up to $300,000 per year will be eligible. And, better access to high-quality child care can increase the likelihood that parents, especially mothers, are employed or enrolled in education and training beyond high school, while also providing lifetime benefits for children, especially those who are economically disadvantaged.
Delivers affordable, high-quality care for older Americans and people with disabilities in their homes, while supporting the workers who provide this care.
Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of older Americans and Americans with disabilities are on waiting lists for home care services or struggling to afford the care they need, including more than 800,000 who are on state Medicaid waiting lists. A family paying for home care costs out of pocket currently pays around $5,800 per year for just four hours of home care per week. The Build Back Better framework will permanently improve Medicaid coverage for home care services for seniors and people with disabilities, making the most transformative investment in access to home care in 40 years, when these services were first authorized for Medicaid.
Provides 39 million households up to $3,600 (or $300 per month) in tax cuts per child by extending the American Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit.
The Build Back Better framework will provide monthly payments to the parents of nearly 90 percent of American children for 2022 – $300 per month per child under six and $250 per month per child ages 6 to 17. This historic tax cut will help cover the cost of food, housing, health care, and transportation and will continue the largest one-year reduction in child poverty in history. And critically, the framework includes permanent refundability for the Child Tax Credit, meaning that the neediest families will continue to receive the full Child Tax Credit over the long-run.
The largest effort to combat climate change in American history:
Delivers substantial consumer rebates and tax credits to reduce costs for middle class families shifting to clean energy and electrification.
The consumer rebates and credits included in the Build Back Better framework will save the average American family hundreds of dollars per year in energy costs. These measures include enhancement and expansion of existing home energy and efficiency tax credits, as well as the creation of a new, electrification-focused rebate program. The framework will cut the cost of installing rooftop solar for a home by around 30 percent, shortening the payback period by around 5 years; and the framework’s electric vehicle tax credit will lower the cost of an electric vehicle that is made in America with American materials and union labor by $12,500 for a middle-class family. In addition, the framework will help rural communities tap into the clean energy opportunity through targeted grants and loans through the Department of Agriculture.
Ensures clean energy technology – from wind turbine blades to solar panels to electric cars – will be built in the United States with American made steel and other materials, creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs here at home.
The Build Back Better legislation will target incentives to grow domestic supply chains in solar, wind, and other critical industries in communities on the frontlines of the energy transition. In addition, the framework will boost the competitiveness of existing industries, like steel, cement, and aluminum, through grants, loans, tax credits, and procurement to drive capital investment in the decarbonization and revitalization of American manufacturing.
Advances environmental justice through a new Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator that will invest in projects around the country, while delivering 40% of the benefits of investment to disadvantaged communities, as part of the President’s Justice40 initiative.
The framework will also fund port electrification; facilitate the deployment of cleaner transit, buses, and trucks; and support critical community capacity building, including grants to environmental justice communities. In addition, the framework will create a new Civilian Climate Corps – with over 300,000 members that look like America. This diverse new workforce will conserve our public lands, bolster community resilience, and address the changing climate, all while putting good-paying union jobs within reach for more Americans.
Bolsters resilience and natural solutions to climate change through a historic investment in coastal restoration, forest management, and soil conservation.
The framework will provide resources to farmers, ranchers, and forestland owners, supporting their efforts to reduce emissions. At its peak, the increased investments in climate smart agriculture alone could reach roughly 130 million cropland acres per year, representing as many as 240,000 farms. Farmers, ranchers, and forestland owners have long demonstrated leadership in environmental stewardship with strategies that provide benefits for the farm, the environment, and the public. These investments will help meet the demand from the farming community for conservation support and enable producers to realize the full potential of climate benefits from agriculture.
The biggest expansion of affordable health care in a decade:
Reduces prescription drug costs.
Finally let Medicare negotiate drug prices.
Medicare will negotiate prices for high-cost prescription drugs. This will include drugs seniors get at the pharmacy counter (through Medicare Part D), and drugs that are administered in a doctor’s office (through Medicare Part B). Drugs become eligible for negotiation once they have been on the market for a fixed number of years: 9 years for small molecule drugs and 12 years for biologics. Medicare will negotiate up to 10 drugs per year during 2023, with those prices taking effect in 2025, increasing to up to 20 drugs per year.
The policy will establish a clearly defined negotiation process that is fair for manufacturers, and gets the biggest savings on drugs that have been on the market a long time. This discourages drug companies from abusing laws to prolong their monopolies, while encouraging investments in research and development of new cures. Drug companies that refuse to negotiate will owe an excise tax.
Impose a tax penalty if drug companies increase their prices faster than inflation. Starting when this bill becomes law, future drug price increases will be compared to their current prices. We will finally put an end to the days where drug companies could raise their prices with impunity. If prices for a drug increase faster than inflation, manufacturers will owe a tax penalty, holding down prices for Americans with all types of health insurance.
Directly lower out-of-pocket costs for seniors. Today, there is no cap on how much seniors and people with disabilities have to pay for drugs, and millions of seniors pay more than $6,000 a year in cost-sharing. This proposal puts an end to this burden, and ensures that seniors never pay more than $2,000 a year for their drugs under Medicare Part D.
The plan will also lower insulin prices so that Americans with diabetes don’t pay more than $35 per month for their insulin. Lawmakers have also agreed to lower seniors’ cost-sharing for all types of drugs and they are working expeditiously to finalize legislative text that will save seniors money at the pharmacy counter without increasing premiums.
Strengthens the Affordable Care Act and reduces premiums for 9 Million Americans.
The framework will reduce premiums for more than 9 million Americans who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace by an average of $600 per person per year. For example, a family of four earning $80,000 per year would save nearly $3,000 per year (or $246 per month) on health insurance premiums. Experts predict that more than 3 million people who would otherwise be uninsured will gain health insurance.
Closes the Medicaid Coverage Gap, Leading 4 Million Uninsured People to Gain Coverage.
The Build Back Better framework will deliver health care coverage through Affordable Care Act premium tax credits to up to 4 million uninsured people in states that have locked them out of Medicaid through. A 40-year old in the coverage gap would have to pay $450 per month for benchmark coverage – more than half of their income in many cases. The framework provides individuals $0 premiums, finally making health care affordable and accessible.
Expands Medicare to cover hearing benefits.
The Build Back Better framework will expand Medicare coverage to cover hearing coverage, so that older Americans can access the affordable care they need.
The most significant effort to bring down costs and strengthen the middle class in generations:
Makes the single largest and most comprehensive investment in affordable housing in history.
The framework will enable the construction, rehabilitation, and improvement of more than 1 million affordable homes, boosting housing supply and reducing price pressures for renters and homeowners. It will address the capital needs of the public housing stock in big cities and rural communities all across America and ensure it is not only safe and habitable but healthier and more energy efficient as well. It will make a historic investment in rental assistance, expanding vouchers to hundreds of thousands of additional families. And, it includes one of the largest investments in down payment assistance in history, enabling hundreds of thousands of first-generation homebuyers to purchase their first home and build wealth. This legislation will create more equitable communities, through investing in community-led redevelopments projects in historically under-resourced neighborhoods and removing lead paint from hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as by incentivizing state and local zoning reforms that enable more families to reside in higher opportunity neighborhoods.
Extends the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for around 17 million low-wage workers.
Before this year, the federal tax code taxed low-wage childless workers into poverty or deeper into poverty — the only group of workers it treated this way. The Build Back Better framework will extend the American Rescue Plan’s tripling of the credit for childless workers, benefiting 17 million low-wage workers, many of whom are essential workers, including cashiers, cooks, delivery drivers, food preparation workers, and childcare providers. For example, a childless worker who works 30 hours per week at $9 per hour earns income that, after taxes, leaves them below the federal poverty line. By increasing her EITC to more than $1,100, this EITC expansion helps pull such workers out of poverty.
Expands access to affordable, high-quality education beyond high school.
Expand access to affordable, high-quality education beyond high school. Education beyond high school is increasingly important for economic growth and competitiveness in the 21st century, even as it has become unaffordable for too many families. The Build Back Better framework will make education beyond high school – including training for high-paying jobs available now – more affordable. Specifically, the framework will increase the maximum Pell Grant by $550 for more the more than 5 million students enrolled in public and private, non-profit colleges and expand access to DREAMers. It will also make historic investments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and minority-serving institutions (MSIs) to build capacity, modernize research infrastructure, and provide financial aid to low-income students. And, it will invest in practices that help more students complete their degree or credential. The framework will help more people access quality training that leads to good, union, and middle-class jobs. It will enable community colleges to train hundreds of thousands of students, create sector-based training opportunity with in- demand training for at least hundreds of thousands of workers, and invest in proven approaches like Registered Apprenticeships and programs to support underserved communities. The framework will increase the Labor Department’s annual spending on workforce development by 50% for each of the next 5 years.
Promotes nutrition security to support children’s health.
The Build Back Better framework will help children reach their full potential by investing in nutrition security year-round. The legislation will expand free school meals to 8.7 million children during the school year and provide a $65 per child per month benefit to the families of 29 million children to purchase food during the summer.
Strengthens the middle class through a historic investment in equity, safety, and fairness.
The legislation makes a transformative investment in Rural America through a new Rural Partnership Program that will empower rural regions, including Tribal Nations and territories, by providing flexible funding for locally-led projects. The Build Back Better framework will provide nutrition security to millions of American children by expanding free school meals, which are the healthiest meals that children consume during the day. It also will make an historic investment in maternal health and establish a new and innovative community violence intervention initiative, in addition to investing in small businesses and preparing the nation for future pandemics and supply chain disruptions.
Invests in immigration reform.
The framework includes a separate $100 billion investment in immigration reform that is consistent with the Senate’s reconciliation rules, as well as enhancements to reduce backlogs, expand legal representation, and make the asylum system and border processing more efficient and humane.
The Build Back Better framework is fully paid for:
Combined with savings from repealing the Trump Administration’s rebate rule, the plan is fully paid for by asking more from the very largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The 2017 tax cut delivered a windfall to them, and this would help reverse that—and invest in the country’s future. No one making under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes.
Specifically, the framework:
Stops large, profitable corporations from paying zero in tax and tax corporations that buyback stock rather than invest in the company.
In 2019, the largest corporations in the United States paid just 8 percent in taxes, and many paid nothing at all. President Biden believes this is fundamentally unfair. The Build Back Better framework will impose a 15% minimum tax on the corporate profits that large corporations—with over $1 billion in profits—report to shareholders. This means that if a large corporation says it’s profitable, then it can’t avoid paying its tax bill. The framework also includes a 1% surcharge on corporate stock buybacks, which corporate executives too often use to enrich themselves rather than investing workers and growing the economy.
Stops rewarding corporations for shipping jobs and profits overseas.
President Biden has led the world to stop the race to the bottom in corporate taxes and that rewards corporations that ship jobs and profits overseas. That’s why the President won an agreement among 136 countries on a 15% global minimum tax. This framework would help finish the job. Consistent with that agreement, it’d adopt a 15% minimum tax on foreign profits of U.S. corporations, so that they can no longer claim huge tax benefits by shifting profits and jobs abroad. And, it’d make sure that other countries abide by the agreement they adopted by imposing a penalty rate on any foreign corporations based in countries that fail to abide by the international agreement. Other countries will not be able to try to take advantage by failing to meet their commitment.
Asks the highest income Americans to pay their fair share.
The Build Back Better framework includes a new surtax on the income of multi-millionaires and billionaires – the top 0.02 percent of Americans. It would apply a 5 percent rate above income of $10 million, and an additional 3 percent above income of $25 million. The Build Back Better framework will also close the loopholes that allows some wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying the 3.8 Medicare tax on their earnings.
Invests in enforcing our existing tax laws, so the wealthy pay what they owe.
Regular workers pay the taxes they owe on wages and salaries—with a 99 percent compliance rate—while too many wealthy taxpayers hide their income from the IRS so they don’t have to pay. And, as a result of budget cuts, audit rates on those making over $1 million per year fell by 80 percent between 2011-2018. Wage earners have a 99 percent compliance rate, and, by contrast, the top 1 percent evades over $160 billion per year in taxes. President Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda will create a fairer tax system – a tax system that requires the wealthy to finally pay their fair share and rewards work, not wealth. The President’s plan will accomplish this through transformation investments in the IRS: hiring enforcement agents who are trained to pursue wealthy evaders, overhauling technology from the 1960s, and investing in taxpayer service, so ordinary Americans can get their questions answered. Additional enforcement resources will be focused on pursuing those with the highest incomes; not Americans with income less than $400,000.

Hence, part of the problem.

The framework starts off with "transformative".

The better evidence is that people want restorative, not transformative. And "conservative" as in the original meaning of the word, i.e., to conserve.

Being restorative would be transformative right now, and to be truly conservative would be as well. But the sales pitch of liberals, and their angry cries now, that we "want to go forward" doesn't appeal much to average people who can look back and know that things were once much better, and decent, at some point in the past.

Neither to serve nor to rule.

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

Prologue

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

Neither to serve nor to rule.

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

Edward Abbey

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

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

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

We serve, and we are ruled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The candle burns at both ends.

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

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

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

It's an investment for him.

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

That indeed was the American dream.

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

Stagecoach. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gone to a small appliance store recently, have you?

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

Road to Serfdom indeed.

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

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

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

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

Maybe that's the way in every state.

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

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

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

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

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

I've sort of just done that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truly, it is.

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

It doesn't necessarily mean that you did that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be that as it may, Abby was right.

And Chesterton too:

Footnotes:

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

Lex Anteinternet: Musings of the Ancient Agrarian. Climate Change, Bucking the Winds of Change, and Food from a Factory

Lex Anteinternet: Musings of the Ancient Agrarian. Climate Change, ...:

Musings of the Ancient Agrarian. Climate Change, Bucking the Winds of Change, and Food from a Factory

I've generally avoided the topic of global warming here as I'm a coward and don't want to take the heat on it (hah, hah). But, at this point, the majority of people in most places accept that man caused climate change is occurring. This is very much the case around the globe. For instance, just the other day, Conservative British Prime Minister gave a speech regarding it that contained an apocalyptic warning about not addressing it . . . and he's a conservative. Germany's Angela Merkel, who just stepped down as that country's head, is also a conservative (Christian Democratic Union) and was plain on her views. Really, only in the US is there any kind of argument that it's not happening. Indeed, just the other day, one of the oil producing nations in Arabia announced its plans to deal with it.

Now, this isn't going to be a screed agaisnt oil companies, I'll note right now. This is one of those winds of change type of articles.

In Wyoming, you still have a lot of public sentiment going the other way, but here too things are changing. Just last weekend, the Tribune ran an op ed excoriating local policymakers for not advancing the new energy producing technologies that are coming, arguing that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end.

And as a practical matter, it is, irrespective of people's views of it.. Even if you are a diehard opponent of the concept of global warming, alternative means of producing energy are over the tipping point. I still hear people here say, all the time, "electric cars won't work here", but 1) they will, and 2) carmakers don't care about works in Wyoming. You don't build an auto industry around 250,000 drivers, after all.^[1].

Indeed the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, of which I'm a member, ran an entire issue of their explorer magazine on completely switching the planet over to "alternative' forms of energy. The AAPG can't be accused of being made up of radical greenies. In its two big articles it had one that sought to point out the difficulties, but they both mapped from a scientific prospective how to do it.

Since then a cooperative made up of large power generation companies has announced that its going whole hog with power generation station for automobiles. That's really darned similiar to the old "oil companies" sponsoring gas stations, which of course they did in a major way.

Anyhow, I was surprised recently to see farmers and ranchers begin to get up and running on this, but they are. They very much are in other states. Wyoming is isolated and things like this are slow to get a foothold here, and on top of it, while nobody really wants to say it, we're still in the outgoing tide from the last oil boom, and therefore it remains the case that a lot of what seems to be the viewpoint of the state is really a vicarious view from the oil producing states much to the south of us. Politics tend to change here when busts get deep and last, as that's when the locals are most notable. And it's also the case that change is massively unsettling, and it's always instinctive to argue for the familiar rather than plan for the change that's coming.

But that's starting to occur. Indeed, the Ladder Ranch has an entire series of posts on their blog about their attendance of the recent warming conference in Scotland. That's really remarkable. When Wyoming ranching blogs start posting about things that need to be done, it's not very long before you see a rancher driving up to the feed store in an electric pickup truck. As in, like, maybe next week or so.

And they're not the only ones. Citing a need to preserve Wyoming's environment and economy, a couple of commentators in the Tribune recently posted an interesting oped, as noted.

Hutcherson, Smitherman: We’re betting Wyoming’s future on Wyoming’s past

That article commented:

One of coal country’s biggest lessons is that the greatest threat to communities’ long-term vitality is not change but waiting too long and trying to make the transition too late. Wyoming can dither away our savings at this crossroads, putting our youth and our future at risk. Or we can embrace change on our terms with a bold vision. The consequences are clear. The path of familiarity will continue to hurt Wyoming’s youth. A new path is needed... before it’s too late.

As odd as it may seem, that reminded me of an Army Jody Call we learned in basic training, which went

Ain't no sense in going home; Jody's got your girl and gone.
Ain't no sense in looking back; Jody's got your Cadillac.
Ain't no sense in looking down; Ain't no discharge on the ground.

I guess that's all the antitheses to the bumper stickers around here that use to plead for "one more oil boom" with the promise "I won't piss it away". It's a lot like a hard core drinking asking for one more drink, you're not going to stop

Thatts a big part of the problem with Wyoming's economy, actually.

What I mean by that is looking back, and looking back to the immediate past, rather than the longlasting and enduring past.

Anyhow, getting back to the Ladder Ranch blog entry, that post has this comment.

If the goal of no more warming than 1.5 degrees centigrade has a hope of being met (we’re currently at 1.1), it will take all sectors. The solutions are not simplistic,

I guess it shows a contrarian streak, but as a geologist/amateur historian, in addition to being an officer of the court, it actually is pretty simplistic. It just requires doing it. That may require a sudden public consensus, but if this blog here shows anything, people are actually amazingly capable of doing that. People can, and do, change their opinions on things on a large scale, overnight.

And young people are. Young Republicans, who otherwise don't share much in point of view with Democrats, agree that this is a big problem. Given as the politics of the country is in the firm grip of the nearly dead hands of ancient, ancient politicians, that may not be obvious, but as we literally have a political leadership that's so old that the barque over the River Styx will soon be threatened to be full to overcrowded with American politicians, we may see a change in views here much quicker than we might otherwise be inclined to suppose.

None of which is what this post is about.

Due to Twitter, I ran across some items where soy boy metrosexuals are imagining an agricultural free world with all food made in labs.

As in 100%.

This, they imagine, will solve the whole problem.

First of all, that would create a new problem. The modern world is antithetical to our natures to start with. We're born to be hunters, farmers, and pastoralists, not cubicle dwellers and office workers. Most Americans hate their jobs because modern work sucks.

Secondly, dimwitted people who imagine stuff like this are Americans or Europeans, and most people on the globe aren't. The average farmer is a lot more likely to be riding to his field on a single piston engined light motorcycle while wearing a conical hat than driving a F350 to the feed store.

Bangladeshi farmer. Wikipeda photograph by Balaram Mahalder . All rights reserved to original author. If this guy looks happier at work than you do, that's because he is. Yes, he lives in a dirt poor country, but he's working outdoors with his family wh

And not only that, part of the solution to this problem is more people in agriculture, not less, and more agriculture of a distributist and agrarian nature.

It's not necessary to have the fence to fence massive implement farms that dominate today that are fueled not only on petroleum (although that will soon change) but on debt (that won't be changing).

Which gets, in the end, to this. Hutcherson and Smitherson have a point about betting Wyoming's future on the past, but maybe we're not betting on the current future which is embedded with the past, but in a way that for some reason we can't really see.

It's odd, but even saying it requires some explanation, so perhaps that this is missed, and the fact that you have soy boy cubicle backers suggesting that everyone sitting inside in the solution to things isn't too surprising.

Wyoming has always bet its future on the extractive industries, but it wasn't those industries that built and ultimately sustained much of it. The first industry in the state was the trapping industry, which is so feral, if you will, that we don't even recognize it as such. The second one was ranching and farming. Even by the time they entered, however, there were those who promised that the future was all carbon based. And it came to very much be.

But all the while, Wyoming remained wild and it was agriculture that really preserved the land and made the state what it is and was.

Now we've entered odd times. They're odd politically, and they're odd trend wise. It's making people doubly obstinate. But larger trends don't care about obstinacy, even if they do about arguments.

Anyhow, maybe it's time to look back a bit. And by looking back, look locally, and with a Chestertonian and Leopoldian frame of mind.

That would mean accepting some limits to things.

Indeed, fairly recently, on the same day, two different blogs linked in two things about limits in the form of mobility.

The British Adam Smith Institute linked in this:

SIR SIMON INSISTS THAT WE'RE ALL TERRIBLY NAUGHTY PEASANTS

The New Mexico Place of the Governors posted this:

Group on horseback and wagons, near Cimarron, New Mexico

What Sir Simon said, was:

Travel was the great beneficiary of the leisure society. Only now are we appreciating its cost, not just in pollution but in the need for ever more extravagant infrastructure. Cities sprawl when they should be densified. Communities have become fragmented. British government policy still encourages car-intensive settlement in countryside while urban land lies derelict.

It is an uncomfortable fact that most people outside London do most of their motorised travel by car. The answer to CO2 emissions is not to shift passengers from one mode of transport to another. It is to attack demand head on by discouraging casual hyper-mobility. The external cost of such mobility to society and the climate is the real challenge. It cannot make sense to predict demand for transport and then supply its delivery. We must slowly move towards limiting it.

Here's the thing. Sir Simon may be, well, . . . right, but maybe not for the reasons he imagined. And in an era in which a contagen breaks out in South Africa, and is Colorado just a few days later, well. . .

But beyond that, looking towards more a more localized, distributist, foods system, and simply system, makes sense. We don't need food from factories, in other words.We probably need it from the backyard, and from local farmers and ranchers. And where it needs some processing, where it can be done locally, it should be.

Now, that can't be done in every instance. You probably can't grow coffee beans in Montana in your backyard, for example.^[2]. But you can grow vegetables if you have much of a yard, and that's a better and more sensible product than bluegrass, which doesn't do much other than suck up water. And you can get some of your protien from fields and streams yourself. That ties you to nature and you see what's going on.

Shoot, I'd have things back at the mule power plow level if I could, which I know isn't going to be happening. But rethinking the industrial cubicle complex sure can be argued, and a lot of those who are coming up with some really radical ideas, well they need to spend a little time outdoors.

Footnotes:

1. I'm continually amazed by the argument, which you hear from all kids of people, that "well electric vehicles won't work here", with the person next citing the example of driving across the state and back in a day, or going high up into the hills.

Well, here's the thing. Cars and trucks are made for Denver Colorado, not Douglas Wyoming. We'll have to get used to electric vehicles for that reason if no other. And the fact of the matter is that they're improving so rapidly that pretty soon you will be able to drive across the state and back in a day with them.

Added to that, I've watched farmers and ranchers adapt to solar chargers readily. Solar-powered livestock pumps are common, and so are solar-powered battery chargers for trailers that stockmen use when living in the sticks on drives. If you can plug your trailer in while it's sitting there, well pretty soon you'll be able to do the same with your truck.

2. Coffee does provide a good example, however, of how changes can be made by looking forward and back.

Coffee isn't grown in North America and must be shipped in. It's different, therefore, than lettuce, for example, or cattle. Indeed, in the last instance there's no earthly reason that beef should ever be shipped into the US, but it is.

Whenever something is shipped in, it's got a long carbon footprint. Even condensing that impact, it's obvious. Things often get on a boat. If they don't get on a boat, they're loaded in a truck. Anyway you look at it, they in fact end up on a truck. The truck goes thousands of miles before, in a roundabout way, and on subsidized roads, things end up on your grocery store shelf

There's no reason that things that can be grown locally shouldn't be. Variety may be sacrificed, but truth be known a lot of Americans don't eat a very varied diet anyhow. Indeed, at least some suggest, and my observations support, that it's become less varied over time. Most people are down to a few, very few, basic foods that they're used to and which are more or less cheap. Not too many people nationwide, for example, are having rabbit tonight even though rabbits are mowing down much of the nation's massive blue grass crop every day that people are growing for them.

Things grown in the backyard don't need any transportation to the table at all, other than to walk them into the house. Things grown locally could easily be transported to market in electric trucks. Things coming a long distance, like coffee, could easily be transported by electric trains.

This simplifies this, rather obviously, but you get the point. The irony is that this "greener" approach would more closely resemble the one that existed prior to 1950 than it does the one that exists today.

Related Threads:

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

Lex Anteinternet: The Big Speech: Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urb...

Lex Anteinternet: The Big Speech: Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urb...: The late Henry Fairlie was a British born essayist who wrote in the New Republic. A man of biting wit, he wrote the following essay, which...

Lex Anteinternet: I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays...

Lex Anteinternet: I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays...:

I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays. . .

as I'm busy, but I took Thanksgiving weekend off for a variety of reasons. Also, for a variety of reasons, it's the first time I've had four days off in a row for several years.

I avoided checking my email, which I'm better at doing than other people that I know. I don't have my email set up to give me automatic alerts, for example.

Cell phones. The worst thing to happen to humankind since. .. well ever. These are our old cell phones. I found them in a drawer when I was looking for something the other day. They're expensive, so you save them, which you probably don't need to do.

So in checking my email this morning, and my calendar, I see that I have emails from lawyers for every day of the four-day weekend, save for maybe Thanksgiving itself.

There's no doubt about it. Cell phones and computers have become the enemy of sanity.

I know that some of those folks were simply working on Friday, which isn't a holiday weekend for everyone. I had intended to but decided not to. But Saturday and Sunday?

There's a point at which stuff like this has to stop. I'm glad to see that for the first time, pretty much ever, Walmart and some other big box stores closed on Thanksgiving itself and will close on Christmas. Some restaurants were open, however. Grocery stores were as well. Friday, of course, was "Black Friday", which I've worked many times myself, and Saturday was "Small Business Saturday".

We're reading, of course, about inflation ramping up, which the administration seems to have no handle on whatsoever. The weekend shows had Democrats on explaining how the "Build Back Better" bill won't contribute to it, which is baloney. If anything starts to depress it, it'll be the arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which isn't good.

Really building back better would take a fundamental look at which what we've built, which is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week, cubicle economy, and dismantling big chunks of it. Right now workers are voting for that with their feet.

Maybe some pondering on that is in order.

Could you do Thanksgiving like it's 1621? An Agrarian Thanksgiving

I wrote out a blog entry for Lex Anteinternet on what the first Thanksgiving Dinner in 1621 must have been like.

Pheasants.

It really surprised me, even though it shouldn't. We modern Americans are so used to the "poverty of resources of our ancestors" story that, well, we believe it. In reality, that first gathering in English North America to celebrate God's bounty and give thanks for it, no matter how imperfect the Church of England and Puritan celebrants, and the native ones as well, was a really bountiful feast. I've joked in the past that it probably consisted of salt cod, but in fact it seems likely to have featured waterfowl, maybe turkey, deer, mussels and quite an abundance of other foods stuffs.

Unlike now, what it didn't feature was pie, probably, even though pies of all sorts were a feature of the English diet, although at this point I frankly wonder. What would have kept there from being pie would have been a lack of wheat, as that crop wouldn't have come around for at least a few years. And the lack of a grain crop meant that there wouldn't have been beer, if that's something your Thanksgiving usually features (mine does). It's an open question if there would have been wine. There would have been a lot of fresh vegetables, however, as well as fresh foul, venison and fresh fish.

It would have been a good meal, in some ways one we'd recognize, but also one in which we might note some things were missing. No potatoes, for example.

This set me to wondering what a killetarian/agrarian like me might end up with if allowed to do a Thanksgiving Dinner all of stuff I'd shot or gathered. Could I do it?

Well, there'd be no mussels on my table, but most years there would be fare similar to what the first celebrants had. There are wild turkeys in my region, although I failed to get one this year. Events conspired against me and I didn't get a deer (at least yet) either. But if I had a major dinner, and time, I think I could muster it. It might be pheasant rather than turkey, or a wild turkey, which is really no different in taste, only in bulk, from the domestic ones.

The challenge, however, would be vegetables, depending upon how feral I'd take this endeavor. If I went full hunter/gatherer, here I'd really be in trouble. I frankly know next to nothing about edible wild plants.

Now, starting off, I'd note that in my region, like the rest of the globe, a vegetarian would have starved to death in a few days prior to production agriculture. It's not only an unnatural diet, but it's impossible up until that time. Indeed, one of the ironies of agriculture has been the introduction of unnatural diets. When you read, for example, of the Irish poor living on potatoes and oatmeal, while that's not what their Celtic ancestors had eaten prior to 1) row crop agriculture, and 2) the English. Shoot, potatoes aren't even native to Ireland.

Anyhow, I note that as the native peoples of the plains were more heavily meat eaters than anything else, as that's what there was to eat. But there is some edible vegetation.

I just don't know much about it.

I guess I'd start off with that I knwo that there's a collection of native berries you can eat. I mostly know about this as my mohter used to collect some and make wine with them, and I've had syrup and jelly made with them as well. UW publishes a short pamphlet on them, which is available here. There are also wild leeks, which my mother and father, and at least one of my boyhood friends would recognize, which my mother inaccurately called "wild onions".

And that's about all I know about that.

Which isn't enough to make much of a meal.

Now, a person could probably research this and learn more, and I should, simply because I'd like to know. Indeed, on the Wind River Indian Reservation there's a "food sovereignty" movement which seeks to reintroduce native foods to the residents there in order to combat health problems, which is a really interesting idea and I hope it has some success. I hope that they also publish some things on this topic, assuming that they haven't already.

So, in short, at least based on what the present state of my knowledge is, the Thanksgiving fare would be pretty limited, vegetable wise.

Now, what about grow your own?

Well, if expanded out to include what I can grow myself, well now we're on to something else indeed. . . assuming that I can get my pump fixed, which I haven't, solely due to me.

If I were to do that, then I'm almost fully there for a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, omitting only the bread and cranberry sauce.

And I'm not omitting the cranberry sauce.

I'm not omitting the bread, either.

Frankly, I think the modern "bread is bad for you" story is a pile of crap. People have incorporated grains into their diet for thousands of years. To the extent that its bad for you, it's likely because Americans don't eat bread, they eat cake. That's what American bread is.

Of course, I think the keto diet is a pile of crap too, which I discuss on another Lex Anteinternet post. So here, I'd have to make bread, or buy it, and I'd prefer to make it. Soda bread more particularly.

On this, I'd be inclined, if I could to have an alcoholic beverage for the table, which is another thing, albeit a dangerous one, that humans have been doing since . . . well too long to tell. The Mayflower sojourners started off their voyage with a stock of beer. . . ironically in a ship that had once been used to haul wine, but they were out when they put in at Plymouth Rock. By the fall of 1621 it's unlikely that they'd brewed any. as they lacked grain. The could have vinted wine, however. If they did, we don't know about it.

So in my hypothetical, if I stuck to local stocks, I could probably do the same. I don't know how to do it, but I could learn. But I'm not going to do so, as frankly my recollections of that wine aren't sufficiently warm to cause me to bother with it, and I recall it took tons of sugar, which obviously isn't something I'm going to produce myself.

I'm not going to brew beer either, although plenty of people do. I don't have the time, or the inclination, and either I'd end up with way too much or not enough.

And this reflects the nature of agrarianism, really. A life focused on nature with agriculture as part of that. I don't have to make everything myself, but I have to be focused on the land, have a land ethic, and focus on what's real.

Maybe next year I'll try this.