Lex Anteinternet: National AgDay, 2023.

Lex Anteinternet: National AgDay, 2023.:  

National AgDay, 2023.

 

Lex Anteinternet: Bank collapses, The Economy, Modern Work. A meand...

Lex Anteinternet: Bank collapses, The Economy, Modern Work. A meand...: 

Bank collapses, The Economy, Modern Work. A meandering trip through the punditsphere.

I haven't commented on the recent bank collapses at all here, as banking doesn't interest me much.

First National Bank in Meeteetsee, circa 1901.

It should.  Economics does. But banking doesn't.  Given that, I tend to think this probably isn't as big of a crisis as it's being portrayed.

Indeed, I think it isn't.

Not that it isn't important.

A couple of observations, however, on the observations.

On This Week and Meet The Press, Elizabeth Warren was on, meaning she was doing a full court press over the weekend.  Both of her interviews were nearly identical, as both interviewers let her backtrack on a question to give her full, long explanation of the history of this topic.

I have to say, her explanation was good.  I don't know if it's correct, but it was good.  And that's saying something, as I frankly can't stand Elizabeth Warren.

One thing she continually noted is how we weren't watching these big banks like we were "small local banks".  I don't know if that's true either, but she was full of profuse praise for small local banks.

Hey, I'm a distributist and a localist, so I like small banks.  Is there an argument here for keeping small local banks local?

Seems like there is, although with a modern economy you're going to need big financial institutions.  She wasn't arguing otherwise.  It's just an interesting aspect of this.

One member of the banking committee was asked if these banks were "too big to fail" and he flat out said yes, an interesting example of political honesty.

Of note, while the banks are sort of being "bailed out", those who are really emphasizing this right now seem to fail to appreciate that FDIC insurance is being used for this, which suggests that the insured face amount of $250,000 is really way too low.  It probably ought to be more like $1,000,000 at this point.

Robert Reich, whose opinions I have a love/hate relationship with, used the opportunity, predictably, to hammer the rich, writing:

The undeserving rich

Putting the bank bailout in context

A while back I saw somebody commenting to one of Reich's Twitter feeds on this topic, which he's obsessed with, that Reich was rich himself.  According to an online source he has a net worth of $4M, which would mean, quite frankly, that in contemporary terms, he really isn't.  Shoot, half of that could be his house alone, depending upon where he lives, with the house not really being all that much.

Reich's article is an interesting one and basically amounts to an argument that post Reagan, the economy has been rigged to favor the upper 1%, more or less.  That's not how he puts it, of course, but is basically what he believes.  He notes that workers incomes haven't really gone up in 40 years.

All that is true, and from a Distributist point of view, is a nifty argument, the problem is however that the percentage of Americans who are "wealthy" has increased remarkably in the past 40 years.  Indeed, some demographers worry that the American middle class is disappearing not because the middle class is sinking into poverty, but that the upper middle class is moving into wealth.

In real terms, almost nobody, save for people on the street, something that wasn't tolerated 40 years ago, is poor the way the poor were, say, in the 1960s.  Prior to 1950, the middle class was mostly lower middle class and lived on the edge of poverty, That's just not true anymore.  And poverty was by and large worse in real terms at that time, than now.  It's easy to forget that as we have a 1) Norman Rockwell view of the past and 2) we always think our own times are worse than they really are.

Therefore, the Reich argument, the way it's made, really doesn't hold water.

Which gets us to the fact that  the best arguments for addressing the modern economy actually have to do with Social issues, as in Social Justice in the classic Pieper sense, rather than economics.  

What people like Reich, or Warren, edge up on is arguing that life was "nicer" when there was a big middle class.  That's true.  And many things that are unobtainable to even the upper middle class and the lower wealthy class were then, as there were very view super wealthy.  But lib economist don't go there as they are, frankly, just a little left of center on the capitalist scale.

Put another way, the difference between liberal economist and conservative economists is very slight.  Both main camps are fully vested in capitalism and are, beyond that, invested in the theory that a capitalist economy is its own good, rather than the distributist concept, which is another free market concept, that any economy only serves to serve people.

Hardly anyone is going to argue that in the lib or con economic camps, but it's true.  The theory is always that we do this or that for the economy, and then this or that happens to people, rather than considering what do people want, and what kind of economy best serves that.

A really interesting example of this, I'd note, is that really left wing economist essentially join industrialist in concepts that really only serve industry.  They seemingly don't know that.

For example, you'll see left wing economists, and politicians with strong interest in economic topics, argue that we need abortion so that women can work, or that we need government funded day care so that women can work.

This is really only liberal in that it takes the liberal view that pregnancy is some sort of freakish medical aberration that needs to be medicated into extermination or, if a person is so unfortunate that a child is born, it needs to be separated from the Dear Worker.  Beyond that, it's pure industrialism.

The big achievement of industrialism early on is that it took men off of family farms and family workshops and sent them off all day long to work.  In the 20th Century, it started to do the same for women.  Abortion and birth control were big industrial successes, as they meant that there was a way to separate women from biology and all those problematic little people.  Of course, it turned out that people had children anyhow, so daytime child concentration camps had to come about in order to address that.

This, really interestingly, is one area where the extreme left and industrialist have all come together.  Communists, for example, boosted the "let's warehouse all these little problems so that the mothers can toil" approach to things, whereas quite a few modern businesses have put in day cares so that they can take the "time off to raise children: . . no, just bring the little urchins into the business day care".

Here's an area where Reich and company have a real wage point, but not in the manner that they might imagine.  Part of the reason that wages have remained low over 40 years is that we've practically doubled the work force in relationship to the population.  I.e., if where you had 200 adults and 100 workers 40 years ago, now you have 200 workers.  More workers equal less pay.  

Now, I'm not saying that women shouldn't work.  I'm just saying that in our modern economy, they've been compelled to work.  And one way or another, in the modern economy, employers have had to accommodate children in the workplace where they would have resisted even 20 years ago.  

A lot of people are refusing to work now, it seems, or so the society wide rumor has it.  And that does seem to have some merit.

Chuck Todd, on the Meet the Press, noted a labor shortage in his early part of the show this pasts weekend, attributing that to a "restrictive immigration policy".  

Todd is apparently delusional.

The US has the most open immigration policy on the planet.  What the country has been working on, not too successfully, is halting illegal immigration.  That's what Todd really means.  Clamping down on illegal immigration is creating a labor shortage, in Todd's mind.

Illegal immigration actually serves to depress wages for the same reason noted above.  Illegal workers in the country means more workers, and that means lower wages.  D'uh.

All of which suggests, on this topic, that addressing illegal workers would mean a rise in wages, which we have been seeing.  Isn't that what we wanted?  Well, it is inflationary, at least temporary, but having suppressed wages for years, some of that's going to occur until it levels out, which it ultimately will.

All of that gets back to this, what do people want out of the economy?

I suspect they want something of their own.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyomin...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyomin...: 

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...hmmm. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...: Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

His principled stance on McCarthyism aside, it's just this sort of thing that makes it so you can't really be too sorry that the Legislature didn't honor Hunt this session.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservation

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...:

Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservation, Germans retake Kharkiv

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.

Demonstrating how Wyoming really hasn't changed much, the move was hugely unpopular in Wyoming, or at least was politically unpopular.  

The history of the reservation dated back to 1924 when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased a collection of ranches and amassed 37, 117 acres in the valley. The area was always spectacularly beautiful, but ranching conditions were generally poor.  Rockefeller's intended purpose from the onset was to donate the land to the Federal Government, something which of course appealed to him but much less to locals who were scraping by in industries derived from the region's natural resources.  In 1929 Rockefeller's initial donation of land went forward on a reduced basis, with only the Grand Teton National Park coming into existence.  The donation was smaller as Wyoming's Congressional representation opposed the larger donation, leaving Rockefeller with 32,000 acres and an annual tax bill of $13,000.

In 1942 Rockefeller informed Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that if the project did not go forwad, he would sell the land.  This resulted in President Roosevelt's Federal reservation.

On March 19, Wyoming's Congressman Frank A. Barret introduced a bill to return the land to National Forest status.  In Congress, he based his argument on preserving the grazing permits in the former Federal domain that was part of the reservation.  Teton County Commissioner Clifford Hansen, who would later become Governor, and whose Mead family contributed a later Governor and other significant state politicians, also spoke against, although he was directly impacted, holding grazing permits in the area.

The bill passed both houses of Congress, but Roosevelt issued a pocket veto that contained a memorandum stating:

The effect of this bill would be to deprive the people of the United States of the benefits of an area of national significance from the standpoint of naturalistic, historic, scientific, and recreational values,

Campaigning by conservationist deterred any further legal effort to abolish the reservation, and its being opened to grazing in 1945 due to wartime conditions somewhat allayed local fears.  In 1950 the controversy was resolved through S. 3409 which merged the monument and neighboring national park, but also provided: no further extension or establishment of national parks or monuments in Wyoming may be undertaken except by express authorization of the Congress."  This did not prevent later wilderness designations, which have continued to be opposed in ways that can be argued to be short-sighted.

Lex Anteinternet: Governor Gordon Finalizes USDA Disaster Declaration Request

Lex Anteinternet: Governor Gordon Finalizes USDA Disaster Declaratio...:  

Governor Gordon Finalizes USDA Disaster Declaration Request

 Governor Gordon Finalizes USDA Disaster Declaration Request

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Gordon has submitted his U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) request for a Secretarial disaster designation as indicated in a February 20, 2023, news release. 

In his letter to the USDA, Governor Gordon noted that Wyoming’s winter season started early, and the culminating impacts of sustained cold, wind, and snowfall have caused significant distress to the livestock industry across the state. Access to traditional winter grazing resources has become dire, as well, because many ranch, county, and BLM roads are drifting shut and, even when cleared, continue to re-drift because of high winds, the Governor’s letter explained. 

The Governor’s Office, in partnership with local, state and federal agencies and impacted ag producers, worked collaboratively to determine losses, the timeframe and the geographic scale of impact. Data obtained through the National Weather Service’s event tracking system reveals that 66.5 percent of the time, from January 1 to February 27, Wyoming was under some combination of Winter Storm Warnings, Blizzard Warnings, Winter Weather Advisories, and High Wind Warnings–far outpacing any other state in the lower 48. 

Underscoring the need for federal assistance, Governor Gordon’s letter noted, “State, county, local, and individual resources have been deployed and are being shared between entities for snow removal, but there is too much volume and wind to keep roads open and passable to gain access to livestock.” Additionally, Governor Gordon’s administration has been working closely with our local Farm Service Agency office to identify the areas of greatest impact and corresponding needs of the ag community. 

This is good news, but it would have been better news if the Governor had declared an emergency two weeks ago and deployed National Guard engineering equipment at that time to assist in rural snow removal. 

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 Season Begins.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 S...: 

Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 Season Begins.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season: 

So on to 2023!

I decided to go ice fishing today.

My daughter is the real ice fishing aficionado in our family.  I had some experience with it as a boy, but oddly enough, my father didn't really engage in much ice fishing.  He was a dedicated fisherman, so that's surprising.  Indeed, he probably was slightly more of a fisherman than a hunter, and I in contrast I am definitely more of a hunter than a fisherman.  I know that his father did both, as we all do, but I don't know how that scale balanced.  I've really only heard about my father's father in regard to bird hunting, although I know that he fished the streams as well, like we all do.

Anyhow, back when I was young, in the 70s, I recall ice fishing at Alcova, which I'd be a bit afraid to do today, but it wasn't very often.  I also recall people parking their trucks on the ice, which I'd never do today.  My father chopped a hole in the ice with a spade, which I don't recall anyone doing since that time.  

It was fun.

We have a hand auger.  Much better than a spade.  And little ice fishing poles, which isn't what my father used.

I didn't make it out last year.  I hunted geese until the end of January, not terribly successfully, and it warmed up too much to ice fish.

Not this year.

In fact, today, going out by myself, as my daughter lives in Laramie now, I found myself flagged down going in, after I passed the snow plow.  A really nice fellow I know, having called him as a witness on the Reservation, and a city councilman, formally one of my kid's religious education teachers, informed me the road was drifted in.  I thanked them and pulled off

The dog wasn't pleased.

The dog believes that he's integral to fishing, and that without him, the endeavor will fail.  He's very serious about his hunting occupation, and fishing is of course fish hunting.

I pulled off to let him wee. .. okay and I needed to wee too.  After that, in spite of being warned, I drove down the road toward the lake.

Oh man, was it ever drifted in.

I went back down the road and met a fisherman from Douglas near the highway.  He was waiting for me for a road report.  He'd driven a long ways and had a lot of poles, a true ice fisherman.  I gave the road report to him. He decided to try Alcova.  I decided to try a different high mountain lake.

And yes, I'm not going to mention it.

Before I left for that one, I received a call from my son's girlfriend. She's a dedicated fly fisherman, a rare quality in a girlfriend and one to be seriously admired.  My pickup, which my son is driving, she related, had been rear ended in a Laramie blizzard.  I have his truck right now as it's having a complete mechanical breakdown.

Turns out it wasn't bad.

Couldn't make that other high mountain lake either.  It was also drifted in. 

Oh well.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season

Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season: 

The 2022 Season

The 2022 hunting season has ended.

In 2022, when I wrote about the 2021 season, I started off with this:

 It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.

And that statement was true once again for 2022, but for different reasons, a lot of which had nothing much to do with the hunting season itself.

That's because 2022 has been the year of the field of Medicine, or age, or perhaps lifestyle, or whatever, catching up with me.

Self portrait, and a bad one, turkey hunting.  I was wearing a coat under this coat, and frankly I don't look like I was feeling particularly well when this photo was taken.

In the Spring I wasn't feeling well, which after much delay and finally responding to a demand from Long Suffering Spouse, caused me to go into the doctor's office, which lead in turn to a prescription for some medicine.  I'll spare you the details, but like most medicines and me, I didn't really respond terribly well to them physically. They did their job, but they also made me a bit ill, and made me ill just in time for Spring Turkey Season.  I hunted turkeys, as I always do, and I did see some, but I never got up on them (I tend to stalk them, rather than lure them in).  I did get a turkey call, which I'd never had before, but that failed to bring any in.  

A couple of weeks later, by which times things had warmed up enough to wear my Park Service dress campaign hat, the replacement for my long serving but now lost M1911 campaign hat.  I miss the old hat.

I also had the joy, and I won't detail it, of being pretty sick while hunting.  Something I rarely have experienced.

It was fun anyhow, but not something for a subsistence hunter to write home about.

That takes us to fishing season, and here too, for one reason or another, I just didn't get out over the summer as much as usual.  Indeed, "didn't get out as much as usual" was the theme of the year.

I fished the river several times, and one of the mountain streams I fish.  I attempted to take my daughter and her boyfriend down a significant local canyon, where I'm sure there are big fish, but we failed at that.  I hadn't scouted the route, and ours was pretty impassable.

I did try something I have not for several years, however, which was fishing from a kayak.

The doctor's visit mentioned earlier lead to a colonoscopy, which I wasn't too quick to get set up.  That ended up getting scheduled for early Fall.  And that lead to a major surgery in October.

The North American Retriever getting a cool drink from a mountain stream while blue grouse hunting.

Prior to that, I got out for blue grouse, but failed to see a single one.  I never made it out sage chicken hunting.  I didn't draw antelope, but my son did, and I went out with him.  None of us drew limited deer, but my daughter and I went out opening morning and nearly got a couple of really good deer in a general deer area until some fool blasted right by us in a truck, scaring them off.  We went back out a couple of weeks later and my son got a nice deer in a very distant area.  So at least that was a partial success.  

I went out for antelope with my son, and he was successful.

I drew an elk tag, but I only got out twice, once before surgery, and once after.

Surgery put me out of action in a major way for well over a month.  When I got back on my feet, only waterfowl was open.  

It's been a pretty good waterfowl season, however.  The weather has been right for it (lousy) and lots of waterfowl have been in the area.  I've shot more geese this year than I ever have before.

I thought about closing this entry out with a quote from Kristin Lavransdottir about Lavran, when he last rode away, or the video clip from No Country For Old Men at the ending with the sheriff protagonist is recalling his father.  Instead, I'm just going to note that I still don't really feel up to speed, but I'm putting in for everything.