What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Saving Rural America

NonmetroCounties520.jpg

The darkened counties of this 2007 map are losing population. America's small towns and rural counties have been declining for decades, a trend which seems to have no end in sight. As rural America empties, nothing at all seems to be filling the void. Main Street, USA, is for rent or for sale at bargain prices. 40,000,000 acres of American farmland are now fallow. The rural "brain drain", in which the best and the brightest are constantly migrating to the cities, has become cliche. Our rural areas are increasingly plagued with high unemployment, substance abuse, and other pathologies.

This is a disaster for the United States. Small town and rural life is uniquely suited to fostering traditional mores and habits of mind, to inspiring regional and familial loyalties, and to living the Christian virtues amongst neighbors whom you did not choose, but who were chosen for you before you were born. A small town has a personality, like a man, and must be accepted like a crazy uncle with warts and all. In the rural districts one cannot pretend to be independent: you need your neighbors, whether or not you happen to like them, and over time you learn to like them well enough. The mainstays of a traditional life - ritual, familiarity, memory, transparency, patriarchy, personal loyalty - can flourish only in settled communities organized on a human scale. The demise of such communities reduces American culture to that of an urban sit-com.

Can anything be done about this? Should anyone care?

Massive economic and cultural forces lay behind the trend. Government, technology, finance, and entertainment drive everything. As rural America embraces "the American Dream", there ceases to be anything especially compelling about remaining in such places. The American Dream, as it has been sold to us all, isn't likely to be realized in a small town. The great centers of population and commerce offer much more in the way of "opportunity" (translation: a chance to get rich), and even if you don't get rich, well, there are plenty of consoling diversions. But if rural America is going to be saved, it will need to exchange "the American Dream" for the reality it already owns - a place to call home.

By far the most critical need for America's rural counties is children. Most large cities are always receiving migrants and are not much harmed by low birthrates. But small towns in rural districts, due to higher rates of out-migration, need higher birthrates to survive. 2.1 children may be "population neutral" for the developed world in general, but for most small towns it means rapid and inevitable population decline. Without a dramatic reversal of the present low birthrates in rural counties, continued decline and ultimate catastrophe is absolutely guaranteed.

Finally, there needs to be a revival of regional affections and loyalties, which paradoxically is going to mean relocation for a few regional-minded folks. Being a regional loyalist in a sea of cosmopolitans - or even in a community of transient American dream chasers - is not going to do anyone much good. We are essentially starting over. Americans of traditionalist sensibilities, if they don't already have roots in places with stable and otherwise desirable regional identities, might want to establish them in such places for the sake of their progeny - even if it means living as an exile for the remainder of their own lives.

Comments (75)

Seems like the midwest plains are hit hardest. Maybe it's the absurd weather: heatstroke in summer, sub-zero in winter, and hail in between. Did I mention the constant wind? I lived in Kansas for a year, and I can't say I miss it.

More seriously, if you want a job that pays anything you have to move to a city. Going back to Kansas, there were a few settlements with a whole lot of nothing in between them. There were small towns all over the place, but where do you work in these places? Maybe mega-farms just exacerbate this, since as fewer people own more of the farmland, that means less people are farming. Of course, even if you don't farm then there's not much for you. America used to actually make things, but we don't do much of that anymore. In Wichita, there were a few aerospace factories that made up the bulk of the blue collar jobs, and not much else outside of that. Tom Piatak says it better than I can though.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2010/04/21/bringing-back-the-old-economy/

I'm an engineer, and you can get an engineering job at a smaller company in a smaller town. But statistically, you're far more likely to end up in a city. I've gone from Tallahassee, FL, to Wichita, KS, now to Hampton Roads, VA; getting bigger every time. If you want the jobs, you better get used to living in a city.

It seems to me that the jobs issue is nearly the whole of the problem, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence. Even in the small city I live in (which seems to me a near-perfect size), we've had plenty of people move away to larger urban centers because of losing a job here. I assume (with some fears) that my own daughters will end up living in bigger cities than this eventually, because either they (if they do not marry young) or their husbands will need to do that in order to make a living. Not particularly to get rich, either.

Either the destruction of small town and rural America is caused/abetted/facilitated by our political economy, or it is not.

Obviously, it is, which leaves two options, really: a)these processes are inexorable, the outcomes of process at once still deeper, and based more broadly in American society, or b)these processes are, to a significant degree, foreseeable products of decisions taken both collectively and individually, and thus contingent, artifactual, and reversible to some degree.

If the former, this is all pointless nostalgia, in the invidious sense of the term. It will be, in that case, no more justifiable that the process should be halted here and opposed to there, and those inclined to complain when it affects this have no warrant to reproach those who protest when it affects that.

If the latter, then it is fruitless and vain to protest that only one generative source of these processes should be addressed by those concerned to preserve small-town and rural America, and the goods of human flourishing they make possible.

A great many Americans should thus either fall silent before the onrush of modernity as we know it, or begin discussing concrete alterations of lifestyles and the foundational architecture of our political economy. Anything else is whining, and unserious special pleading.

Jeff, those areas have been losing population for decades; that they were populated at all was the result of poorly conceived settlement policies or the predictable effects of resource depletion.

There was a time when one could roll a wheelbarrow out into the Nevada desert and scoop out pretty rich silver ore. There was also the blizzard of '86 which devastated the cattle industry. Some of those counties hit their population peaks in the 1860 - 80s and have been losing population since the then.

(There are many old cemeteries in the the west and they can be very interesting. Child mortality was very high given the number of headstones - one set I recall was from a cemetery in Austin, Nevada where a man buried two children and his wife in the space of a year.)

Attempting to dry land farm the plains with 160 (or even 320) acre parcels was just dumb. I assume the population loss in better parts of the farm belt is due to consolidation - with modern machinery and methods, even farming a 1,000 acres is a part time job for some crops.

We shouldn't subsidize economic inefficiency.

For the record, I live on a dead end road off a dead end road in a rural county and like the tree/cattle, sheep, horse/people ratio but folks are folks everywhere and the United States is an 80% urban nation and is only going to get more so. There are advantages to living in an unincorporated area in a largish county with not too many people but living in a small town proper can be a real pain. No ideology is proof against busybodies and for some reason they seem to gravitate to things like city councils and condo boards.

Child mortality was very high given the number of headstones - one set I recall was from a cemetery in Austin, Nevada where a man buried two children and his wife in the space of a year.)

Yet another reason for the high birthrate back then: many children died early. Also, children were, for the most part, seen as a consolation for the parents, since there weren't many other people around and a house full of kids, while noisy, is lively.

Nowadays, our ipods are seen as our consolation, sigh...

The Chicken

I don't think we are dealing with a fecundity issue. Were more children to be born, more children would merely leave for greener pastures or I suppose grayer concrete in this case. I agree with Maximos that this is almost purely a political economy question. The abandonment of rural areas is not accidental. Were it not for social security, I think the change would be more drastic. In my area, the servicing of the elderly is a nontrivial part of the economy. Some days, I think it's pushing 50% of the economy.

Increased (even skyrocketing) urbanization is a fact not just of American life, but of life everywhere on earth. It's one of the key factors of analysis in a lot of longitudinal, grand strategic documents. It is linked with an overall rise in social pathologies of every kind, and I really don't think this is merely a 1-to-1 tradeoff where we can say, well, rural towns have their disadvantages too.

It's obvious that they do, and it's wearying to have to constantly make such obvious concessions (I'm a conservative--we don't believe in utopias). But it's not at all obvious that their annihilation in favor of proliferating megacities is basically a wash. That's especially considering the qualitative differences in the kind of busybodies you get in a large city. Having lived in both, it has been my experience that I'd rather deal with the petty tyrannies of a nosy neighbor or a self-serving son of the sheriff, who at the very least have a common memory and a shared sensibility about the basic goods of life, one that is not entirely a question of power and resources. They do not regard you and your family as part of a multicultural morass that must be managed at a safe distance. They speak your language, literally and figuratively, and that matters rather a lot.

Certainly I prefer them to than the sort of busybodies one finds in, say, the Washington, DC metro area--the concentration of their power, their total estrangement from the people they're trying to "manage," their alienation from the direct affects of their behavior, their utter lack of accountability, the fact that they can destroy you without even having to endure the inconvenience of looking you in the eye.

All that said, I have no special insight into what can be done about it. It's an outgrowth of processes (not all of them "impersonal") that have been going on for some centuries, and so I continue on with my lifelong dream of returning to the country, just like everybod else these days.

It seems to me that the jobs issue is nearly the whole of the problem, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence.

I think the jobs issue is indeed a very large part of the problem - it may well be my own problem in the near future - and I didn't mean to imply that everyone who leaves a small town for employment in the cities is looking to get rich. But it's definitely not the whole story. Quite a few do leave to get rich, shunning more humble opportunities at home. And many more leave because they are looking for fun. I see these attitudes all the time among the bored, public-school educated young people in my own little town. They have been raised on the same TV and entertainment fare as everyone else; they have imbibed a materialistic philosophy of existence in the classrooms; they have at most one or two siblings and few solid relationships; they are bored silly - what's to keep them here? In the cities, at least, they have not exhausted their (falsely limited) possibilities.

The jobs issue is one that I don't know to address on a macro level. I just assume the modern economy is going to do what it's going to do. Even if I had some bright ideas about how to fix things, there just isn't anyone listening. At least not to me. But I'm open to studying the question and coming to a conclusion eventually.

The question is, what can we do about the problem, if anything? It's rather the same dilemma that traditionalists face in every other sphere of life: the good things that were once just inherited and assumed must now be very specifically chosen. And in the act of choosing, something authentic is lost and new dangers threaten. The only real solution I see on the horizon would lead to a modified version of intentional communities. But intentional communities are not fully traditional: i.e., they do not create an environment in which people manifestly need tradition in order to survive.

Either the destruction of small town and rural America is caused/abetted/facilitated by our political economy, or it is not. Obviously, it is ...

Yes, I agree.

... which leaves two options, really: a)these processes are inexorable, the outcomes of process at once still deeper, and based more broadly in American society, or b)these processes are, to a significant degree, foreseeable products of decisions taken both collectively and individually, and thus contingent, artifactual, and reversible to some degree.

I vote for B, cautiously and with qualifications. The degree to which the process is reversible, realistically, without causing greater evils, is unknown but probably quite small. I'm prepared for the whole of the American countryside to be emptied of civilization save for a remnant of deliberate communities which survive by sheer force of will.

If the latter, then it is fruitless and vain to protest that only one generative source of these processes should be addressed by those concerned to preserve small-town and rural America, and the goods of human flourishing they make possible.

I don't think I understand you here, Maximos. What is the "one generative source" to which you refer?

We shouldn't subsidize economic inefficiency.

Of course we should, when the common good is economically inefficient. What a ridiculous thing to say.

[Updated: apologies for the terse latter sentence. I'll learn some manners eventually...]

I don't think we are dealing with a fecundity issue. Were more children to be born, more children would merely leave for greener pastures or I suppose grayer concrete in this case.

M.Z., I think fecundity is unquestionably a part of the equation. If, say, 50% of one family's offspring are likely to leave their small town, it matters whether that family has two children or ten children. The family with ten children, more than likely, will have at least four or five of them stay close to home. And the children who leave will have more reasons to return someday.

I don't think I understand you here, Maximos. What is the "one generative source" to which you refer?

I'm generalizing, arguing that there are two fundamental classes of causes of rural/small-town decline: the cultural, arising from changes in mores and life expectations, and the politico-economic, arising from deliberate choices as to how we will govern ourselves, in the narrow political sense, and in the economic sense. Obviously, the two classes of factors are interrelated, but since this is a blog post, and not a thesis, I don't propose to explore the manifold ways in which they are related and yet distinct. Conservatives "get" the former class of causes, most of the time. They'll tell us that Americans are too materialistic to have larger families, that the "American Dream" can be corrupting and degrading, that perhaps families should make do with less in order to have one parent remain at home to raise, and perhaps educate, the children. All well and good, I say. Conservatives generally don't "get" the second class of causes, and tend to resist, to the point of absurdity and self-contradiction, those who propose that we actually change the laws that have facilitated the very things that occasion their complaints.

It is my argument that conservatives should either embrace the imperative of substantive alterations in American political economy, to the end of supporting the forms of life that uphold the values and goods they treasure, or cease indulging in nostalgia, and pointless caterwauling about everything that has been, is being, and will yet be, lost. Fish or cut bait. Intentional communities are all well and good; I'm very sympathetic to MacIntyre, and I live near Amish country, and harbour some admiration for their cultural tenacity and virtues; but creating intentional communities will never get us any further than our own version or what the Amish have, if it even gets that far - which I suspect it cannot, because our own cultural traditions, our veneration of Western high culture, and so forth, preclude a complete retreat from the broader culture. Perhaps that's a broader argument, however. I'm more magnanimous than my critics, who, as I've broached these issues over the past five years, have both tried to pick and choose what they'd like to retain of the politico-economic forces destroying the ways of life they claim to value and have accused me of inconsistency, arguing that my recommendations are mere lifestyle affectations, just like liberal lifestyle politics. I'll not rehash all of that, since it's both tedious, and embodies a fallacy that irks me greatly. Suppose, arguendo, that intentional communities really do presuppose the same liberal/modern cultural politics of of voluntaristic self. So what? The resultant intentional communities would still be better than what their adherents left behind, yes? The trouble is that this is all they would be: lifestyle communities within a hostile, dominant culture, the very structural forces of which, even apart from the cultural crap like porn and TV and all the other scheiss, would relentlessly war against the conditions of their possibility. The best case scenario then is that intentional communities ride it out, bitter year by bitter year, waiting for the dominant culture to implode, so that they can pick up the pieces. Not much of a best case, in my estimation; in that case, I think Moldbug's predictions are more probable than not: technicals (synecdoche, folks). And in that case, the culture dies anyway.

Conservatives believe, or at least claim to believe, that culture and such are tacit, embodied in practices, disciplines, modes of experience, traditions handed down, seldom articulated by philosophers, all of which form the souls of persons in community. And in refusing to countenance reform of our political economy, by shouting "socialism!" or "unintended consequences!" every time the blasted subject is broached, conservatives are leaving on the table a large percentage of the 'practices' that form modern American souls. As I've said, they're entitled to their judgments, and to their quavering terrors that any attempts to reform our political economy will lead to some version of the French Revolution, or Leninism. What I don't think they're entitled to do is to leave on the table a political economy directly inimical to the goods they're desirous of securing, and then grouse about the consequences. Want the goods of multinational corporations? Don't complain when the towns empty out, and the cities burgeon, and everyone moves away. It's like sex without pregnancy.

Maximos, thanks for the explanation. If I had read more of your posts over the years, you wouldn't have needed to do that.

I agree with you as regards the politico-economic contribution to our cultural malaise. But I lack conviction as to any definite course of action. Some of the more popular proposals among distributists strike me as likely to cause greater evils than they remedy - but I could be wrong about that.

Whether the relationship between culture and political economy is symbiotic or synergistic, from a Christian perspective I think we must hold that culture is the more sovereign and that economic determinism is not an option. Nevertheless, it is true that the crushing weight of the present system makes any large-scale revival of Christian culture unlikely. Until such a time as our culture is re-evangelized and converted, or at least has some momentum in that direction, it might make more sense to focus our energies on creative ways for tradition to live within or around the political-economy we're stuck with. The possibilities of organized secession, in varying modes and degrees, should be explored as well.

We shouldn't subsidize economic inefficiency.

Of course we should, when the common good is economically inefficient.

Thing is, though, Jeff, who is "we"? If it were the Jeff Culbreath Foundation subsidizing economically inefficient small-town communities, I wouldn't worry too much, though I don't know if such subsidized small-town communities would really be the same thing in the end as what you would like them to be. But it's much worse than that, because the "we" is going to be the American government, or at least the state government, and I believe that it's pretty much inevitable that that sort of subsidization will lead to corruption of what is subsidized and in the end to a kind of slavery. Look what it's done for public education, for example. One can say until the cows come home that there is "nothing wrong in principle with public subsidy of education," and that may be true, but the empirical disaster that it's been in fact ought to be a warning to us all not to rush to advocate that "we" (aka, the government) subsidize this or that good thing. This, by the way, is why I oppose private school educational vouchers.

I think I agree with Maximos, but I'm never quite sure.

Thing is, though, Jeff, who is "we"? If it were the Jeff Culbreath Foundation subsidizing economically inefficient small-town communities, I wouldn't worry too much ... But it's much worse than that, because the "we" is going to be the American government, or at least the state government, and I believe that it's pretty much inevitable that that sort of subsidization will lead to corruption of what is subsidized and in the end to a kind of slavery.

Lydia, I believe you have unintentionally put your finger on the problem: there is no "we" anymore, at least no "we" that recognizes and believes enough in the common good to support it corporately. I'd like to see that change. I'd like to see it start right here at home. Off the top I can think of one example, our city arts commission, which has accomplished some very good things, through subsidies, that would not have been accomplished otherwise.

It isn't government funding of public education that has ruined education. We get some of that money from a charter school and put it to good use. We'd never be able to afford music lessons without it. What has ruined government funded education is bad educational philosophy, false principles, and a public so culturally fractured and "diverse" that the good is actively excluded so as not to offend.

State governments also help to fund college educations. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, so long as the product is good and the recipients are worthy. I've seen many people and communities benefit from this but it also helps to drain the population of small towns. So, why not take that money and divert it to small town entrepreneurs? That might help. I'm just throwing it out there. It may be wise or unwise, but I see no reason to oppose the idea in principle.

"40,000,000 acres of American farmland are now fallow."

What I mean by subsidizing inefficiency for example is how much of that acreage is really viable farmland? Or, if viable farms are measured in sections/farmer, it doesn't matter how many children a couple has, only one is going to get the farm and the others are going to have to move. Also we might note how the brown band matches the Ogallala Aquifer which is being rapidly depleted. This was productive prairie until it was plowed and it became the Dust Bowl after several decades of "farming".

Maximos refers to the political economy and others wax eloquent on the loss of values; well, there is virtue in admitting error.

Jeff writes, "the good things that were once just inherited and assumed must now be very specifically chosen."

The reality is that much of the brown and green were over-settled originally and should never have seen a plow or a cow. Settlement of those areas were a gross misallocation of capital - both human and material. The "values" involved were conquest and unwarranted optimism as well as enriching the handful of folks running the railroads. For much of these areas we aren't dealing with long spans of time. Land was settled and farms, ranches, and mines went bust in a few years or a couple of generations at most. Forming towns in these areas only to have them abandoned is typical.

This is basic politics and economics. Folks settled those areas for political and economic reasons and are leaving them for the same reasons - no jobs and the Native Americans are long gone (or building casinos) - the rest is ahistorical idealism and sentimentality.

"Certainly I prefer them to than the sort of busybodies one finds in, say, the Washington, DC metro area--the concentration of their power, their total estrangement from the people they're trying to "manage," their alienation from the direct affects of their behavior, their utter lack of accountability, the fact that they can destroy you without even having to endure the inconvenience of looking you in the eye."

Dead is dead. Conflating the personal abuses of power by the local political and police organs in a small, relatively isolated community with impersonal policies (often dishonestly represented and poorly understood) with which one merely disagrees is sort of interesting.

The case against country life: "A Wagner Matinee", by Willa Cather.

Speaking as a native of Red Willow County, Nebraska (my grandparents on my father's side were share-croppers who eventually saved enough money to buy a farm of their own there), I can testify to her good eye for detail: "the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door."

That might help. I'm just throwing it out there. It may be wise or unwise, but I see no reason to oppose the idea in principle.

Well, but there is a principle: subsidiarity. It is damaging to colleges and universities, and to other small communities, to have the federal government subsidizing (and thus regulating) those institutions. It is less damaging to have the state government do it, but only by a modest margin. Every state education bureaucracy in this country is stodgy, married to poor psychology, and anti-religion.

Now, if you want to limit the governments involved to the town, city, and county - local communities - yeah, I can go along with that.

The trend of moving from the rural to the city is as old as Athens and Rome: in both places, you had to have land to vote, but those who had land eventually lived more in town than not, because that's where the action and fun was. And in both places (as well as ancient Thebes, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Antioch, you had huge urban populations in their heyday, draining the rural areas of talent and excess population. The cities have more give, more flexibility, because they have more wealth to spare. That excess wealth automatically attracts those without prospects in the countryside.

We are not seeing a new trend. The countryside can produce new wealth only in proportion to land under cultivation (any increase in productivity will automatically be copied by everyone else soon, making the product cheaper, not bringing in lots of new wealth, at least in monetary terms). That land is always limited. In the cities, though, the cycle looks different: there are thousands of different ways of generating a living, and every dollar "earned" cycles through hundreds of hands. When you have topped out on what the land can be made to produce, anybody left over on the farm MUST go to the city.

While I agree with Maximos that there is a significant governmental and political function responsible for the loss of rural jobs (and other disturbances in the rural cycles), the root issue is deeper and older than the government we have now, or the economy we have.

Also we might note how the brown band matches the Ogallala Aquifer which is being rapidly depleted. This was productive prairie until it was plowed and it became the Dust Bowl after several decades of "farming".

Both due at least in part to bad farming practices -- so we need more farming elsewhere, not less.

I can't speak for the Midwest, but I lived in Mt. Shasta in the 70's and 80's and had to leave with my family because there wasn't enough work there.

One of the reasons for lack of work was that all the lumber mills were shut down, and logging companies were put out of business by the eco-freaks, Sierra Club et al. Plus, 50% of the land in the West is owned by the Feds.

This country thrived under what Steve Sailor calls "affordable family formation". Jobs paid well and were plentiful and land was cheap and easy to acquire so men married very young and produced large families in colonial America.

The Feds have pretty much shut down resource development in the rural West, and they own most of the land. That makes it tough to earn a living off the land.

Horse logging could support thousands of men pretty well, but it can't be done. One man with a couple of horses (cost - $2.50 each a day to feed), a chainsaw, a portable, band saw mill, and a flatbed truck, and you're in business.

Yes, we need fewer people to produce ore, oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals and so forth, but more people could manage in rural areas if they had the land and fewer regulations and taxes laid on them.

Your average American pays about 75% of his income in taxes or payroll entitlements. That's when you count all the hidden taxes, fees, regulation costs, and all the business taxes you pay every time a good changes hands.

BTW, thousands of forest burn every year due to Fed mismanagement while there has not been a single major, destructive fire on the tens of thousands of private forest.

Most folks know their own advantages, their own best good, better than we know those advantages. If folks are moving to urban centers and leaving behind the rural lives they once had, and if they keep with those lives once they reach the cities, then THAT is the common good, and it does not need to be subsidized.

Maybe, Michael, but speaking as someone very sympathetic to the free market and very hesitant about subsidizing whole lifestyles (I think it'll change and corrupt the lifestyles anyway), I think Mark Butterworth's points are worth heeding. How many of these moves are a result of actions by government that every free-market-friendly person should disapprove of?

Lydia,
I didn't mention the free market. I mentioned only that folks generally know better than others do about their own best good. That's the case whether they take into account things done by government or things not done by anyone at all. I'm making a knowledge point, not a government action vs. free market point.

The exodus from rural life takes into account a whole host of reasons: some governmental, some not; some economic, some not; some cultural, some not; some medical, some not; some familial, some not; some climatic, some not; etc.

Interestingly, when they get to the cities, some of them congregate in urban small towns -- neighborhoods -- often a bit like what they left behind. Every major city has them: Chinatown, Germantown, little Italy, etc.

Well, sure, people "take into account" things and decide their best interests _given_ those things. But that doesn't mean that they always "want" to leave the rural area in the most interesting sense of "want." If somebody is heart-broken at leaving his home in a rural area but has to do so because the logging business he enjoyed has been put out of business by misguided government environmentalism, then this isn't what I would call a "natural" movement to the cities on the part of the rural inhabitants. And if a great small town turns into a ghost town for the same reason, then I say that the government has something to answer for, because it didn't sufficiently value that town, those jobs, and those people. And there's an important sense in which the people who left didn't do so "freely" in the sense of having a mere _preference_ for living somewhere non-rural.

Lydia,
Right, government has things to answer for. I don't deny it.

But I wasn't making a personal freedom vs government intervention point (just like I wasn't making a marketplace point). I was making a knowledge point. In a world of ever-changing and immeasurably complex human conditions, we ought to presume that folks know their own best good better than others know them. The so-called "common good," therefore, is found best by letting folks make their own choices, their own trade offs, their own compromises. Government just doesn't have the knowledge needed to pull that off. Centralized decision making, in this case, is inescapably plagued by ignorance -- both in altering the original conditions and in trying to set right the unintended consequences they unleashed when they intervened in the first place. In short (if we want to make this a government action point), government intervention is not going to be the cure for government intervention.

"In a world of ever-changing and immeasurably complex human conditions, we ought to presume that folks know their own best good better than others know them."

I don't really think this is accurate. People constantly sell their inheritances for messes of pottage. George MacDonald said that God won't give you a stone for bread, even when you mistake the former for the latter and ask for it. The government and the corporations are not so understanding.

Metaphorically speaking, people mistake stones for bread all the time. That is why prophets are needed: to tell folks, "Excuse me, but that's not a French baguette you're about to bite into, it's a slab of granite."

The Southern Agrarians tried to raise this very alarm back in the 30's. Not enough people listened, or maybe, as Andrew Lytle said looking back on it, they didn't yell loud enough.

"Government just doesn't have the knowledge needed to pull that off. Centralized decision making, in this case, is inescapably plagued by ignorance -- both in altering the original conditions and in trying to set right the unintended consequences they unleashed when they intervened in the first place."

But this learning curve unavoidable. Conservatism is based on creating just-so stories that seek to avoid that uncomfortable fact and that is why we keep repeating the same mistakes. This may have started when we figured out how to domesticate plants and non-human animals or when some hominid saw the potential of knapped flint but the two rules remain the same: Left to individual actions, humans will destroy the commons and certain commons cannot be privatized.

All decision making is plagued by ignorance - private more so than public and local more than central (there is wisdom in a multitude of councilors). Travel north from Jeff's home and you come upon land still scarred by private hydraulic mining way over a century ago. The state of California, not local communities stepped in here and banned it before more farmland was destroyed. Go 500 miles south and the beginnings of the Angeles National Forest was set aside by Benjamin Harrison back in the 1880s because development was threatening what was then the only source of water for the communities in the San Gabriel Valley.

Individuals are too often are forced to live in the short term where ignorance, greed, and basic survival rule. We have just lived though another major cycle of this and yet nothing seem to have been learned (easier to believe Acorn caused it all, I guess).

Mark, forests grow about 5% a year. Back in the period to which you refer private forests had been over cut to take advantage of Asian demand on the assumption that the National Forests would be available for another Great Barbecue. Once again board room greed and shortsightedness screwed the little guy. Environmental concerns may have hastened the pain but pain was coming regardless.

I don't know if you've been in a mill lately but most of it is automated. Here and there there is a guy behind a computer screen and a bunch of levers - logs go in and sticks come out the other end. The big trees are mostly gone and the new mills couldn't handle them anyway.

In logging, mining and farming - commodity extraction after all - we still come down to acres/tons and machines. Just as a boring rig replaces a lot of guys with picks and hammers and an air conditioned combine sends folks to the cities looking for work so does a feller-buncher replace a lot of guys with chain saws who, in turn, replaced even more guys with axes. The jobs that were lost in logging were doomed by over cutting by private corporate choice and cut cycles that allow for mechanization.

Small scale horse logging is cool but again we are dealing with acres/individual. The best and easiest harvested land is already in private hands so we already have a problem. My neighbor's portable mill has been a great source of sawdust for my berries but he has 140 acres of forest and it's part time work as it is for the guy behind me with 120 acres. The mill is great for boutique (timbers, etc.) and personal use but there is too much waste to compete with LP sized operations. BTW, my canine companion can go to the vet in my truck but a down horse means a house call and that meter starts ticking at $300 around here. It's easy to under-estimate the costs of a small operation and over-estimate the number of folks who could actually make it work.

"In short (if we want to make this a government action point), government intervention is not going to be the cure for government intervention."

Only if we are incapable of learning. But if that is the case then unrestrained markets will also continue to screw things up and in that case we are doomed. That we are now not in a Great Depression is evidence that we can learn. It is why we had a bailout under a conservative Republican president and why we had a stimulus bill under a liberal (sort of) Democratic president (and would have had one had the Republican won). We also seem to have learned that unregulated financial markets don't work and hopefully we soon learn that a steeply progressive tax is needed.


Al, it seems to me that you are conflating conservatism with libertarianism, which is warranted least of all at this website.

Jeff -- thanks for putting this up. I am at a loss as to how to restore the small towns of our republic, though fully convinced of the wisdom and justice of restoring them.

Rob G -- your April 24 2:20pm comment is awesome on stilts.

Al, I would be interested to hear your opinion of the Southern Agrarians. Based on your past remarks, they are men who might have deserved execution, being nostalgists for the Confederacy's treason, right?

I think it's a little odd that at one time, Al, you're saying that rural life is economically inefficient and deserves to die and in another comment you seem to be agreeing with those who would preserve such a thing as a "commons" which capitalism would otherwise foolishly destroy. Or is your later comment on "commons" merely a general one, and you wouldn't apply the principles there to small-town America, which you don't see as worth preserving?

Rob,
Nobody is saying that people don't make mistakes. Of course they do. Some are whoppers. But the track record for achieving personal advantage and happiness is better when folks seek it on their own than when the government does it for them. Why? Because they know their desires, resources, conditions, abilities, and prospects far better than do politicians and bureaucrats.

But this learning curve unavoidable. Conservatism is based on creating just-so stories that seek to avoid that uncomfortable fact and that is why we keep repeating the same mistakes.

Hahehahahhehaw!!! Al, that was really, really funny.

I will grant you that some conservatives have made great mistakes. Almost as great as the ones liberals make repeatedly. But I will not grant that conservatism is based on creating just-so stories. And I certainly will NOT grant that any "story" telling by conservatives is more likely to be "just-so" than liberals' concoctions. That's frankly just bizarre to even suggest it.

Left to individual actions, humans will destroy the commons

The _tendency_ is there, true. But balancing it: unless it is being fought tooth and nail to keep it a small beast, government will swallow the commons, destroy it, AND destroy the private goods. THAT tendency is just as certain.

Otherwise, though, I actually thought that you made a couple good points in your comment. To have an economy that "allowed" more men to remain on the farms, mines, or logging trails, would require on its face a repudiation of increases in productivity by machinery.

Michael, I certainly don't endorse "government as the answer to government," except insofar as we're talking about government's _backing off_. What I was chiefly suggesting was just that. No, it's not a panacea, but of course one of the points a number of people have made here is that there is no panacea. Meanwhile, I think one constructive suggestion is that government entities, including state and local entities, consider reversing legislation (yes, including environmentalist legislation) that is ruining jobs in rural and small-town areas by over-regulation and also ease regulatory burdens that disincentivize small farming and other rural and small-town ways of making a living. And simplify the tax code. If that also makes things easier for big business, so be it. I'm not out to punish anybody.

Oh, and let the ranchers shoot the wolves, for Pete's sake.

"But the track record for achieving personal advantage and happiness is better when folks seek it on their own than when the government does it for them. Why? Because they know their desires, resources, conditions, abilities, and prospects far better than do politicians and bureaucrats."

Agreed. But at the same time, a lot of people seem to be fairly easily hoodwinked into making choices that go against their better interests. I certainly do not want the government greasing the skids for them to do so. But it's no better when it's Wall St. or Madison Ave. or "the market" that is applying the grease.

Rob,
It's far, far better to let them make their own choices under the influence of Wall Street and Madison Ave. than to have the government make those choices for them from Pennsylvania Ave. I'd much rather have folks buying Edsels and pet rocks than to endure things like public education, the welfare state, nationalized health care, Roe v. Wade, and the application of Keynesian economics. If you're worried about the deleterious effects of hoodwinking, you can't turn to politics for your protection.

The alleged experts are fools in so many ways. But then, I'm making an ancient point: "the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone" -- not the stone rejected by the butchers the bakers and the candlestick makers, but the stone rejected by the builders themselves, by the experts -- that's stone upon which everything should be built. All this is another way of saying to beware the nonsense that comes from Harvard and makes its way to Washington. It will ruin America.

Lydia,
Unless I am mistaking your meaning, we have agreed for the last three exchanges.

"It's far, far better to let them make their own choices under the influence of Wall Street and Madison Ave. than to have the government make those choices for them from Pennsylvania Ave."

Being sold a bill of goods is being sold a bill of goods. It doesn't matter if the shyster doing the selling is from Wall Street or K Street, Madison Ave. or Pennsylvania Ave.

Big government and big business don't act alone in hermetically sealed spheres. The Agrarians warned about this in the 30s, and it is far more obviously true in the present time than it was in theirs. And it's nowhere more evident than in U.S. farm policy.

"I think it's a little odd that at one time, Al, you're saying that rural life is economically inefficient and deserves to die and in another comment you seem to be agreeing with those who would preserve such a thing as a "commons" which capitalism would otherwise foolishly destroy."

Not capitalism (the former Soviet empire is chock full of environmental atrocities) but the nature of an unregulated commons regardless of the economic system that makes it individually advantageous to engage in behavior that is collectively destructive.

Rural life isn't economically inefficient per se. It will do what ways of life have always done - evolve to meet changing conditions. Being able to farm a section or two in an air conditioned cab is infinitely preferable to being worn out in your forties working 160 acres from behind a team of mules. There are folks who boutique farm in the Central Valley and work the farmers' markets in Southern California but that's a lot of driving to maintain things.

We eat well and cheaply because most crops are commodity-like and one can't make it growing commodities on small plots of land. I can save money growing fruits and vegetables and I could profitably graze a cow or two if I was so inclined but there it no way it makes sense to grow grains.

Also, I disagree with the central premise. We never choose our neighbors, we are simply stuck with them. The advantage of an urban area is that one has a far wider world from which to create ones community.

We can preserve material culture and should - Plymouth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are good things as are national and state parks but I don't see how we artificially preserve the things Jeff's post idealizes. They were born of a time. Some, if not most, were the product of bad decisions (bison are a perfectly good protein) and even the ones that made sense at one time can't be artificially sustained. Have you considered that the values that are worthwhile will continue regardless of place?

"But I will not grant that conservatism is based on creating just-so stories. And I certainly will NOT grant that any "story" telling by conservatives is more likely to be "just-so" than liberals' concoctions. That's frankly just bizarre to even suggest it."

Then explain the fact free nature of this thread.

Where are these 40,000,000 acres and why are they fallow? Still waiting for an answer.

"Meanwhile, I think one constructive suggestion is that government entities, including state and local entities, consider reversing legislation (yes, including environmentalist legislation) that is ruining jobs in rural and small-town areas by over-regulation and also ease regulatory burdens that disincentivize small farming and other rural and small-town ways of making a living."

A whole collection of just so stories that free one from the burden of actually facing reality. While I am sure Rob G. and I would disagree on the Agrarians he has made some good points. What does he get in reply? Ideological boilerplate.

Which environmental legislation? What regulatory burdens? How about some examples along with the stats to demonstrate they are a significant problem.. This is what I'm talking about. All conservatives have to do is repeat simple talking points without having to think about hows and whys of things. Because the folks at the top of the rightwing food chain know that their pronouncements won't be actually analyzed by the rank and file they generate nonsense like the above which is then repeated.

(BTW, today, on the ABC morning program, for the first time in memory, I actually heard a Republican Senator make a positive contribution to a policy discussion. The heavens opened up and the ground shook. It was Corker on financial reform - no lies, no Luntz talking points - Yea.)

There are reasons for regulations. Some are stupid and need to be changed but the sort of categorical statements that are regularly thrown out by conservatives are hardly useful. Start locally, do we want folks to be able to install septic systems without a perc test? Is it a good idea to allow unregulated logging near streams and rivers? The back of the property is (literally) the base of a mountain, the slope has a southern exposure which is great for my berries but it is also quite unconsolidated and is part of a huge slide area (equisetum grows on the slope and there are seasonal springs). Should I be able to do what I want with the slope? Should the the guy who owns the land above me or the guy above him be subject to no restrictions? We are blessed with a number of rivers. Some of the farmers get a state permit and pump water for irrigation which is doable on a small basis. Do we want unrestricted drawing on common water? If we are mining ancient water (the plains) should there be no regulation on the number of wells? Is it OK to put fishermen and the tourist business out of work to grow hay and potatoes?

"And simplify the tax code. If that also makes things easier for big business, so be it. I'm not out to punish anybody."

Think for a minute. Anything that incentives big business will make it harder for small business in the context of this topic. We have paved roads. The more efficient Home Depot or Walmart is, the lower their prices. The lower their prices, the further one is willing to travel and the more trips one will be willing to make. If I need a bolt, I'll go to the Ace a couple of miles away and spend the extra nickle. If I have a major project, I'll drive the 80 miles to Home Depot and save the Benjis.

Taxes aren't punishment. They are how we get roads and schools, water and sewers. What you are doing is living in a country built by folks who were willing to tax themselves to do big things. You are willing to enjoy the world they built. You are also willing to see it fall down around your ears because you are unwilling to make the connection between having things and paying for them (as well as maintaining them.

No one is not farming because they can't fill out Schedule F. Really, go look at it. It it that complex?

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sf.pdf

Michael's comment on Edsels and Pet Rocks is typical of the poverty of conservative analysis. Unless one is a hoarder, Pet Rocks are a harmless trifle. The mention of the Edsel is however interesting. While the Edsel was a classic design fail, there were regulatory issues. Autos of the time were too large, heavy, inefficient and dirty. We were also on the cusp of Germany and Japan cleaning our clocks. Michael's personal choices negatively affected our health, economy and national security. Regulation made autos safer, cleaner and more efficient. I guess that was a bad thing.

"public education" One of the first things these rural communities did, as soon as were able was to establish schools as a community i.e. public.

"the welfare state" - what do we eliminate?

"nationalized health care" - Some day, I hope, but we aren't there yet, which you would know if you actually read the law.

"Roe v. Wade" - Wouldn't matter in California as Reagan signed a liberalized law when he was governor.

"the application of Keynesian economics" - which is why we are able to go back and forth on this blog instead of having to sell apples on some street corner.

"Oh, and let the ranchers shoot the wolves, for Pete's sake."

Another just-so story that allows one not to have to think seriously about matters.

Paul, being nostalgic about treason is a grave moral fault but a First Amendment matter so I wouldn't hang them; they will likely be stoking coal for eternity though. Seeking to end the Union by force of arms is actually treason and should be properly dealt with. Mencken's dated essay came to mind but the rural South of the Agrarian's time is still best described by Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday or as far as I'm concerned "good old boy" is too often just another way of saying "mean s.o.b.". The pressing issue of the agrarian's time was Jim Crow and lynching which, unless i am mistaken, was not their concern. Industrialization was a mere mote compared to the beam they ignored.

Not sure what you mean by conflation of the two as all of you are mixing in markets with values. All I am pointing out is that the communities being mourned came into being for economic reasons and are going away for economic reasons.

Most of those communities came into being through government actions and they were sustained with federal largess. I think it is improper to create hothouse value museums. As I pointed out earlier, folks are folks everywhere and it is entirely possible to create "community" in an urban area and with the added value of having some choice in the selection.

When a farm needs to be 1,600 acres to make it and one man with modern machinery can run it part time then nine men will see their 160 acre farms consolidated and the one man left will choose to have 1 - 3 kids that he can afford to educate instead of 5 - 7 whose labor he no longer needs. A pick-up and a maintained county road instead of a horse and buggy and ruts as well as the need for a job means that he will make dwelling decisions that preclude the continued existence of a bunch of small towns, some of which will grow together while the others will just go away.

In other situations (say mining and drilling), where in days past communities would be formed, technology now precludes that. Gas wells? Some rigs pull up, a trailer park community appears and in a short while the wells are in and the only work is a guy in a truck going from well head to well head; the others hitch up the trailers and soon a new temporary settlement many miles away is formed. In the future other adaptations may work themselves out but getting all worked up about the going away of that which, in many cases, should never have existed seems pointless.

BTW, I noticed that brown area in the middle of Nevada. Eureka County is about as rural as it gets. Mining is the game here, most of the land is federal but there are several large mines on that federal land - last time I roamed the county (north on a dirt road off U.S. 50, a mountain range east of town - a few years ago - they were opening a large new mine. Most of the housing is mobile homes and small communities arrive and then depart as the need arises.

The notion that we are going to keep small communities going (or mourn their passing) because of losing something in the way of "values" is sentimentality.

Al says:

The notion that we are going to keep small communities going (or mourn their passing) because of losing something in the way of "values" is sentimentality.

Losing values is not a matter of mere sentimentality. Saying that they are is another leftist just-so story.

Actually I thought of a few ways that public policy can and does preserve farm land. Zoning and tax treatment for example. Rural zoning that precludes development by mandating minimum parcel sizes. Timberland is taxed on an extraction basis. Conservation easements that allow some kinds of agriculture and remove the possibility of development.

Policies that increase urban density and reduce sprawl would allow small operations to exist close to a market source, Regulations on water would also be useful. In much of the west land without water is useless for agriculture. I saw a parcel in eastern Nevada recently where the land was 1.2 and the water rights (100 acre feet annually) were .9 million. Water is valuable and Las Vegas and Reno are acquiring water rights.

""Gluttony, glitter, girls and gambling are what [Las Vegas] is all about," the 81-year-old rancher asserts. "What it's all about here [in Callao] is children, cattle, country and church." Then Garland raises a fundamental question. "Would it be crops or craps that we use our water for?"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10953190

This sort of thing seems to me to be of a different order then mere technological developments. One way or another a political decision will be made. Allowing urban sprawl in the desert is a bad one.

"The notion that we are going to keep small communities going (or mourn their passing) because of losing something in the way of "values" is sentimentality."

Which is why I put values in quotes. The loss of small towns doesn't mean the loss of real values. There are plenty of folks in LV that have great values. They just chose the wrong place to live. It is possible for there to be (gasp) common ground in some aspects of this issue.

Al, you are very interesting to read, but you're all over the place.

"All I am pointing out is that the communities being mourned came into being for economic reasons and are going away for economic reasons."

The very next sentence:

"Most of those communities came into being through government actions and they were sustained with federal largess."

Also, "being nostalgic about treason is a grave moral fault" and "Seeking to end the Union by force of arms is actually treason and should be properly dealt with" -- I don't have any dispute with this, really. But I keep bringing up your stridency this particular case of treason and subversion, because it contrasts starkly with your easygoing attitude some other cases.

Lydia, you wrote:

How many of these moves are a result of actions by government that every free-market-friendly person should disapprove of?

Many, to be sure. Government regulations, taxes and fees are definitely a part of the overall stranglehold keeping small farms and businesses from becoming economically viable.

But big business is another problem. Every time a big box store opens in a small town, numerous local, independently owned businesses must close. This process doesn't need to be "population neutral" for the big boxes to succeed and prosper. And what is more, it permanently slams the door on entrepreneurship and "free enterprise" in hundreds of local markets.

(One of my pet issues is getting conservatives to think about free enterprise in terms of how many American families truly have the freedom to start a viable business. Darned few. Free enterprise, as the term is bandied about today, means free enterprise for those with access to a credit line of $100K or more, the ability to work without pay for a few years, and the skills to enter a market not yet monopolized by mega-corporations with huge economies of scale - probably less than 5% of the population. If that's "free enterprise", we need to find another name for a system in which the majority actually enjoys freedom of enterprise.)

When it comes to manufacturing, distribution, and light industrial jobs, the decline in rural counties is due both to economic/government incentives and to cultural priorities. The extent to which cultural priorities play a role is precisely the extent to which the decline can be reversed short of a revolution. Corporations simply choose to locate in large metro areas for transportation, proximity to suppliers, workforce demographics, and other conveniences. In some few cases this is doubtless an economic necessity. However, there are many companies that might easily operate and remain profitable in smaller towns, but they simply choose the larger cities in order to maximize their profits or to satisfy their own cultural preferences. Small town life just isn't valued as such: businesses aren't willing to sacrifice anything for it, and I submit that the reasons for this are not altogether wholesome.

People tend to cut their ties, by choice, and not look back. That's understandable, for a host of reasons, but it tells us something rather important: America's rural decline can be reversed whenever the economic and commercial elite in this country - or a sizable portion thereof - decides to reverse it. That kind of change requires sustained public pressure and can, in fact, be very successful. Just look at what America's corporations have concretely embraced, voluntarily and at considerable expense, as a result of such campaigns in the areas of anti-tobacco, "going green", political correctness, and so forth, without coercive legislation.

But that's not going to win over the ideologues among America's establishment "conservatives" who would condemn such priorities as "social engineering". How many times have you heard the refrain that "the primary job of business is to increase profits and make money for its shareholders"?

Al, you wrote:

Actually I thought of a few ways that public policy can and does preserve farm land. Zoning and tax treatment for example. Rural zoning that precludes development by mandating minimum parcel sizes.

No, no, no. This is actually a big part of the problem, this binary thinking on the part of county supervisors and other returning MBAs who can't envision anything between large commercial agriculture and huge tracts of cookie-cutter homes zoned 5 or 6 per acre. Zoning has its place, but it has become entirely a tool of corporate interests in my neck of the woods, and your suggestion is just more of the same.

With 40MM fertile (or once-fertile) acres fallowed, preserving farmland via zoning restrictions is putting the cart before the horse. How about getting some of that fallow acreage back into production? Many of these declining rural districts would be helped considerably if one didn't have to buy 120 acres just to live there. I have some rural acreage that would be much more productive in 3, 5, 7 or 10 acre parcels with gardens, fruit trees, and livestock than it is now as pasture alone, but alas, the county won't let me parcel it out even though I've got two neighbors holding 3 and 10 acres respectively.

One reason these little towns are dying is that many of them have been re-zoned for commercial agriculture only. The few remaining small lots in the town are usually "grandfathered" in but there is zero prospect of the town reviving under current zoning restrictions. Glenn County has six or seven of these towns: tragically, our county officials seem content to let them die.

To some extent, I agree with Maximos that this process is foreseeable and preventable as an outcome of certain choices and policies. One of the biggest of those is that there are quite a few positions in businesses and government which can be done via telecommuting or by offices opened in small communities. Management doesn't tend to like this because it means that work is decentralized and pushed away from where aspiring empire-builders can micromanage their little fiefs.

The Clinton Administration contributed to this process by creating policies which centralized most government IT contracting in the metropolitan DC area. The Bush Administration then accelerated the process with its War on Terror build ups. Today, metropolitan DC is probably the closest thing we have to a Silicon Valley on the East Coast (the main difference being that most of it is a result of government, which lends support to Maximos' assertion).

The thing is, though, Jeff, that you want _some_ corporations to choose to locate in rural communities (to sustain them) and _other_ corporations not to locate in small-town communities, because they provide unstoppable competition. The latter being Wal-Mart. Some small-town Town Fathers like it when Wal-Mart comes in and offers job, while "crunchier" types tend to feel angry at Wal-Mart's very existence and to say that the Town Fathers (if they build an access road or allow the zoning or whatever) are greedily sacrificing the town's patrimony for monetary reasons. I gather the idea is that a big-box store company should simply cease to exist, that its jobs aren't wanted and are better done without.

I'm not necessarily saying there is a formal inconsistency here. But I do point it out because the "pickiness" kind of bugs me. It seems extremely micro-managing to me for "Crunchy" types on the one hand to imply that Corporation A (whose existence they must approve of well enough but whose location they consider to be a result of "greed") has something very like a _duty_ to locate in a rural community in order to provide jobs, but Corporation B has a duty (apparently) to dissolve and die, because its stores are so ugly, out-compete local stores, it sells clothes made in South America, it doesn't pay _enough_ for its jobs, or what-have-you. And what do you want to bet that _others_ would also complain if Corporation A did set up shop in the community, because fields had to be sold and developed for their big, not-so-pretty buildings? Sometimes I really get the feeling that corporations are just a whipping boy and will get blamed no matter what they do.

We have no desire to make the corporation qua corporation a whipping boy; certain corporate forms, yes, and certain corporate practices, absolutely, but for a reason, namely, the preservation of a given way of life that makes possible certain goods of human flourishing. It is this object that furnishes the criteria by which any discrete corporate decision will be judged.

Lydia,

Degree and kind are very important with how the corporations move to rural areas. For example, I'll compare Rosetta Stone with Wal-Mart in Harrisonburg. That's an area I know quite well.

Wal-Mart's impact there has been very similar to what it has on most rural communities in the way of jobs, driving out local business, etc. On the other hand, Rosetta Stone maintains a fairly large office there where they do a lot of the work where it would be unnecessarily expensive to do it in Northern Virginia. Both the community and Rosetta Stone benefit from this pragmatic situation.

There are A LOT of companies that could follow Rosetta Stone's lead.

Thanks for the concrete example, Mike. Isn't part of the issue there that Rosetta Stone doesn't need a lot of space? Just a "fairly large office"? You see what I mean? Would any corporation be condemned that came to a community, even if it provided jobs and meant that people didn't have to move away, if it needed to buy and use larger amounts of land? So it seems that the lesson there is sort of "information industries = good" (because they leave the countryside prettier and don't compete against anything that was already there), "manufacturing and retail industries = bad."

Now, I'm not saying this is inherently an incoherent position. I just find all the chopping up and changing sort of annoying. It's like saying to corporations, "You greedy guys, why don't you come to the country and give people some jobs!" And then to others, "You greedy guys! Why do you come to the country and ruin it?" There's something so weirdly dictatorial about that.

I think another problem is that they see all local businesses as inherently good. If the people of those small towns actually cared about the Mama and Papa businesses in town, they would support them even if a corporation did come along, the people have the freedom to chose after all. When I lived in a small town the local shops would frequently over price things because they new there was nowhere else to go within a close vicinity, so you had no opinion, it wasn't until a corporation set up in town and provided the competition necessary that they lowered there prices and started to charge the normal prices. Some went out of business but most just learnt to adapt.

I think there are three different things you have going there:

1) Businesses which only strategically move functions that can be done more cost-effectively to a rural area.

2) Manufacturing.

3) Big box retailers that will likely kill local shops.

I don't think there can be a coherent opposition to number 1 since it has no transformative impact on a community except in the way that an extreme busy body might find offensive. With regard to number 2, I think it depends entirely on how that business operates. Merck has a very large facility in that area, but it's also located a good 20 miles out in the country side where land is cheap and it won't be an eye sore. Anyone who is inherently opposed to manufacturing here is likewise ideological.

Where #3 becomes a problem is that it tends to destroy many local businesses and the value of the jobs that it provides are questionable compared to the value the community lost by having those businesses destroyed. The counter argument here is that Wal-Mart is cheaper, but the counter argument to THAT is that it is cheaper precisely because it can ram down the prices other businesses can charge. The result of that is that more manufacturing leaves the country leaving us with many rural communities that have neither manufacturing nor many local retailers.

The big box retailers are sort of an edge case here because the value they provide a community is always part of a faustian bargain.

I think another problem is that they see all local businesses as inherently good.

From a utilitarian perspective, they are better than their transregional/transnational counterparts. The fat cat who overcharges is still likely to spend most of his money in the same area he operates; Wal-Mart sends it off God-only-knows-where. That's a key part of the reason Wal-Mart tends to slowly impoverish many of the areas where it does business.

But again in this situation it would be up to the local community to come together to put a stop to this, if there area is being impoverished by Wal-mart, but if they are (I don't no enough about Wal-Mart and its effect to know if this is true, since I live in Britain at the moment) unwilling to do so because they like the cheaper products, then I can't see what you can do, I don't know how you can change this course even with government intervention.

I thought you may be interested in this also, all this talk reminds me of a South Park Episode called "Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes" where after the opening of a Wal-Mart-esque shop in the town, the effect is that it turn the area into a ghostown, all the local businesses close down and people can't help but buy useless things that they don't need because of the lure of there cheap price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_Way_Comes

One really needs to look to French economic models to understand opposition to Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, many of our small businesses have the same issues of a Wal-Mart. For example, a Do-It-Best is little different than a Home Depot except the former is a cooperative. They both are heavily dependent on international sourcing. In many ways, we can no longer really speak of a local economy. Instead, we are speaking of stub economies.

To address the three given above:
1) Businesses which only strategically move functions that can be done more cost-effectively to a rural area.
This very quickly moves into the area of issues with company towns. These are not ideal models.

2) Manufacturing.
You have much of the same issues as above. When you are a company town, you don't control the company, the company controls you. When Gateway shut down in South Dakota, the technology jobs disappeared. When a tech firm shuts down in Silcon Valley, either the employees go to other firms or a new firm is created. Manufacturers like rural areas for union busting and control.

3) Big box retailers that will likely kill local shops.
Too many people focus on retail when they talk small businesses. End sales are not a big component of the economy. Local and regional manufacturing are a bigger deal. Before Prohibition, there used to be tons of local and regional brewers. After Prohibition, they were consolidated, and now we have two brewing companies controlling well over 75% of the market. The regional manufacturer has been killed and that is where the real money is at.

I'm not sure if your acquainted with the work of Philip Blond but he addresses a lot of these topics, he is a supporter of Red Toryism.

Here's an old Wiki page on him with his views:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phillip_Blond&oldid=326595267

and an essay with an outline of his views:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/02/riseoftheredtories/

Phillip Blond describes himself as a radical Tory or a 'Red Tory'. Following Disraeli he argues for a radical toryism where the conservative element preserves and extends what is good and the radical element removes and reforms what is wrong and what is damaging. Blond proposes a popular capitalism which respects traditional values, local communities and allows 'The Common Man' to successfully participate and share in the benefits of the modern international trading economy. As such Blond wants to restore free markets by lowering the barriers to market entry and giving people assets other than their labour so they can genuinely trade and own. For Blond neoliberalism, socialism and communism are ideologies which disempower and dispossess ordinary people and should therefore be rejected by those who wish to secure and advance the well being of all. Blond considers that a true conservative should reject both state welfarism and neo-liberal market philosophy as both lead to, and require, a massive centralisation of capital and political power which itself licenses monopoly capitalism - a mode of market exchange which unduly benefits those who are already asset rich. Moreover because it favours the already wealthy and elevates speculation over investment, state sanctioned laissez-faire economics has increasingly concentrated real ownership of assets in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Monopoly capitalism has for Blond created an ever more dispossessed group at the lower level of society, this condition has however via the widening use of debt to purchase assets extended insecurity upwards, increasingly preventing many ordinary people from maintaining their own lives and communities. Blond argues that despite real increases in income the economic gap between the top and the bottom has widened during the last 30–40 years and that contemporary models of the state and the market have both played an exclusionary role in respect of the poor and an indentured role in respect of the middle class.

Qutoes from him:

I believe in markets, but I don't believe in markets understood as private monopolies. I believe in open global, national and regional civic markets. If everybody owns and trades, and there wasn't just an exclusive, dispossessed class, there wouldn't be a radically insecure bottom twenty or thirty percent of society that causes problems for everybody else.

What is actually happening now is that monopoly capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's institutions and lives. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each other's regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only those at the very top of society in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years.

What we are seeing is the rise of new oligarchies. It is almost as if the 19th century is returning to the 21st century where we are going to live in a world where most of us are disempowered, most of us permanently struggle, most of us can't make ends meet, all the while those at the top are reaping vast rewards.

We (Americans) should be so lucky as to hit the reset button to the conditions of the 19th century (slavery notwithstanding) since in that century, among many economic benefits enjoyed by the common man, the value of the dollar consistently went UP, not down.

A note to Lydia:

Does one have to sign up for a Google account to post a comment at your website? I am not a fan of Google accounts and am not a fan of cloud computing. Sigh. No comments on miracles from me (does that count as a miracle?).

The Chicken

The modern collapse of the dollar is a government created problem though (or should I say it is created by an independent government agency) which couldn't have happened in the 19th century, because you had no central bank to inflate the dollar and hence weaken it. If wasn't until the Fed was created in the early part of the 20th century, to try to stop economic Boom and Bust cycles that these the problems began to arise, this combined with the fall of Gold Standard.


A good article on the demise of the dollar:

http://mises.org/daily/1125

And another on what they believe to be the coming Dollar collaspe:

http://mises.org/daily/1386

Chicken, right now one does, but I can change that. I did it a long time ago for troll control, not to discourage Chickens. Try again in a little while when I've eased the restrictions.

To Lydia,

Can't post to your site, yet. Will try later or in the morning. Meanwhile, just for fun, try defining the probability of a miracle. Depends on who is doing the miracle, eh? Who can know the mind of God? In order to assign a probability, one must have some knowledge of the agent who might or might not decide to perform the miracle. After all, God is not required to perform miracles.

The Chicken

"So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top."

That's precisely what's happening in the U.S., but many on the mainstream right are either unaware of it or are loath to implicate the market in any of this, so as not to appear insufficiently conservative to their compatriots. There's an attitude among the Limbaugh/Hannity types that says "what's good for corporate America is good for me," and if you resist that notion you're not really a conservative.

There is no need for corporations to always be whipping boys, but neither should they be off-limits to criticism when they do, as Maximos puts it, endanger "the preservation of a given way of life that makes possible certain goods of human flourishing."

The reality is that much of the brown and green were over-settled originally and should never have seen a plow or a cow. Settlement of those areas were a gross misallocation of capital - both human and material.

That may be true for Nevada and some high desert regions, but to say that of the great plains, apart from a few arid western counties, doesn't make any sense. Most of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas are green and brown, for Pete's sake - including fertile, ancient river basin land.

My own county, with plenty of water and a long growing season, would be green as well if it were not for Mexican immigration.

Al wrote:

When a farm needs to be 1,600 acres to make it and one man with modern machinery can run it part time ...

You keep repeating things like this. Yes, technology is moving fast, but I don't know anyone who can work even 100 acres alone part-time, much less 1,600 acres. Hyperbole for the sake of making a point is understandable, but it seems to me that you actually believe this is accurate.

Lydia, you wrote:

The thing is, though, Jeff, that you want _some_ corporations to choose to locate in rural communities (to sustain them) and _other_ corporations not to locate in small-town communities, because they provide unstoppable competition. The latter being Wal-Mart ... I'm not necessarily saying there is a formal inconsistency here. But I do point it out because the "pickiness" kind of bugs me.

It depends on the standard you are using. If the standard is "complete freedom of economic activity for every person and corporation without distinction", then of course my selectivity seems petty and inconsistent. If the standard is "the common good", then I hope you will find it more consistent and less "picky".

The thing to realize (as I know you do) is that all economic activity is not created equal. Certainly much economic activity is necessary, is socially beneficial, and should take place in a context of freedom. I will also agree that that which is doubtful should normally be given the benefit of the doubt, erring (if it be error) on the side of liberty. But some economic activity is objectively harmful to the social order and should be proscribed. Do big box stores fall into this category? In most cases, I believe they do. If too many existing local businesses are going to be harmed, if too many once independent families are going to be thrown back to reliance upon wages and/or forced to leave their communities, if America's historic and picturesque public spaces are going to be boarded up and replaced with grotesque warehouses and parking lots, then yes, I would argue that the operations of these mega-importers/retailers should be restricted by law.

"With 40MM fertile (or once-fertile) acres fallowed, preserving farmland via zoning restrictions is putting the cart before the horse. How about getting some of that fallow acreage back into production? Many of these declining rural districts would be helped considerably if one didn't have to buy 120 acres just to live there."

Jeff, it would really help if we knew where this land was located - both yours and the 40MM - do you have a source for that claim? We are talking about a continent here so we can't assume fungiblity - fallow land has its benefits too..

I checked out the Glenn Co. General Plan as well as the zoning map and the application for rezoning - the questions seem discouraging on the latter. I can understand your frustration but those two 3 and 10 acre parcels may be typical of the mistakes that a general plan is designed to prevent more of. It is easy to prevent uses but it is difficult to mandate uses beyond a certain point. You visualize small farms but what's to keep folks acquiring your parcels from using them as rural residential? Would 8 - 20 (you didn't mention your parcel's acreage) new septic tanks affect ground water; are you near a CAF; how about other considerations that come with increased density? Also multiply what you want to do by the number of others around you who might want to do likewise and how would that effect things?

Likewise with the small communities. If entities like that are allowed to develop they tend to grow together and your county just isn't that big. Take a look at a satellite map of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Not that long ago all those towns were small and separated by farmland and orchards. Then we have what has happen around Tracy and Sacramento as well as the 101 corridor towards Ukiah.

If we want to preserve agriculture, it can't be done with hobby farms; agriculture, as a business, has the same economies of scale as other businesses. A bunch of five acre lots might help local business but likely not in the direction you want - trendy restaurants and the like but, in your case, the small retail business issue is over - too many big box stores too close (Chico, etc.).

""All I am pointing out is that the communities being mourned came into being for economic reasons and are going away for economic reasons."

The very next sentence:

"Most of those communities came into being through government actions and they were sustained with federal largess."

Sorry Paul, a little too compressed. We have a tangle of private and government actions over time in the areas that are losing population. Recall that much of this land was settled under different dispensations. The railroads were granted alternate sections up to twenty miles on each side of the right of way. Early settlers were usually grandfathered by statute, the railroads sold land, the government sold land outright or gave title through homesteading and the states got a section/township for school lands. Then came government subsidized irrigation projects, etc.

However they got there the farmers, miners, and ranchers needed towns as did the railroad (also town lots were more lucrative for the RRs). These small towns were not created to foster abstract notions of community; they filled real, material needs. Example: Modena could support business under one set of circumstances (the railroad and horses) but when Parowan, Cedar City, and St. George are very drivable, not so much.

http://www.onlineutah.com/modenapics02.shtml

(BTW, if Michael B. reads this, there is a nice picture in the gallery of the PUBLIC school house from way back in the day.)

Consider also that most people don't want to live in a small isolated town.

"But I keep bringing up your stridency this particular case of treason and subversion, because it contrasts starkly with your easygoing attitude some other cases."

We can't know for sure, of course, but had the Southern treason succeeded the world would likely be a far worse place. The United States was founded on some necessary but distasteful compromises that led to all sorts of problems. The Confederacy was founded on concepts that were positively evil; its persistence would have been a festering malignancy in the world.

Had we not had a series of pernicious Supreme Court decisions in the post war decades and had we not ended Reconstruction until reconstruction had actually happened, we would have been a better nation.

I would likely be more charitable if this was all in the past but sadly one of our major political parties has succumbed in the here and now to the confederate malignancy.

(Also re: the Agrarians - the problem wasn't industrialization per se so much as industrialization in the context of Lochner and no Wagner Act.)


Jeff, there are many references to this, here's one,

"First is the income issue. For the average farmer, increasing farm size and/or off-farm employment are often driven by the need to just earn enough to live on. In today's ag economy, 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans can't provide a full-time income for most farmers."

http://cornandsoybeandigest.com/mag/soybean_acres_parttime_work/

This obviously doesn't apply to row crops like tomatoes and lettuce or orchards but for that brown strip down the middle, that's the way it is.

Al, you occasionally say some interesting things, but your take on the Confederacy and the Civil War/Reconstruction is a bit, um, unnuanced.

"the Agrarians - the problem wasn't industrialization per se so much as industrialization in the context of Lochner and no Wagner Act."

Not so. The Agrarians were against the negative aspects of industrializtion dealing with labor, but equally, perhaps even moreso against the commercialization/commoditization that went along with it. This is very plain from a reading of I'll Take My Stand.

Rob, I was thinking of this:

"Even the apologists of industrialism have been obliged to admit that some economic evils follow in the wake of the machines. These are such as overproduction, unemployment, and a growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. But the remedies proposed by the apologists are always homeopathic. They expect the evils to disappear when we have bigger and better machines, and more of them. Their remedial programs, therefore, look forward to more industrialism. Sometimes they see the system righting itself spontaneously and without direction: they are Optimists. Sometimes they rely on the benevolence of capital, or the militancy of labor, to bring about a fairer division of the spoils: they are Cooperationists or Socialists. And sometimes they expect to find super-engineers, in the shape of Boards of Control, who will adapt production to consumption and regulate prices and guarantee business against fluctuations: they are Sovietists. With respect to these last it must be insisted that the true Sovietists or Communists-if the term may be used here in the European sense-are the Industrialists themselves. They would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government. We therefore look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917,"

Which doesn't seem to provide many useful insights.

As for the Confederacy and nuance, I submit the following from Alexander Stephens,

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

and from the Texas secession resolution,

"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states."

And we know what happened after Federal troops were withdrawn from the south.

Whitewashing a dryrotted board can make it look ok until one pokes around a bit.

More on the Confederacy later as I'm off to work.

But what exactly do you find problematic about the Agrarians' statement you quoted? It's alleged lack of "helpful insights" (with which characterization I disagree) may be attributed to the fact that this paragraph appears in the beginning section of I'll Take My Stand entitled "A Statement of Principles," and is more by way of an observation or diagnosis than a plan of action or prescription.

Also, remember that this was published in 1930 when such observations, while now rather commonplace, were not heard so often. This was the era of "the business of America is business," remember.

Oh, and by the way, don't you find that statement rather prescient, considering where we are today?

I'd say you can chalk Stephens's statement up as rhetorical bluster (whether or no he actually believed what he was saying in that speech); one can find equally hyperbolic statements from the Abolitionists in the North. It is the cherry-picking of statements such as these, and the resultant creation of Northern and Southern florilegia that preempts nuanced discussion of the matters at hand.

"we know what happened after Federal troops were withdrawn from the south"

Lots of things happened when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South. What precisely do you have in mind?

Note on the 40 million acres. I had forgotten about the Conservation Reserve Programs.

http://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/apportstate.pdf

These totaled almost 34 million acres in 2009; a figure which is suspiciously close to 40 milliom. The problem is that the lands in these programs are parts of larger farms and hence putting them under cultivation wouldn't make for farming opportunities for those who didn't already own the farms of which they are a part.

Rob, "he didn't really mean it" is a defense that can be applied to anyone, and absent solid evidence simply isn't serious. The reality, based on history, is that these sentiments were meant and the record from secession to now shows that.

What sort of Abolitionist statements did you have in mind?

What happened after a number of terrible decisions by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the withdrawal of Federal troops was the systematic terrorizing of the freed slaves and their descendants under the formal or informal sanction of the states.

Al, you wrote:

I can understand your frustration but those two 3 and 10 acre parcels may be typical of the mistakes that a general plan is designed to prevent more of ... You visualize small farms but what's to keep folks acquiring your parcels from using them as rural residential?

Many people move to this area because they want a place in the country to have a garden, some fruit trees, some chickens and maybe horses, and a space for the children and grandchildren to run around. That's an efficient, productive use for 3 or 4 acres - if not economically, then in terms of simple happiness. County planners sometimes call this "rural residential", but it's just ordinary country living. Larger parcels, like my 20 acre piece, are expensive for non-farmers to maintain. I rent out my pasture to a local cattleman in exchange for irrigation, fence mending, leveling, and the use of his cattle chute and corral for my own small herd - but no money.

This isn't the central coast with custom-built mansions and paved driveways everywhere (not that there's anything wrong with custom-built mansions). Homes are small and inexpensive, lots of mobile and modular units. It's hot in the summer, windy, dusty, and often smelly. Our "rural residential" population may have jobs in town, but they plant their gardens and use compost from the chicken house, no matter the flies.

Would 8 - 20 (you didn't mention your parcel's acreage) new septic tanks affect ground water; are you near a CAF; how about other considerations that come with increased density? Also multiply what you want to do by the number of others around you who might want to do likewise and how would that effect things?

Ground water is not a problem. The water in the lower aquifers is absolutely pristine. Wells these days do not tap into the top level of ground water at 35-45 feet due to the possibility of contamination. If my neighbors did likewise we would have an old-fashioned rural "neighborhood" not unlike those established 80-100 years ago and found all over the county, but impossible to develop today due to zoning that favors "big" in everything: big housing developments, big corporate farms.

Likewise with the small communities. If entities like that are allowed to develop they tend to grow together and your county just isn't that big.

Al, my friend, that is absolutely not a problem in Glenn County - not for another 100 years. These towns are shrinking and dying, not growing. Some, like Newville and St. John and Monroeville, have virtually disappeared. Others, like Artois (formerly Germantown in its heydey), languish in a purgatory of decaying, unrentable and unsaleable buildings because the latest round of zoning precludes any revival of population to support business. And the county is not small. At 1,327 square miles it is almost the size of Rhode Island, but with a population of 28,000 rather than 1,053,000 - one of the lowest population densities in the state of California.

If we want to preserve agriculture, it can't be done with hobby farms; agriculture, as a business, has the same economies of scale as other businesses.

You misunderstand me. I don't want to preserve "agriculture" for its own sake: I want to preserve a venerable way of life that is being undermined and destroyed at every turn in this country. That means preserving farmers rather than farmland; preserving country dwellers rather than countryside.

Al, I never said that Stephens "didn't really mean it." In fact, I specifically implied that he may very well have meant it. What I was getting at was the cherry-picking of quotes in order to demonize the opposition. You can't have any sort of nuanced discussion of a thing if that's the tack one side is taking.

"What sort of Abolitionist statements did you have in mind?"

How about a very obvious one? That bloodthirsty, militaristic piece of shite, unfortunately sung to this day in churches from coast to coast, known as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

"What happened after a number of terrible decisions by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the withdrawal of Federal troops was the systematic terrorizing of the freed slaves and their descendants under the formal or informal sanction of the states."

This is the sort of thing that happens when, as Herbert Hoover said, you kick a man in the stomach who's down after you've licked him. Reconstruction was the South's Versailles. Unjustified as such reactions were, given the circumstances they can only have been expected.

Had Lincoln not been assassinated Reconstruction would have progressed along a better track, I believe. He may have been a calculating dictatorial politico during the war, but at least he seems to have sincerely wanted to heal the divide quickly and fairly afterwards.


Very, very late:
get the EPA and animal-righter folks off our backs. That would help a lot.

More kids should be encouraged to join organizations that are sponsored by freemasonry to help teach them morals. DeMolay and Job's Daughters would be two such organizations.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.