I'm not a huge fan of the New York Times. Indeed, over time, I've come to see its adopted editorial policy, in which its headlines tend to reflect a political view and its editorials speak of an imagined self importance that the paper and the city that it is located in hasn't had for years and years, as nearly emblematic of the dense way that some large city elites view the entire rest of the country. When newspapers like the Times cry about a fellow New Yorker they detest as President, they ought to realize that it was views like theirs that helped put him there.
Among the NYT columnist I generally am not impressed with is Paul Krugman.
Krugman was published in the NYT the other day with this editorial:
Oh BS.
And among the BS is this concluding statement.
Nor, realistically, can we expect aid to produce a political turnaround. Despite all that aid, in 2017 more than a quarter of East German men cast their ballots for the extreme-right, white nationalist Alternative for Germany.
I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said, seeing it as typical big-city condescension. But that’s neither my intention nor the point. I’m simply trying to get real. We can’t help rural America without understanding that the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop.
All of this really symbolizes the thick nature of urban analysis combined with the thick nature of American economic thought in general.
Lets start with the second to last paragraph. Eastern Germany, that part of Germany that used to be the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), the Communist satellite state set up by the Soviet Union shortly after World War Two, isn't generally rural and therefore doesn't provide any sort of useful analogy at all. Communism itself never figured out how to deal with rural populations and rural people at all, which is why is general approach to rural topics was to industrialize and wipe them out, or simply wipe them out if that approach wasn't successful.
East Germany was an economic backwater, to be sure, but that was due to Communism itself, which did a pretty good job of making almost every region it held sway in, after an initial outburst of forced industrialization, an economic backwater. Communism, it might be noted, was hostile to rural life. Indeed, Marx, who thought up his nifty ideas while taking up seating space in British libraries rather than going out and actually working, grew so frustrated with rural people that he declared rural life "idiocy", which probably nicely reflects that in most rural communities some guy who showed up in the library every day and showed no sign of working would probably be asked to go do something else.
Indeed, the rural hallmark of the introduction of Communism in rural Russia was to halt an evolving transfer of the land to the rural residents and terrorize the most successful individual farmers with famine being the predictable result. Farming in Germany in general was doing well enough throughout the 20th Century prior to 1945 to the extent that the Nazis didn't really touch it that much during their horrific reign as they were somewhat afraid of doing so and rural Germans never embraced the Nazis, unlike their urban fellows. While Nazi economic policies would have created long term disaster for German farming and real horrors for rural areas, including farmers, for the rest of Europe, had the Allied victory not ended them, the introduction of Communism in the East certainly didn't' create economic bliss of any type.
Not that the approach in the Western world has been a lot better, but analysis like by Krugman are so dense to the economy that they can't be expected to grasp that.
Indeed, that's long been the case with American economic pundits and economists in general. The United States has long had, and all of the Western World now has, a Corporate Capitalist economy.
That's not a free market economy, even though we think it is. As a Corporate Capitalist economy we have long had state intervention in favor of business consolation which favors large entities in central locations over small ones that are decentralized. We don't have to have that sort of economy, we simply do as long ago we determined that this is the economy we wanted as it very much favors the increase and consolidation of wealth and that's what our leadership has always viewed as a desirable thing, irrespective of whether it is or not.
Save for a minority of Millennials who think they have suddenly embraced the rotting stinking corpse of Socialism, there's hardly anyone who will consider anything else or even recognize that anything else exists. The entire economic world boils down to Capitalism and Socialism, in our narrow minded view, and even economic pundits and economist themselves see it that way. And they all also assume that Capitalism equates with a free market, when in fact an economic system that requires state intervention in order to simply exist must also by implication favor some businesses over others and not really feature a free market.
Simply put, if there's a rural crisis, it's because we planned it that way.
Indeed, an honest look at Krugman's topic would, first of all, ask if there's an actual rural decline, or, rather, a decline in general.
The better evidence is the latter, and distinctly.
The decaying American rust belt, which isn't rural, and an American urban economic environment so bleak that the darling of the new American left in Congress declares herself to be a Socialist and maintains that Capitalism must be destroyed would suggest that the problem isn't rural at all, but rather simply economic. Something in the American economy isn't working.
For that matter, yellow vests protests in Europe, which are rural centered, would suggest that something in the Capitalist system everywhere isn't working very well, as we've addressed here before.
And if that something has featured a long running population depletion from some, but only some rural areas, it's also featured an economic decline from manufacturing areas and an economic backwater in some of the United State's oldest cities.
While that's gone on, the decay of the intellect and sense in reality in those more benighted classes in cities has lead to a very real and ongoing decay in American and western society in general. In the 1970s this expressed itself with a desperate effort of those in those cities and in that economic class to stone themselves into numbness, something previously really only a feature of the lives of the desperately poor in urban areas. This has never really abated and now its gone so far that marijuana, the drug of the pre World War Two ethnic and urban underclass has evolved to legality so that the monied middle class may more easily stone itself and escape reality. In other areas, people who previously were concerned with making do in life have reduced their identity to their sexual appetites and want to be known by them so that they define their existence. All over in the same class personal standards have declined to where features of former working class life that actually conveyed a message, such as tattoos, have become standard in a desperate effort for identity and people change their appearance in all sorts of ways nearly weekly.
Things are so bleak that the USA Today recently ran this headline:
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
And the niftiness of our present economic direction was looked at by the Atlantic in an article published under this headline:
Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
Things don't look good, alright, but Paul, where you live is the epicenter of that.
Fascism, which Paul alludes to, and its identical cousin Communism, don't come out of rural areas either. Rater, politics in rural areas tends to be defined by a distinct "leave me alone" attitude that the current "validate me and my beliefs" ethos of the urban white middle class simply can't stand.
About the only thing that Paul got right in his missive is that there has indeed been a long term, indeed very long term, shift of the rural population to urban areas and its technology based.
And its based in that alone. Nothing about large cities is otherwise enviable or really a long term draw to anything. The reason that it happens is economic and political. It's not, as people like Paul would seem to assume, simply natural.
This has everything to do with a system that encourages consolidation over everything else. Even while we fret over this, lawmakers do everything to make it easier and easier.
Legal roadblocks in the form of licensing that at one time partially arrested such things have been removed, thereby shifting the provision of all sorts of services, both professional and otherwise, to city centers and large entities. Consolidation of retail through the use of the corporate business form, combined with the total decay of local statutory forms on such things as land use and zoning, has operated to wipe out local retail through state fiat. Funding of transportation systems, which are always taxed based in some fashion, has encouraged and then practically required the movement of everything into the dense city center. Statutory provisions that would address some of this have failed to pass, as in the example of the the Big Box tax that failed in the Legislature recently, or have gone unused, as in the case of the seemingly dormant Sherman Anti Trust Act.
It's happened not because we tried so many things and they failed, it's happened as we value money over everything else on earth and believe that buys us happiness, even though the long record has shown this isn't the case.
Indeed, that's been shown to so much be the case, that people who really succeed, and acquire wealth, use that to move to rural areas, albeit often sanitized ones where the realities of rural life, or just reality in general, have been removed.
So, Paul, it's not that we looked for solutions and they failed. We just didn't look. And now the long existing problems associated with the big cities are being ignored as well. So soon, indeed now, you'll be able to look much closer to home.
From Chesterton.
So, Paul, I agree. People, including yourself, should get real about rural America. But that would require getting real about economics in a really large sense itself, which few are willing to do, and which I don't expect the New York Times to do anytime soon.
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