Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 9. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. It's Donald Trump's economy now.

 

July 4, 2025

The headline from the CST:

HOUSE GIVES FINAL OK TO TRUMP TAX BILL

And indeed it did, bowing to Trump's timing demands, and the current demands of a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican populist and destroyed conservatism, and particularly fiscal conservatism, in the GOP.

It balloons the debt and cuts services, while shoveling money to the Armed Forces and ICE.

It'll wipe out the medical care of millions, kill thousands, and cause a fiscal crisis unlike any faced by the country since the Great Depression which will, in turn, require a massive tax increase, at a bare minimum, to dig out of, if not things more drastic.  It likely belongs to Grover Norquist and the National Conservatives, rather than Trump.  Trump, a demented old man, will be dead before the consequences really set in.

The sub headline:

President says he will sign measure into law today; Democratic leader likens House to ‘crime scene’


And indeed it is.  It takes from the middle class and gives to the rich, and benefits the elderly (who get a tax break) to take from the young.


July 7, 2025

Employment Boom: Wyoming Unions Say Thousands Of Electricians Needed

The Trump far right is having a fit over Larry Summers' comments on This Week.  Summers criticized The Big Ugly and stated directly that it will lead to deaths so that the ultra rich can get tax breaks.

July 8, 2025

The on again, off again, on again, tariffs are back.

Supposedly all sorts of negotiations were going on, but now we're informed that most countries just get a form letter.   Countries receiving the silly missive are Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Laos, Myanmar, Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Serbia, Cambodia and Thailand.

There's this:

Wyoming landed one of crypto’s biggest names. Here’s what that means for the state.: Country’s second-largest crypto exchange names Cheyenne its home base. Wyoming leaders believe their pursuit of digital assets is paying off.

Frankly, I wish Wyoming's leaders would back the crap out of crypto.  I can't really define it, but the entire thing sounds like a 1929 era pipedream combined with scams that will blow up in people's face.

And crypto isn't really Wyoming. 

July 10, 2025

A whole host of economic news.

a.  A penny for King Donny's mush brained thoughts.

Something really calculated to boost the price of everything.  King Donald is raising copper tariffs by 50%.  The US imports 50% of its copper.

On the plus side, King Donny recently had the government stop making something they actually weren't making, pennys.  The inevitable increase in the cost of copper might Make Penny's Great Again.

M'eh.

b.  Black sheep black sheep, have you any wool?

A local product advancing.

Knitting a future for Wyoming wool: Buffalo’s Mountain Meadow Wool operates the largest full-service wool mill in the West.

This is the sort of thing I've advocated for, for a long time.

The Pandemic and Food, Part Three. A Good, Affordable, Steak





This direction, rather than CyberQuackery, is what we really ought to look at.

c.  Socialism is bad unless it benefits you, in which case, it isn't socialism.

I continue to be amazed by how our Republicans in Congress are all against expenditure except where it means a healthy does of everyone else's cash being hurled at Wyoming.  

I'm not against the $5.4B coming here, but where's all the Freedom Caucus cries of "Socialism!"

Lummis Wants To Give Wyoming More Control Of Investing Its $5.4B Education Fund

M'eh.

c. Flog that dead horse harder.

The CSD poses a question, to which the answer is no.

Trump Opens Floodgate For Wyoming Coal, But Will Producers Buy New Leases?

Coal is on a long term decline, as we've discussed here before.

Coal in the ICU

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

Legislative efforts on this from the right recall the lyrics of 19th Nervous Breakdown.

When you were a child you were treated kind

But you were never brought up right

You were always spoiled with a thousand toys but still you cried all night

Your mother who neglected you owes a million dollars tax

And your father's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax

e.  Donnie cries for Bosonaro.

I don't know if Donnie cried for Evita, but he is for Bosnoaro and threatening to hurt the US and Brazilian economy unless Brazil does his bidding by stopping his prosecution.  He's going to hit Brazil with a 50% tax.

Bosonaro is also a right wing figure.

This is corruption on the part of the US, plain and simple.

f.  Deseret Lee gets a break?

While the would be Senator of Deseret Mike Lee was screaming that Federal lands all over the West should be sold for real estate developments, his actual home state saw a 36% decrease in births.

Well, the far right is rather pronatalist, so we can expect Lee to demand Western couples get busy.

g.  The law of unintended consequences and marriage.

A headline:

Tariffs hurt bridal industry due to reliance on overseas market

July 11, 2025

And now Donny's going to hit Canada, our largest trading partner, with a 35% tariff.

Brazil promised retaliatory tariffs if King Donny's helping tariff hand goes out to his fellow right wing figure in Brazil who is facing a trial, as Donny really should have.

The Secretary of State, whose job in Wyoming is to be a Secretary, is once again criticizing the Governor, whose job is to govern.

Gordon Defends Energy Platform; Gray Says Wind, Solar A ‘Woke Clown Show’

Gray clearly can't stay in his own lane, and is clearly running for something else.  Wyomingites are pretty sharply divided on him, with the far right seeing him as some sort of brilliant crusader, and many others seeing him as a self serving buffoon looking for the spotlight to shine on himself.

The State Department is making layoffs in order to cut bloat, even though nobody really knows what the right size of government actually is.  It's a philosophical knee jerk thing that any government is too much government, unless the government helps me personally or fits with my ideology.

July 13, 2025

30% tariffs on the EU and Mexico.


Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 8. The imaginary lost world edition (and also something about the color of pots and kettles).

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 8. The imaginary lost world edition (and also something about the color of pots and kettles).


Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth. 

John Kenneth Galbraith.

June 17, 2025.

Headline in the Tribune:

Trump cancels $49M Wyoming coal carbon capture project
And:

New products take backseat amid Trump tariffs
And:
Companies work to overcome staff incivility
President Trump issued an executive order allowing Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel, something that had been held up by President Biden.

Eh?  Isn't this the opposite of economic nationalism as espoused by the far right.

Yes, it is.

Part of the deal gives the U.S. a "Golden Share', which according to Trump funcationary Howard Lutnick, does the following:
This perpetual Golden Share prevents any of the following from occurring without the consent of the President of the United States or his designee:
• Relocate U.S. Steel’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• Redomicile outside the United States
• Change the name of the company from U.S. Steel
• Reduce, waive, or delay the $14 billion of Near-Term investments into U.S. Steel
• Transfer production or jobs outside the United States
• Close or idle plants before certain timeframes other than normal course temporary idling for safety, upgrades, etc.
• Other protections regarding employee salaries, anti-dumping pricing, raw materials and sourcing outside the U.S., acquisitions, and more.
We'd first not that nothing is "perpetual".

Next, isn't this Socialism?

Sort of, yes.  It's also somewhat reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt's idea, regarded as radical then and now, to give shares to US corporations that grew over a certain size, and regulate them as public utilities.

Any way its looked at, this is a radical position for the Republican Party and the US to take in general.  It's amazing that there hasn't been objections to it, let alone by the GOP which up until Trump didn't approve of economic protectionism or anything that could be suggested to be Socialist.

Indeed, even now, Trumpites like to accuse people of being Socialist.  

Hmmm. . . 

June 21, 2025
Man who says he can move TikTok to South Dakota is a bust in Wyoming politics: Reid Rasner lost by 43 points in a U.S. Senate race and has offered few details in support of his multibillion-dollar bid, but has won over the Rushmore State’s governor.

June 26, 2025

Wyoming oil positioned to weather Middle East conflict, analysts say: Nation's soaring oil and natural gas production may buffer energy prices if Israel-Iran conflict disrupts global supplies, some industry officials predict.

U.S. Ballistics plans on opening an artillery projectile plant in Cody. 

cont:

The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a Medicaid provider tax overhaul central to President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to the chamber’s procedural rules.

June 28, 2025

The US broke off tariff negotiations with Canada, the US's largest trading partner.

Aluminium costs are pressing beverage manufacturers.

June 29, 2025

The Senate voted to take up The Big Ugly, which doesn't mean that it's passed.

For the sake of the country, it should not pass, but it likely will. 

Elon is taking note of the impact, which won't please his former ally.

June 30, 2025

CBO on The Big Ugly, as reported by the CST.

CBO PROJECTS TRUMP BILL WILL RACK UP DEBT

Where are those GOP fiscal conservatives?

And also:

Office estimates plan would add $3.3T over next decade

Well, given their ages, Donald Trump, Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso will likely be pushing up daisies by that time.  So, if its good for the old Boomers, that's all that really matters, right?

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina came out in opposition of the Big Ugly.  He was immediately threatened with being "primaried" by the illegal occupant of the Oval Office, but then announced he won't be running anyway, which has the impact of positioning this office for a Democratic occupant.

Going into 26, the Republicans are in real trouble in the House, and they're starting to get into trouble in the Senate.

Canada eliminated its digital services tax.

cont:

Via Reddit, not sure of the source, posting so it can be see.


PTC is the renewable electricity production tax credit, a per kilowatt-hour (kWh) federal tax credit included in the U.S. tax code for electricity generated by qualified renewable energy resources. 

cont:

July 1, 2025

At this point, Dr. John lacks any credibility on pretty much anything, but here's his statement.


The article notes:
As a doctor in Wyoming for over 20 years, I’ve cared for Medicaid patients my entire career. I understand Medicaid’s importance for the people it is intended to serve. I have also seen its shortcomings.

Thanks to Wyoming being good stewards of taxpayer dollars, the Medicaid reforms included in the bill are unlikely to negatively impact our state. Wyoming’s policies are already aligned with a majority of the Medicaid provisions. This includes work requirements for all able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid.

Medicaid was established to help children, pregnant women, seniors and the disabled. We need to make sure that high-quality care is accessible and reliable to those who qualify for Medicaid. This bill does that.

Dr. John also supported Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for his current position even though he no doubt privately believes Kennedy is a quack.  And he hid under his desk for the most part during the recent public lands issue.  Reaction to this story brought out a lot of anger by people remembering that, as it should. 

Eight Republican Senators are currently holding out against The Big Ugly.

The GOP leadership has been struggling with getting the Big Ugly passed in general, and in meeting King Donald's arbitrary July 4 deadline.  Now the monarch has indicated he has sort of a "m'eh" view on the deadline and he doesn't want things cut too deeply, which must be causing Grover Norquist fits.

cont:

The Big Ugly passed the Senate with J.D. Vance casting the tie breaking vote.

Now its back to the House where the House Freedom Caucus has already criticized it due to its increasing the deficit.

The most amusing vote on the Senate side was Lisa Murkowski, who voted for it, but indicated she was agonized by the whole thing. That seems to be Murkowski's theme.  If the Senate proposed a vote to run over kittens, she'd vote for it, but note that the whole thing really bothered her.

Murkowski:

My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet.

Gutless. 

July 2, 2025

The US dollar suffered its worst first-half decline in more than 50 years due to tariff concerns.

Lisa Murkowski is taking a lot of flak for selling her vote for changes to the Big Ugly that benefitted certain constituents in Alaska, including whalers, while she acknowledges the Big Ugly is ugly.  She seems utterly surprised that she's now the subject of outright deserved contempt.

Murkowski was just playing politics the old fashioned way, trading her vote for something she thinks her constituents needed, while still not liking the bill.  It's the way things are done, in normal times, which these are not.

Murkowski is 68 years old, which I'll mention as the Big Hugly contains tax breaks for seniors.

Well of course it does.  

Old Boomers Never Die

They control away. . . *

Footnotes:

*From Old Soldiers Never Die.

Last edition:


Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Common assumptions that may make an a**. . . well you get it. Economics.


As the Big Ugly is debated in Congress, I keep hearing a set of assumptions thrown around as if they're truths.

In each case, there's no reason to believe that they are.

The first one is that "the government is too big"?  Oh? What's the right size government.

Republicans like to claim that the best government is the one that governs the least, but they've never put that into practice. They aren't right now.  If you have masked Geheime Staatspolizei running around, you are definitely trying to govern.

They'd reply, as Mike Lee did the other day, that they're against faceless bureaucrats who are responsive to elected officials, which is pretty rich for a guy acting like he's the Senator from Deseret rather than Utah.

Anyhow, for a country of 300,000,000 what is the right size government?

Nobody seems to have an answer.

It's likely one, fwiw, that not only has more immigration officers, but more social security employees, and more IRS employees.  The military, which nobody is proposing to shrink, probably doesn't need to be anywhere near its current size.

Speaking of the IRS, we also hear that "Americans are overtaxed". This is actually complete crap.

The big problem in the US economy today is that Americans are grossly undertaxed but still want a government that would have to be funded by a lot more taxes.  Still, Americans believe they're heavily taxed.

I once had a die hard GOP Trumpee tell me that Americans paid the highest income tax rate in the world.  When I challenged him on it, he looked it up right then on his computer and was stunned.

Frankly, the wealthy should pay a lot more taxes than they do.

An outright myth is the trickle down economic theory that Republicans have revived.  Tax breaks for the wealthy don't trickle down.  It's well demonstrated.

Another one is that you can grow your way out of a budget deficit. We know that you can't. And yet I heard Mike Johnson claim that we surely would do just that if the Big Ugly was passed.

Johnson is a smart man.  He knows better, which either shows that he's sipping Sazerac with his coffee, willfully deluding himself, or flat out lying.  

A secretly held one that causes people like Grover Norquist to wake up in the middle of the night cackling is that you can starve the government into being smaller.  Newt Gingrich believed that.  It just doesn't happen. 

The rude truth of the matter is that the deficit has been too high for many years, but it really started ballooning during  Trump I.  Yes, it ballooned further during Biden's presidency.  The Trumpites plan to balloon it to the point that will cause a fiscal crisis, there's no doubt about it.

The Republicans voting for the Big Ugly know this. They'll either be dead before it matters, or are just hoping somebody else will come around and fix the budget after they've killed the government back to 1914 levels.  Why?

Well, um. . .the government is too big. . . and taxes are too high. . . and 1914 was a perfect year. . . 

Monday, June 16, 2025

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 92nd Edition. Immigration. How did we get into this mess?

Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.

In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!

I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.

To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT

Trump on "Truth Social". 

Over the last few days soldiers of the California National Guard have been backing up ICE in immigration raids in Los Angeles.  The Marine Corps is as well.  The Marines, we now are told, have actually performed an arrest.  There are somewhere between 11.0 million to 18.6 million illegal immigrants, mostly, but not exclusively, from Central America in the country.  During his run for a second term, Donald Trump basically promised to deport them all, but he's really not been much more successful than President Obama was on the same topic.

Of that number, probably about 1.6 million came in during the Biden Administration, not all of them as Republicans seemingly like to suggest.

Lots of reasons are given for this situation, most of which are devoid of historical analysis, and therefore, inaccurate.  We'll take a more indepth view here.

As noted, most illegal immigrants into the US are from Central America. At one time, "illegal alien" almost always tended to mean an illegal entrant who was Mexican, but that never really reflected the entire situation.  As late as the 1980s, the second largest group of illegal entrant into the US were Irish, something almost uniformly ignored.  Indeed, illegal aliens in the US come from all over the globe.  Nonetheless, the big problem is a Central American one.

When you conquer a foreign people and arbitrarily draw a map of convenience for yourself on what you are keeping, you create a problem.

That may sound like a non sequitur, but we need to start there.  

The United States fought Mexico from 1845 to 1848, wi th most of the last part of that period being an occupation of the country.  The Mexican War is more complicated than its generally considered to be, and I'll not go into the origins of the war.  Suffice it to say, however, that a result of the war, the principal result in fact, was that the US acquired 55% of Mexico.

Now, that 55% is a bit deceptive in that the US did not acquire 55% of the Mexican population.  In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexican representatives chosen by hte US to sign it, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans lived south of the Rio Grande.  There were, however, Spanish speaking populations north of the river, with most of them living in Texas, which Mexico had not regarded as properly lost, New Mexico, and California.  Mexican populations, however, stretched all the way up into Spanish speaking settlements in Colorado as well.  

Depending upon where they lived, many of those Hispanic populations were distinct with distinct histories, which also set them apart from the population of Mexico, although that population is more diverse then imagined.  The closer you got to the Rio Grande, however, the more "Mexican", the population was.

The border was extremely fluid, although real, and would be for decades thereafter.  People crossed back and forth over it fairly readily for various reasons.  To the extent there was control of the border, on the US side it was by the US Army, and on the Mexican side, the Mexican Army, both of which occasionally crossed the border in pursuit of Native Americans.

It was the Mexican Revolution that really began to change things.

Mexican refugees crossing into the United States in 1915.

The Mexican Revolution saw an increased rate of border crossing as various groups of displaced people picked up and fled into the US.  The US was a haven for combatant leaders and politicians from all sides of the war itself, which remained the case for decades.  Villa famously attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, but he also had taken refuge in the US prior to that.

The Revolution caused the US to really patrol the border in earnest for the first time, with the National Guard serving on the border up until early 1917, while the U.S. Army crossed the border in pursuit of Villa.  In the popular imagination the war ended in 1920 when Obregón sworn in as President after having rebelled against Carranza, but that simply isn't true.  Villa was assassinated in 1923 and Plutarco Elías Calles came into power as a radical anti Catholic in 1924, which resulted in heavy repression of CAtholicism even though over 80% of the population was Catholic. This sparked the actual last major rebellion against the government in the form of the Cristero War, which lasted until 1929.

As with earlier phases of the Revolution, the Cristero War caused refugee populations to migrate to the US.  Indeed, the Cristero's weren't even the first religious refugees of the war, as Mormon populations had in some instances migrated out of Mexico earlier.  As that had an ethnic component to it, the Mormons were mostly Americans culturally or in fact, we should note that migrant Japanese populations in Mexico were in some instances evacuated by the U.S. Army during the Punitive Expedition.

There were concerns about the large number of migrants even then, with it interestingly being the case that some of the existing Hispanic populations were amongst those concerned, which has tended to be the case more recently as well.  Colorado passed the first law in the US banning marijuana as Hispanics native to the state associated it with Mexican refugees, with whom they did not wish to be confused or associated.

These various events caused the Border Patrol to be created in 1924. By that time, the really hot period of the Mexican Revolution was over, and the Cristero War had not yet begun, so the early Border Patrol entered the story at a time that is quite different from the present.

Indeed, while the  Cristero War saw an influx of migrants, its end came with the arrival of the Great Depression, during which illegal immigration was not a major problem.

But that brings us to why this Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist is being published first here, rather than on Lex Anteinternet where  they normally are.

Let's take a look at pre World War Two agriculture. . . and economics. . . and marriage.  Well, let's take a look at the US before World War Two.

It's easy to say, "it's was a different country", but it wasn't.  It was much different, however.

Ironically, lots of rank and file Trump supporters look back to that era, or the one that came immediately after it in the 1950s, as a Golden Age they'd wish to return to.  And to some extent, now without good reason. . . although they themselves would largely choose to keep the moral laxity of the post 1960s, as long as it applied to men and women.  What they seemingly want, sort of, is the economy of the 1950s with the personal morality of the high Playboy era.  Or maybe they want the 60s themselves, but without the drugs and Vietnam, but with good paying industrial jobs, no fault divorce, and Fran Gerard.1

The pre World War Two world, indeed, the pre 1980 world, was much less corporate than it is now.  While there were chain stores of one kind or another, Piggly Wiggly, Safeway, Woolworths, etc. much of retail was very local.

From Safeway's website.

Agriculture in much of the country was of the classic "family farm" type. Ranching definitely was.  Outside of the South, remote owners of farms and ranches was extremely unusual.  The South stood out as an exception due to historical reasons, as there was a tremendous amount of sharecropping in that region, but the owners of the land were still local.  Hobby agriculture was a thing, but it wasn't a major thing.

Economics were almost much thinner.  The middle class was much poorer than it is today and large portions of it lived very near the poverty line. The reverse is true today.  Much of the middle class slips into the upper class periodically, and drops back out of it, without realizing it. They don't consider themselves "rich", but they periodically, statistically, are.  

Indeed, while its disturbing to many, including frankly distributist, the modern American economy has had the effect of making Americans as a whole extremely wealthy.  Americans like to note that the average wage hasn't rising in years, but because average prices have effectively dropped, in comparison to inflation, their spending power has continually grown.

Not that everything has been perfect, by any means.  As often noted, it's impossible for families, for the most part, to get by on a single income, which cuts against what I just stated.  

Popular traditionalist meme with some truth to it, but it requires more thought than this.  Also, this pertains more to the 50s and 60s, than it does to eras before it.

Considering that, however, we need to start off with noting that what people imagine as "traditional" really means the 1950s, in this sense, with the "1950s" really being the years from about 1955 to 1965, that is from the end of the Korean War to the beginning of largescale troop deployments in Vietnam.  The "American Graffiti" era, in other words, which is set in the early 1960s, ot the 1950s as sometimes imagined.  The economy really was exceptional then for a wide variety of reasons.  Europe and Asia's economies had been flattened by the Second World War.  China's economy, which was not a major player in the world in any event, was removed from the international scene by its fall to Communism.  The US was really on the only major industrial power in the world that didn't suffer two decades of economic recovery due to the war.  Technological advances of the 30s and 40s came inot the American market on a largescale due to the end of the Great Depression.  American education advanced enormously due to the GI Bill.

Before 1940, however, families got by on one income due to home economics, to a large degree.  That is, people lived in smaller houses, they had one car, they didn't go on extended vacations, they didn't buy "home entertainment centers", and so on.  We've dealt with it extensively, but unmarried women and men living in the communities they grew up in, lived with their parents.  It was unusual for an unmarried man to own a home.  Men and women basically went from their families home and economic care right into marriage, as a rule.

If they got married.

We haven't dealt with that much either.  By and large, most people in American society got married.  But there were entire classes of people that did not.  One we've dealt with before is Catholic Priests.  As we've noted, the Priesthood, and religious orders, were two ways in which Catholic men and women could have what amounted to a middle class existence without getting married.2 

Other professions of that era had the same feature, however.  Enlisted soldiers in the services were largely unmarried.  They were not paid well, particularly in the lower grades, although that was somewhat made up for by the government providing housing, food and clothing.  If they were married, it was usually only after they'd climbed in rank, which in the pre World War Two Army took an extremely long time.  Junior officers were rarely married either, although more senior ones normally were.

And agricultural workers, those who worked for wages, were often unmarried.  Working cowboys almost never were.  Their jobs just didn't pay enough for them to marry.

Cowhands are a particularly interesting example.  The end of the open range meant that ranches became more established and were normally family outfits.  But the sons of those who were not to inherit the ranch, as well as some men who were just attracted to an outdoor life, provided a pool of men who became cowboys working for wages. There was more of a need for cowboys at the time than there is now, as machinery had not made inroads into agriculture like it has since.  There are lot of things a person could point to in the case of farming, which became much more mechanized in the 1950s, but this is also true of ranching, which had not yet seen the introduction of the 4x4 truck.  Cowhands were expected to provide their own equipment, but the ranch provided everything else for them.3 Even on farms, there were lifelong farm workers who were just that, unmarried men who spent their lives working on a farm they did not own.

That's where things circle back into the story of immigrants and agriculture.

Prior to World War Two, temporary agricultural labor was usually local.  Farms tended to be small in comparison to the giant ones that exist now, and the labor was often made up of the extended families of the farmers.  There was temporary labor, including Hispanic labor from Mexico near the border, but its need didn't exist to the extent it later did.  As noted, people lived closer to poverty, which meant that they endured those conditions more readily, by necessity.  The world was simply smaller too.  People didn't consider it odd to send teenagers, or even children, into the fields during the summer months.

World War Two removed thousands of those people from their pre war lives, including their prewar economic existences.  Men who had been sent all around the country, and overseas, didn't tend to return to agricultural work involving remaining single, and they didn't have to either, given the post war economy. Women who had worked in fields prior to the war worked in factories during it, and had grown used to a new life. They had no interest in returning to the pre war lifestyle either, and they also didn't have to.

Somebody had to do the work.

During the war, Mexican labor was brought in to do it under the Bracero program.  And to some degree, the situation it created, has been with us ever since.  Yeoman's Fourth Law of History at work.

So now what?

Well, in order to really reduce the number of immigrant farm workers, legal and illegal, at work in American fields, you'd need to create a situation in which Americans would do the work. That won't happen in the current farm economy, however.

After the Second World War the US went to a "cheap food" policy, and we've had it ever since.  We note this as one thing you could do is pay Americans the necessary rate to work in the fields, but that would be grossly in excess of what immigrant laborers are now getting paid.  That raises all kinds of moral issues, but one practical issue is that if we are going to address this, just like the topic of imported foreign products, the time to do it was decades ago, not now.  Indeed, in the case of immigrant farm labor, the time to address it would ideally have been 1945.

In other words, it'd cause a huge spike in food prices.

Another thing you could do would be to try to address industrialization of agriculture.  When farms were smaller and there was less of a need  for extra labor.  That could be done by making the remote corporate ownership of farms illegal, although that would frankly not address all of the problem by any means.

Any way it is looked at, it would mean that Americans would pay more at the grocery store, and the question there is whether or not they're willing to do it for a major societal shift.  Hardcore National Conservatives are banking on Americans being able to be forced into this.  

Trump?

Richard Ortiz is a migrant worker in Nipomo, California where famous photographer Dorothea Lange took a photograph of the Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson in the 1930s


Florence Owens Thompson.   The mother of ten children, her first husband was the son of a farmer with whom she became a migrant farm worker.  Her second, if he was a second, would have been a common law arrangement.  She also occupied a wide variety of other occupations through the 1940s.  In 1952 she marred a hospital administrator and her life obtained stability.  Essentially, her life demonstrates exactly what we've set out above.

I somehow doubt it.  But who knows.


Suffice it to say, in much of this, basic morality seems to have gone right out the window.

Footnotes

1.  This is not how National Conservatives see things, however, which is one of the ironies of the Trump movement.  National Conservatives have a definite Benedict Option worldview and the libertine nature of the post 1960s American culture doesn't fit into that at all.  Immigrants frankly don't much either.

2.  I'm not suggesting that people's callings were not real.  Indeed, because of economic conditions, and society norms, particularly regarding the conduct of young women and men, callings were easier to hear.  I would note, however, that the economic realities of the era probably at least influenced the thinking of some people.

3. Good descriptions of this can be found in Louise Turk's book Sheep! and Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, all of which discuss this in the context of cowboys.  A good description of it in a novel can be found in Horseman, Pass By, by McMurtry.

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 7 and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 91st Edition. Reality is hard.


Sunday, June 15, 2025

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 7 and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 91st Edition. Reality is hard.


We start, where we left off:

June 13, 2025

Trump signed a Congressional resolution counteracting California's prohibition on the sale of petroleum vehicles after 2035.

It appears that a TACO moment is coming up.


The messaging here is really spastic.  Illegal immigrants in cities are violent criminals, unless they work in the hospitality industry, in which case they're good, long time workers, which is also true of farms, even though the DHS has a plan to raid farms with National Guardsmen to remove them.

Eh?

Of course, regarding agriculture, which I'm very familiar with, this is all an unintended consequence of the Bracero Program, which started the process of taking American laborers out of the fields, all of which raises a larger question.  

Will Americans return to the jobs occupied by foreign workers, and what sort of pay will it require, if they will, to cause them to do that?

And, as that tweet predicted, the  Trump administration directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels.

We have a more indepth look at this story coming up, maybe, but Trump has repeatedly received  a hard dose of reality on his pet theories, or the pet theories of those who backed him in his rise to power.  Indeed, the entire group of MAGA theorists are getting repeated lessons on being locked into the past in a very distinct way.  To reverse things, back to, say, 1958 requires massive disruption on a scale that the country, for the most part, isn't willing to endure.

This has given rise to the Trump "TACO" nickname, Trump Always Chickens Out.  It's probably not really a good idea to goad him too much on that.  Reversing course in disastrous policies isn't really "chickening out" but it does mean that Trump supporters and insiders have to now really turn a totally blind eye to what's going on.

What does that do, however, to people like Peter Navarro, who radically advocated for tariffs?  And more than that, where does it leave people like Tom Homan who are radically in favor of mass deportation?  Indeed, to a very large degree it was illegal immigration and the concept that American jobs had been stolen by migrants, or exported overseas, that brought Trump to power.  Without those issues, much of what he stood for is gone.

Indeed, Holder denied he'd heard anything about any changes yesterday when it came up.  Authorities raided two California farms earlier this week, and the now open plan is to try to deport 3,000 illegal immigrants per day.  White House officials at first denied there were any changes as well, but now it seems that, indeed, their are.

Loyal Trumpites have consistently excused his changes in the menu.  It'll be interesting to see if they have changed their views here as well.


Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 6. “Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.”


Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 90th Edition. Parade and Protests.