Some Labor Day Reflections.

Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.

Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off.  I worked a full day. 

I was the only one in the office.

Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1.  Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.

Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s.  Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;

Deep Breath

A Labor Day homily.

Sadly, I'm working on Labor Day.

Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work.  There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did.  Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble.  Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.

When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism.  Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic.  But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.

One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part.  The advance of technology brought us the other part.  Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all.  The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking.  As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric.  Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.

Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult.  Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible.  Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.  

One of those is the law, of course.  Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.

Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.

Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades.  That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve.  Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for.  I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.

Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer".  I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become.  It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.

Oh well.

And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are.  And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things.  Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.

Deep Breath

A Labor Day homily.

Sadly, I'm working on Labor Day.

The Working Man's Beer

Today is Labor Day, and beer will be consumed in above average quantities in the United States.

Monday-Tuesday, April 30-May 1, 1973. An unsettling start to the week.

April 30:

Nixon canned White House Counsel John Dean and requested the resignations of H.R. Halderman, his Chief of Staff, John Ehrlichman, is domestic affairs advisor, and Richard Kleindienst, his Attorney General. All due tothe Watergate Scandal.

Halderman.

Things were clearly not going well.

May 1:

The British Trade Union Congress called a day long, Labour Day, work stoppage which was honored by 1,600,000 workers in order to protest the government's anti inflation policies.

Japan repaid $175,000,000 in food assistance aid funds which were extended during the post World War Two occupation of the country.  The payment was made in one lump sum at the request of the US, which needed the money due to its growing concern over the imbalance in deficit payments.

Sweden's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister accused President Nixon of violating the Paris Peace Accords and of bombing refugees in Cambodia in May Day speeches.

On Labor Day, 2021

Today is Labor Day, 2021.

Steel worker in Denver Colorado working on parts for the hull of a ship, 1942.  I recently had a jury in Denver in which not one single person had a blue collar job.

I'll be working.

That shouldn't be too surprising, as I'm a "professional", which means that I have hours and whatnot that are outside of the hourly concerns that many employees have.  But my first observation is that. 

Labor Day in the no holiday era.

It's a holiday, but a lot of people will be working.

That shouldn't be the case.

For that reason, I'm going to forego going to any stores that are open.  Indeed, my wife tries to do that on Sundays as well, and while I'm not as good as her about that, I agree with her.

An overseas view and the American economy

The second thing I'm going to do here is to link in the British Adam Smith's Institutes blog entry on Labor Day.  It's interesting how this British institute sees the American holiday

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABOR DAY

The Adam Smith Institute is vigorously pro free market, so perhaps its view isn't too surprising.  It's notable as it takes a really cheery view of the American economy at a time at which Americans have been doubting it pretty rigorously, with the bizarre emergence of socialist thought gaining some currency, supposedly, in the country.

I don't think that the "socialist" who self declare as that really grasp what socialism is, and are actually social democrats, but that's another topic. The bigger topic is that lots of Americans don't feel that the economy works very well for them anymore.

One thing Adam Smith couldn't have foreseen is an economy that was controlled by corporations to the extent ours was.  Smith was a free marketer, but that was mostly a free market economy that was more like that which distributist imagine, rather than capitalists.  Smith probably didn't magine a world in which a lot of people from middle class backgrounds would find themselves working at Wall Mart, rather than owning stores of their own.

The disappearance of the blue collar holiday

It wasn't all that long ago that this day still had a very blue collar tinge to it.  Even when I was first practicing law the labor unions had a picnic on this day in City Park, and this region of the country has never been keen on unions.

Maybe they still do elsewhere, but labor in the US has taken a pounding by the capitalist exportation of manufacturing overseas, and the good blue collar jobs with it.

Probably only President Obama was really honest about this, in terms of a national leader.  He flatly noted that the jobs had gone and weren't coming back, taking the capitalist position that this was okay as new jobs came in their wake. That's the capitalist theory.  We sent jobs overseas we no longer wanted and got back great new high tech ones we did.

Except that's a view that's only really easy to hold if you are at the top of the economic ladder.  Most people aren't nearly as rah rah about that sort of evolution of work, as most people don't really want to work in a cubicle.  Office Space was a popular movie for a reason.

Indeed, an entire category of nostalgia is based simply on the idea of economically having your own.  Your own little store.  Your own farm.  Yours.  Nobody is going to get rich doing that, but you'd have your own.

Money is supposed to be the solution to that, and I've been hearing a lot about that recently.  You are supposed to enjoy this evolution, and move up into it, as there will be more money.

But then what?

Well, that's the thing.  You are supposed to make more money as you'll have more money.  And you'll like that as you'll have more money.

American money is just weird paper backed by nothing whatsoever, of course.  But in the spirit of the times, that's supposed to "bring you joy".

Gen X and Gen Y

But apparently it doesn't.

Indeed, as we've already noted here, Gen X and Gen Y, and even the Gap Generation, have many members who don't see it that way. They'd like to have a life, live where they want, have their friends, families, dogs and cats, and just, well, be.

And lots of them aren't going back to work post COVID at all.

Sooner or later they'll have to. And that will be pretty soon.  But the voting with their feet they're goind right now says a lot about how the economy, and the labor it entails, is viewed right now.

Labor Day, September 1, 1941. Marking Targets for Death and Labor Day Addresses.

It was Labor Day in the United States, falling of course on the first Monday in September.

On this Monday, the German government announced that all Jews within the confines of the territory controlled by it, at home or conquered, were required to wear yellow Stars of David.

German poster declaring that "Whoever wears this badge is an enemy of our people."

The barbarity of this action can hardly be imagined today.  It marked the wearer as somebody to be subject to public scorn merely for his religion, or ethnicity, and ultimately it would mark them for death.

The yellow badge seems to date as far back as the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate in the early 8th Century and have been subsequently revived and kept in force for centuries as a means of marking Jews living within the caliphates control.  Both Christians and Jews were subject to repressive religious laws within Muslim territories, and indeed in some Muslim countries today being an open Christian is extremely risky, and conversion from Islam, although widely occurring, illegal.  Clothing requirements were in fact expanded beyond this to include other features.

Having said that, the practice of requiring Jews, and Muslims, to wear distinct clothing also expanded to Christian countries by the 13th Century, although with a different concern in mind.  As has been dealt with here elsewhere, originally marriage did not require a Priest to officiate and could be privately contracted in a fairly informal manner.  There were concerns in the 1200s that Christians and non Christians were falling into sexual relations that gave rise to invalid marriages in a hasty fashion, and therefore clothing requirements were imposed so that couples in the heat of the moment might be aware that they were going where they couldn't legally go and contracting what would have been regarded as invalid marriages.

The Germans, of course, were readopting the practice in order to make the Jews despised "others".  It was resisted in some occupied areas, such as Denmark, where non Jews took up wearing them as well, and in occupied areas of Catholic Czechoslovakia the authorities had to ban hat tipping to those wearing them, where the residents had taken it up as a sign of respect to the victims.

On the same day, Leningrad came within German artillery range.

The Canadians began to accept enlistments for the Canadian Army Women's Corps.  Of note, the day prior the British had deployed women in mixed gender anti-aircraft units in the UK, a rare example of women in a Western Allied military having a combat role in the war.  

The United States assumed responsibility for Atlantic convoys from Newfoundland to Iceland.  This was undoubtedly an example of direct participation in the war, even though the United States had not yet declared war.

The Soviet Union murdered retired Estonian military commander Karl Parts.

Parts had served in the Imperial Russian Army but had gone over to his native Estonia upon its separation from Russia.  He'd served against the German Freikorps and the Reds there, but had retired in 1925 and was a farmer thereafter.  The Soviets took him into custody in 1940 when they invaded the country and then murdered him on this day.  He was 55 years old.

President Roosevelt delivered a Labor Day address in which he stated that American labor bore the responsibility of winning World War Two.

KYW-TV, the first US television station outside of New York City, went on the air in Philadelphia.  It's still on the air there. 

Ted Williams appeared on the cover of Life Magazine.

Cornell, Wisconsin, suffered a serious flood.

Oyster harvesting seasons commenced.

Labor. 1920, and now.

 

Jewelry workers, 1920.

A Labor Day post.

It can be difficult to take the necessary wrenching steps to prepare for the future, but looking back at the past may help us to see how important these steps are. The graphic below depicts how occupational employment has changed in America since 1920. Students entering the workforce today face a dramatically different landscape of jobs than their parents did in the 1980s or their grandparents in the 1950s. And the work world that their great-grandparents entered in the 1920s is almost unrecognizable.

Back then, about 25 percent of jobs were in agriculture and 40 percent were in manufacturing and other blue collar fields. Today, fewer than one percent of jobs are agricultural and only about 20 percent are blue collar.

In the 1920s, only about 5 percent of workers held professional jobs. This has exploded over the last 90 years and today about 35 percent of workers have professional jobs. Rapidly advancing technology has not only automated and eliminated many jobs that once provided manufacturing, blue collar,  and agricultural employment for millions of Americans, but it has also increased demand for professionals who create, manage, and explain this technology, many of them working in occupations that were unimaginable 90 years ago.

From:  StatChat, University of Virginia.

Looking back a few years earlier, to 1915, reveals this interesting information:

Labor force participation. The 1915 annual average civilian labor force participation rate is estimated at 56.3 percent. This percentage isn’t strictly comparable to the 2015 annual average of 62.7 percent, because of differences in survey coverage and definitions.¹⁷ However, despite the similarity in overall labor force participation, the participation rates of men and women were very different from each other 100 years ago. The 1920 census shows that, among people ages 14 and older, the proportion of the population that was in the total labor force was 85 percent for men and 23 percent for women in January of that year. (Civilian labor force data by gender are not available for 1915.) In contrast, the Current Population Survey shows a 2015 annual average civilian labor force participation rate for people ages 16 and older of about 69 percent for men and nearly 57 percent for women. Table 1 points out that young boys were much more likely to be in the labor force in 1920 than now. Not surprisingly, women of all ages are much more likely to be in the labor force now than in 1920. Half of all boys ages 14 to 19 were in the labor force in 1920; nowadays, about one-third of boys age 16 to 19 are in the labor force. Labor force participation among girls those ages hasn’t shown as much change.

From:  Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And also from the BLS, this interesting statistic which we've discussed as a topic here before.

Education. A century ago, most jobs required little formal schooling, and most of the population had not gone beyond elementary or grammar school. In fact, high school graduates were a rarity: in 1915, only an estimated 18 percent of the population ages 25 and older had completed high school, and only about 14 percent of people ages 14–17 were in high school. Royal Meeker, appointed Commissioner of Labor Statistics by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, had recently written a New York Times article advocating compulsory public education through the intermediate grades. He noted, “Boys and girls drop out of school at all stages of the educational process, but fail to drop smoothly into any part of our economic system.”¹⁸ While failure to graduate remains a concern, more than 86 percent of the U.S. population age 25 in 2010–14 had completed high school or more. The average length of the public school term was about 160 days a century ago, compared with 180 days now, and the average number of days attended in 1915 was only 121.¹⁹ Many young girls and boys worked instead of being enrolled in school. In fact, New York City’s State Factory Investigating Commission in 1914 reported that “nearly 75 percent of factory women studied had left school before the eighth grade, as had nearly 40 percent of the female store employees interviewed.”²⁰ The legal age for leaving school was generally 14, compared with 16–18 today.

And this interesting set of figures, related to the "everything was cheaper back then" claim that people so often hear:

Of course, most prices of food in 1915 were much different from those in 2015, and several staple items are substantially more affordable today. Here are some examples of 1915 and 2015 prices (using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics):

Item	1915 price	1915 price in 2015 dollars	2015 price
Bread (1-lb loaf)	$0.07	$1.65	$1.42
Butter (lb)	.36	8.48	3.18
Eggs (dozen)	.34	8.01	2.81
Ground coffee (lb)	.30	7.06	4.61
Potatoes (10 lbs)	.15	3.53	6.55

Interestingly, in that chart, the only thing that's really climbed in adjustered prices is the price of potatoes, which is nearly double the current (or the 2015) prices.   The only thing that has near parity with its century old price is bread.

Is it just me, or does it seem like today should be Labor Day?

 I know why it isn't. But it sure has that feel to it.

The Long Weekend

Labor Day is the traditional end of summer in the U.S., and its of course a three day weekend for most folks, although not those who work in stores and the like.

It's also the opener for Blue Grouse and Dove in Wyoming.  I go every year, being pretty much as subsistence on those sorts of things as circumstances, time and my spouse will allow.

If this sounds like a mere rhetorical flourish type of introduction, it isn't.  I truly and very seriously believe that a lot of the problems the modern world faces is that the Western world has forgotten what we are, which is a hunting species.  That doesn't diminish any of our other accomplishments, but nearly all of our social problems, and most of our problems are social problems, stem from the slow, and it was very, very slow, change from most families, and again it was families, putting dinner on the table through the labor of hunters, which includes the subset of fish hunters, i.e, fishermen.*  As we've set out in our Third Law of Human Behavior, there's a lot going on here.  Perhaps in a greater sense, the odd subtitle of a former very good, and now defunct, outdoor blog. Eat More Brook Trout, which was "Save the West. . .Kill a Brookie", is not only true, but deserving of global application.

Anyhow, the opening of the hunting seasons on Wyoming is September 1, which is always coincident with Labor Day weekend.  And that's a long weekend for most of us.

This three day weekend turned out to truly be a long weekend, in more ways than one.

The Trek

The dog. This is our bird dog, and he's at this point at about 8,000 feet in elevation after hiking about 1.5 miles or so.  All on public land.

I don't really recall how young I was when I first went blue grouse hunting, but I was fairly young.  It was well before I was old enough to drive.

On that occasion, an oral surgeon friend of my fathers asked if we'd like to go with him.  That oral surgeon was a dedicated hunter in the way that I am now and have been ever since I was old enough to drive.  I really was before then, but being able to drive, in the West, means a lot.

My father hunted, but when I was young, and probably because I was young, he didn't hunt everything you could.  When I was a kid he never bought a big game license, although he started to buy deer and antelope licenses when I was old enough to hunt them.  He always went for sage chickens, however, and waterfowl.  We hunted ducks a lot.  He was a very dedicated fisherman, and I think he preferred fishing, but not ice fishing, to hunting, although he liked both.  I'm the other way around.

Anyhow, at this time, which was likely around 1973 or so, the oral surgeon, asked if we'd like to go blue grouse hunting. We did. It involved a trip with his old style Ford Bronco that was really a Jeep trail type of thing.  Our 2x4 pickup could not have done it.  We crawled all over the Laramie Range and ended up back on a near extension of it, which is where we got into the birds. After that, we went every year thereafter, limited however to where we could go with a 2x4 pickup.

When I was old enough to drive I'd go with my friends or by myself after school.  I've never been shy about going hunting or fishing alone, although I've been warned repeatedly that I'd get hurt doing that. This will be mentioned again below.  At any rate, in my college days I started to go with my good friend Jeff.  And at that point, we started going into a remote part of the Laramie Range.

I'm not sure looking back, but I think he was the one who suggested the remote location.  I've been back every year since, and if it seems odd that I haven't mentioned him in this context, that's because he moved, first to Denver, and then to Cheyenne.  It's a really far trek for him.

But it's not a minor one for me.

Up until my 40s, the route in was by road, and then by foot.  But you could drive really easily to a drop off point. The road part of this was on an improved, bladed, road before the two track, and quite frankly the road is a stock trail.**  This is significant as the ability to close a stock trail to members of the general public was never even remotely conceived of at that time.  But a stock trail is, where it crosses private land, really only open for livestock.

At some point in time the rancher closed the road, but he continued to allow fishermen on. As I do understand the difference between private and public land, I didn't begrudge him that and I still don't.  Indeed, I'm grateful he allows fishermen on.   And I'm one of those people who are generally fine with there being less roads in the world.  But this did have the impact of closing, to vehicle traffic, a lot of access points to public land.

But not completely.

Being hugely road familiar, I realized I could still get there, on the back roads.  With a lot of effort.

That effort, the first time I tried it, involved a bicycle.  I drove to where I had to stop, as a practical matter, and rode for miles in on my old Trek Mountain Bike.  It would have been easier, frankly, with horses, and while I have access to horses, and had a good horse at that time, those horses weren't trained to gun fire and picking them up would have involved an additional 100 miles by the time I was done.  So mountain bike it was.

And then I acquired a Jeep.

I don't have a "four wheeler" or any kind of ATV and frankly I don't really approve of them.  I don't want one. But a Jeep is a car and I guess I'm willing to accommodate that much.  So with the Jeep, I could safely travel in on  the really rough, steep, narrow, bad roads and make it to the jump off point, while never trespassing on private land.

In the meantime, the ranch had become part of a Hunters Management Area, in which the rancher granted access to big game hunters. Again, I appreciate that. But it never included bird hunters.  I discussions with various area wardens later on, the Game & Fish just had never asked.  That doesn't mean that the rancher would have said yes if they had.  But the bird hunters, like myself, were just left out from the onset.

When it first was the HMA, I spoke to the rancher and got written permission for a couple of years. Eventually, however, he was of the opinion, or at least stated that he was, that maybe he couldn't do that as it was all in the hands of the Game & Fish.  So Jeeping it in was the alternative.

I've done that now for three years running.

The Game Warden

I've always been s strong supporter of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.  Indeed, when I was young I seriously thought of becoming a Game Warden or a Game Biologist with the department, with the warden position being the more sought after one.  They're outdoors all day in the wilds, and that strongly appeals to me.

It might, I'd note, appeal to me very inaccurately.   I've never done their job.  Maybe its nothing like what I imagine it to be, but then I wouldn't know.

I do know that we seem to cycle through game wardens fairly rapidly anymore.  This wasn't always the case.  We used to have the same game wardens in the area for years and years. But this is no longer true.  Now we tend to have young game wardens and most of the game wardens seem to be young.

This is significant for a variety of reasons. When I see an occupation occupied by the young, that means its not occupied by the older, and usually there's a reason for that.  Sometimes its the physicality of the occupation.  Other times its that the job features low pay.  Sometimes its the conditions of the job, which may have changed over the years. And sometimes its societal, in that occupying a job, for a variety of reason, doesn't appeal to people in one generation the way it did to a prior one.

Indeed, the few former employees of the game and fish I've known, and the one then current one, held pretty nuanced views on their employment.  The few former ones I have known were critical of their former employer in a really non specific vague way.  I have no idea what their complaints were, other than that they existed.  The one who was then working for the department had the complaint that being a game warden meant that he wasn't able to get out and enjoy the outdoors.  Indeed, he recommended that a person who loves the outdoors not become a game warden, but take up some other "good paying job" that "let's them get outdoors".

The problem with that statement ist hat "good paying jobs" that "let you get outdoors" largely don't exist in the modern world.  Increasingly in the modern world, good paying jobs put you in a steel and glass giant shipping container on 16th Street in Denver where you get to see the layers of pollutants separate each other out depending upon the day.  In our un-directed search for progress, we've made some odd progressions.

At any rate, as noted, I've generally held the Game and Fish and its game wardens in high regard.  Indeed, while I've never been a game warden, I once considered becoming one.  The thought first occurred to me when I was graduating with my undergraduate degree in geology.  There were no geology jobs to be had with a bachelors degree, but the Game and Fish didn't require masters or doctorates for game wardens, and I thought about applying to take the warden's exam.  I started to study for it, and then thought if I was going to do that I ought to pick up a degree in biology or wildlife management.  Trying that was one of my three options at the time, the other two being law school or a masters degree in geology.  I applied to the latter two not really thinking I'd be admitted anywhere, but as luck would have it I was admitted to the University of Idaho for geology, to my surprise, and the University of Wyoming's law school, the only law school I'd put in for.  I took that latter path, the future for geologist at the time looking fairly bleak.

Anyhow, even shortly after I graduated from law school I pondered the Game and Fish adn I took the warden's exam and passed it.  I was then offered a summer job, but I turned it down, being into a legal career at that time by over a year and on the verge of getting married.

So, suffice it to say, I don't dislike the Game and Fish or its wardens at all. Quite the contrary.

In recent years, when on the blue grouse expedition mentioned above, I've encountered the same warden twice telephonically, and then run into him sage grouse hunting a couple of weeks thereafter.  He was a super nice young man and in regard to the blue grouse expedition, he was very enthusiastic about how I'd gone in.  I offered to come into the office to show him the map, and he said there was no reason at all to do that, and that the next year I should just leave something in the window to show how I'd gotten there.  I think he appreciated that somebody would go to so much effort.

This year I did what the warden last year told me to do, left a note in the window.  But I didn't encounter a warden until the way out.

And he didn't believe me.

Not only did he not believe me, this very young warden called me a liar, in so many words.

I lead him out on the road I cam came in on, learning in the process that a 4x4 pickup truck could do it, to my surprise.  I stopped after I lead him out, which is what I did, which probably took about two hours or so to accomplish.  At that point he was somewhat sheepish and much nicer, but he never apologized.  He stated that part of the reason he hadn't believed me is that I'd gone to so much effort just to hunt blue grouse.

I don't know what to make of it, but I don't like it.  In an age in which a lot of hunters seem glued to ATVs, I'm not, and I don't even own one.  If it was possible, I'd frankly ride a horse in, which maybe next year I'll go.  But to get this treatment simply for putting in the effort really strikes me the wrong way.

And in saying that, I'm one of the supporters of the Game and Fish.  Not everyone is.  A long time friend of mine who has similar sporting views to me clearly is not, and he had a bad encounter with another young warden last year that really left a sour taste in his mouth (I've encountered the same one two years ago and she was very helpful to me, even allowing me to borrow her fairly untrained retriever to retrieve a goose).

Personal encounters mean a lot.  Maybe that's the lesson to learn here. Two encounters with the same super crabby policeman who ought to retire, both for minor traffic matters, has left me sympathetic with urbanites who complain about the police.  If you can't interact with the public without calling them a liar, you are probably in the wrong job.  Or it may be that your employer has the wrong man, or woman.

The Hat

I've posted my now absent 1911 campaign hat here before.

I always wear broad brim hats in the sticks and really appreciate a good fur felt hat, which is what this hat was, or is. I came by it in an odd fashion however.

I never went to buy a broad brimmed hat of this type.  Indeed, I never would have.  And at the time I acquired it I had a couple of good broad brimmed hats already.  Indeed, for general hunting, at that time, I wore a black Stetson that's since become my ranching hat, after my then ranching hat died.  And for bird hunting at that time I wore an Australian style Stetson I still have, appropriately enough termed their "Bird Hunter" model.

Anyhow, an organization I'm part of that's dedicated to the history of cavalry was looking at trying to have some hats made and the Jackson Hole Hat Company made some samples, including the hat depicted above.  The were all small sizes with the one depicted above being the only one that was really finished and the only one close to my size.  Truth be known, it was a bit small and always was, but it was a really great example of the early pattern of the M1911 campaign hat, complete with the brim stitching that served some unknown to me purpose.

When the project failed, we were allowed to keep the hats so this became my hunting hat.  Truth be known, it was always really too small and therefore uncomfortable for years.  When my kids were quite young they sometimes wore it as an outdoor hat and hence the stampede string that was affixed to it, made easy by the fact that M1911s had a hole for that purpose.  But for years I've worn it as a hunting hat in spite of it being a tad too small.  As its a beaver fur felt hat, it's nearly bullet proof and its endured.

It's endured but it's also become rather disheveled looking, quite frankly. Rain, snow, and whatever, have taken its tole, and the shape has deteriorated due to my pushing it on when its just not quite right.  The last couple of years I've thought of tossing it.

Indeed, I nearly did Sunday when we came back as its' just gotten so rough looking, but I didn't.  I left it looped over the driver's seat of my Jeep, where I tend to place it when going here and there.  Generally, it's stayed put there.

Well, even though I had the doors of the Jeep on and the top up on Monday, when I hit the highway to go look for doves, the string snapped and it went flying.  I went back to see if I could find it, and couldn't, and then traveled on. When I came back to town I went twice more.

The wind made the decision for me.  But I'm still thinking of going back one more time.

If somebody found it, I hope its a kid who it can fit who spends a lot of time outdoors.

The Boots, the Hole, the Dog and the Snake

As noted, on Monday, Labor Day, I went back out, this time for doves.

I went to a spot I always do and saw quite a few.  I took the dog with me, even though you really don't use dogs much for doves, as he likes to get out and gets upset if he doesn't get to go.

I probably should have left him at home as when we got out, he was clearly tired from the long, long hike the day prior.  But he went and we were seeing quite a few.

The grass in that spot is really overgrown this year and its covered up the ground and the terrain features pretty severely.  That always worries me a bit as I don't want to run into snakes.  As it was, it covered up a major erosion feature and I fell into it landing on my back.  I fell about five feet.

That scared me as if ever I was going to get bit by a snake, that was when it would occur.  I scrambled right out, which is saying something for a guy whose fallen five feet, hit his head on the way down, and is only 5'6" tall.

The dog jumped the ditch.

On the other side I walked past an area of tall grass.

Before leaving to go out for doves I almost put on my Red Wing service shoes. They're not really appropriate hunting boots, but most of the areas I was going to check were fairly close to roads and I was thinking that I could put them on quickly and get out.

I didn't.  Instead I put on my Hathorn (Whites) smoke jumpers, which I'd worn the day prior and which were still out.

I"m manic about good boots.

A person can skimp on nearly any item of outdoor apparel except for two things, and two things alone.  You need a good pair of boots and you need a good broad brimmed hat.  Most modern outdoorsmen have neither.

Indeed, about 99.99% of boots worn by outdoorsmen today are complete and total junk.  Synthetic crappy boots have come in which are no better, in my view, than wearing your Chuck Taylor's.  Almost any excuse of them is nothing much more than a bunch of unthinking crap.  A person needs, if they're really going to be out in the real outdoors, with the sole exception of some specialty uses, good leather boots.

I've given this lecture, I'd note, to more than one person who disregarded it and even argued against it.  In two such instances those people have blown out their ankles severely in the sticks.  I was with one of them when they did. The other had to be hauled out of the high country and doesn't talk to me about boots anymore.

Anyhow, I love smoke jumpers, which are the best general use outdoor boots of all time.  And Whites are the best of the best.

One of the features of boots of this type is that they feature really thick leather.  It's counter intuitive, but in really hot weather heavy boots are cool to wear as they keep they heat out.

They also keep the heat from transmitting from your foot out.

And that matters if you are in areas that are snakey.

Rattlesnakes operate off of heat, not sight. Their noses keenly sense any change in heat, and that change is usually when a mammal comes buy.  Nine times out of ten for htem that mammal is a mouse or rabbit and it gets no warning at all.  It's bit and eaten.

Sometimes that mammal is something the snake finds threatening, and as they have barely any intelligence at all, that's anything that's not edible and probably some things that are.  Horses, cattle, deer, dogs, and people.  If you are a people, and you are out where snakes are, you ought to be wearing a stout, high, pair of boots.

I don't care what some salesman or outdoor boot company that's going for the mass market tells you.  That boot had better be leather and stout leather.  Synthetic is just an invitation for the snake.

I walked right by the snake, which I never saw. The dog did, as the snake bit him in the face.

Swollen muzzle a day after the snake bite

We were not far from the Jeep and I walked him back to it, lifting him over the fence.  He's a big dog and he seemed okay. I called my wife to call the veterinarian anyway. By the time we hit the highway, he was not okay.  Now, several days later, and after a night in the vets, he's doing much better, but still on medications.

My wife loves the dog.  It took me sometime to get used to him really as I"m not a dog person.  He's a big, gentle thing, and a good bird dog as long as he doesn't have to go into water, which he's not particularly keen about. As he was purchased due to my wife's assertion that as an aging, often solo, hunter, I shouldn't be wading out into the North Platte, that's a bit of a disappointment, but I hope he'll come around.

The dog is a Double Doodle, which in his case means he's 3/4s Standard Poole and 1/4 Golden Retriever.  He's from a hunting line and both of those breeds are hunting breeds.  Poodles, in fact, are an ancient German hunting breed, their name evolving from Pudelhund, "puddle dog".  Golden Retrievers are a Scottish breed descended from a laird crossing a Spaniel with a retrieving dog of some sort, in search of an all purpose breed.

Poodles are the second smartest breed of dog, right behind collie, and are are third only to wolves.  There's a lot of wolf brain in them and they an odd dog for hunters who have never been exposed to them as they're a lot more like the hunting dogs in Medieval paintings than they are like the dogs on the cover of Field & Stream.  They're odd to train for that reason and they take most trainers off guard.  We bought some books as I thought I could train him myself. That thought was foolish, and the books were really deceptive. The author of the books, a highly respected series, had trained modern retrievers and water dogs, not poodles who are a really good hunting dog, but who have stepped out of the 1400s more than the 1940s.

So we took him to a trainer, who was really skeptical of him at first, but then really impressed. Oddly enough, by the end of that summer the same trainer had three hunting doodles in his classes. The breed, or rather cross breed, is really coming along.

Owning a doodle or a standard poodle is an interesting experience for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that people have opinions about it, and not always the ones you are expecting.  Hunters are pretty opinionated about dogs in general, but again that isn't quite what a person might think.  Beyond that, outdoorsmen are super opinionated about outdoor things, and this too works a bit differently than what a person might initially suppose.

What I've noted about this is that there are "experts", Experts, and then folks, so to speak, and their views vary considerably.  Everyone seems to believe that they are "experts", but few actually are on a lot of these topics.  Indeed, real Experts are a tiny minority of supposed "experts" on the topics of at least guns, dogs, trucks and the like.  Real Experts, which can be found anywhere, often have very nuanced opinions and tend to be careful and reserved where as "experts", which can also be found anywhere, but who are particularly vocal on the Internet, often have opinions derived from trends, each other, and from sporting journals on magazine racks.  Folks, on the other hand, have opinions, but they're their own opinions.

Anyhow, if you a outdoorsy guy with a great big Doodle, and they are large, regular folks don't really know how to take it.  It doesn't seem super manly, so they're surprised as as rule that he's a hunting dog, particularly as he's very gentle and friendly.  Folks who have doodles, on the other hand, are usually super enthusiastic to see any other doodle.  Lots of folks in general are surprised that doodles and standard poodles are hunting breeds, let alone good ones.  "Experts" on the other hand, think that's the most absurd thing ever and will tell you so. Doodles are dumb, they maintain, apparently not realizing that poodles are Einstein's next to Labradors.  Or maybe what they are is like mules as to horses.

Labradors and the like aren't bad dogs by any means, but the debate and doubt have been bread out of them so they're like machines in the field.  Labs know from day one that they are to retrieve waterfowl.  They're iffy, usually, on other types of retrieving but can learn it.

Poodles, and by extension doodles, also have that instinct, but it's a 15th Century instinct when to be a hunting dog, was to be a hunting dog. Today we're hunting waterfowl. . . tomorrow upland birds. . .next week roebuck.  Hunting.  They know that they're a hunting dog, but they're a generalist and the specifics have to be learned, or maybe more accurately explained, as in "Jim, I know that that's a fine flock of ducks but I don't see a really good reason why you shouldn't shoot that deer instead., now pound per pound. . ."  They will learn it, but it has to be learned.  That means the trainer has to be good (as ours was) and you have to be good with them.  I doubt they'd work for a heavy handed hunter.  Indeed, I think that's another reason that doodles and poodles are much like earlier hunting dogs.  Gerhard the Jaeger lived with that dog, and it was his pal.  He didn't go to the cubicle every day and put the dog in a dog run.  It worked for him, but he lived with it.  Doodles are like that.

Real Experts tend to know that, and that's why their opinions tend to be very carefully voiced.  Some guys I know who know a lot about hunting dogs simply ask a series of questions when they learn the dog is a hunting dog, which is how they're weighing his merits.  How does he do in water?  Does he retrieve sage chickens?  How is he in the field?

Anyway, I'm not much of a dog person and have become less of one over the years.  I've been attacked by dogs a couple of times, including by a German Shepherd once, and that's made me dog leery.  But this dog has such an odd personality and has been such a good dog that the thought of his getting injured on my watch while he was helping me was simply awful.

Day after accident with swollen muzzle, going home.

So, what's the moral of all of this?  Well, I don't know if there is one.  Or maybe there is one, or several closely connected ones.

One is that perceptions of things can be pretty inaccurate, but impressions, no matter how inaccurately formed, can have a very long lasting effect.  If a guy like me, who has been a strong backer of the Game and Fish for half a century is now suddenly reserved about game wardens, what must the view be of a person who experiences something like I did who isn't so vested in them?

And maybe another lesson has to do with the utility of the proven that works over the nifty and new.  I probably didn't get bitten last weekend as I was wearing a stout pair of outdoor boots.  I got where I wanted to go as I know how to read a map, and use a GPS, and knew the country.  Native knowledge and experience.

And the dogs doing fine.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*This reflects an interesting language evolution as well.  That fishing is fish hunting is self evident, but a lot of fishermen or, to use the less common term, anglers, fail to realize that.  But earlier on, English included other words that also delineated various other types of hunting.

Fowling, for example, is the hunting of birds, and a fowler is a bird hunter.  Lots of people today bear this common last name, stemming from the day when one of their ancestors was principally employed in that activity.  My guess is that other terms existed in older English at one time, but I don't know that for certain.  Certainly more than one for hunter exists in English, with hunter being one and names based on the German Jaeger being others.

**The fact that its a bladed road means its a maintained road, and that, combined with its distance from any town, means that its almost certainly a government maintained road.

I note that as its curious.  The road is closed most of the year, but somebody is maintaining it, and generally ranchers don't maintain roads, particularly ones far from town.  If a road is being maintained on the public's dime, in my view, it ought to be a public road, but none the less, I respect the closure.

Labor Day, 1919

American troops near Marfa, Texas, are treated to a picnic in honor of Labor Day, September 1, 1919.

September 1 was Labor Day in 1919, then as now falling on the first Monday of September.  The unofficial end of American summer was a day off for most people, including I'd note most local newspapers, and it was celebrated in much the same fashion as it currently is.  Foot races and picnics were held in the mining town of Hanna, Wyoming.  Motorcycle races were held in Marion Indiana.  Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech on labor in Plymouth.

In the case of American solders serving on the border, which was still quite tense, this meant, if they were stationed near Marfa, a lunch served by the American Red Cross.

If they were assigned to the transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy, which was now running several days behind schedule, it wasn't a day off. They traveled from Carson City, Nevada, to Meyers, California

The road was treacherous and the Nevada Highway Department closed the road in the Sierras for the convoy.  Motorcycles were used to police the convoy speed and spacing, as well as looking for hot bearings.   The convoy went 34 miles in 13.5 hours and its arrival in Meyers was treated as a great success.  The Mayor of San Francisco traveled out to meet the convoy.

A party that claimed to represent labor was laboring away in chaos on this Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  The left wing turmoil going on in Chicago saw yet another Communist Party emerge out of the departed hardcore left wingers of the Socialist Party, when the non English speakers formed their own Communist Party of America.

This is really confusing as there already was a Communist Party of America, that had existed since May. This new one joined the old one rapidly. The English speaking Communist Labor Party would follow within months.

Of interest, the new foreign born Communist Party of America that formed on this day was double the size of the Socialist Party of America, with 60,000 members, and six times the size of the Communist Labor Party, which had 10,000 members.  This pretty shows that the leadership of the Socialist Party was more conservative and democratic than the rank and file, which had gone hardcore left. 

It also shows that the sentiments of the Socialist were highly influenced by immigrant members who were likely hardcore leftists when they arrived in the country, something that the Communist Party and its sympathizers on the radical left have not really liked to acknowledge.  The 1910s through the 1930s were the high water mark of radical Socialism in the US and its interesting to note that this was also the case for Anarchism, although it was waning by the 1930s.  In both instances the movements had significant immigrant representation within them and, moreover, representation from certain concentrated areas of Europe where the movements were also strong.  It's fairly clearly the case that in those instances they brought radical sentiments with them, rather than acquiring them in the US, although there were certainly native born radicals as well.

All of these movements were on the way out by the 1940s for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they'd been tested with disastrous results in Europe by that time and World War Two caused an economic boost in the country that buried any lingering sympathy for economic radicalism.  But in 1919, Communism was untested and on the rise, even if a language barrier caused it to oddly develop in the US, briefly, in a fractured fashion.  Even at that, however, it never really had very much appeal for most Americans, including foreign born ones, let alone most American workers.

Workers and the high cost of living were the topic of that day's Gasoline Alley, which was published in the local Chicago newspaper.  In a somewhat serious edition of the cartoon, the Reds made their own appearance that day.

It was a day off, of course, for most Americans and that meant not only picnics and races, but trips to the movies, which the movie industry used to introduce new films.

Her Purchase Price frankly had a the type of plot that movie goers of the era loved but which are creepy today.  In that film, Sir Derek Anstruther encounters European looking Egyptian slave Sheka while touring Egypt.  She learns that she's been raised a slave since taken by a bandit in her youth.  So he buys her, after falling in love with her.

Low and behold this disrupts Sir Anstruther's inheritance so the loyal Sheka sells herself to somebody else so that he's not dispossessed.  But Sir Derek pursues, and in the meantime her parentage is cleared up and all is well.

Hmmm. . . .

For folks who were bothered by the racial qualities of that one, let alone the moral questions raised by buying your bride in an Egyptian slave market, The Brat was also released on this day in 1919.  It featured a a chorus girl known only by that nickname who resists improper advances, resulting in her arrest.  The prosecutor's brother, however, is studying the underworld and therefore the judge lets her live in his household so that she can be the subject of study.  Well you can see how that one goes. . . 

Frankly, that was a bit disturbing as well.

Well, north of the border there was Back To God's Country, in which the daughter of a Canadian woodsman grows up in nature and has a rapport with animals.  She falls in love with a Canadian government official and marries him, after escaping the clutches of a bogus Mountie who attempts to rape her and who kills her father.  She then travels with her husband on a whaler but the captain turns out to be the rapist in disguise, so she has to escape by dog sled in the Arctic, with her husband.

Maybe it would have been better just to skip the movies on that Labor Day.

Wyoming Labor Journal, September 6, 1918.

Another item we're running this week in observation of Labor Day, this past Monday, and of course in keeping with our recent 1918 theme, the Wyoming Labor Journal.

This is the issue of September 6, 1918 and followed the recent Labor Day observance in 1918.  While various unions that exist in Wyoming do publish trade journals today, as far as I'm aware there is no longer a general labor newspaper such as this.

Labor was in an odd position in the Great War as it was continually somewhat at odds with the administration while also supporting the war effort.  From the patriotic front page of the paper, you wouldn't necessary know that from the Journal.

Labor Day, 2018. A Query

 

I'm curious, amongst those who stop in here, of the following:

1.  How many of you work a job entailing manual labor?

2.  If you presently do not, how many of you have worked a job entailing manual labor?

3.  How many of you had parents or a parent that:

A.  Had worked a job entailing manual labor;
B.  Worked principally in a job entaling manual labor.

Labor Day 2018. A Contemplation

Today is Labor Day for 2018, but you knew that already.

 Steel mill taking in scrap steel, 1942.

Labor Day is one of those holidays on which I've sometimes posted a reflection here.  I'm doing so now influenced by the fact that, for me, this isn't going to be a day off. I'm just marking time until I go into work, which caused me to contemplate the nature of modern work and what most people are doing now days, and where things seem to be headed.

This day just doesn't mean what it once did to most Americans.  When the holiday started to come in, during the late 19th Century, the United States was in the violent throws of going from being an agricultural nation to an industrial one.  It had a long ways to go and that process hadn't just started by any means, and it wasn't near the end either.  But Labor was really coming into its own.

There was a lot of fear, legitimate fear, about radicalized labor. And indeed in many countries this process resulted in fully radical labor.  It never did in the United States, but from at least the 1890s well into the 1950s there was a section of American labor that was fairly radical. There was also a large section that wasn't and which was heavily patriotic as well.  The American experiment with handling the transition allowed for this to occur, and we must acknowledge that American labor unions, while not without their radical elements, were a major part of that.

Much of this has fallen away.  Titanic struggles between labor and capital resulted in legislative compromises that were so effective that labor not only succeeded in getting what it wanted, by and large, but it over accomplished that resulting in a claw back of some things starting in the late 1970s.  Unions still exist of course, but by and large they achieve very little, their achievements having been accomplished long ago.

More than that, however, an American economy that was born, to some extent, in the early 20th Century and which came into full fruition following World War Two transitioned into something else starting in the 1970s and carrying through the remainder of the 20th Century, which very much played into this process.  Coming into industrialization late, the United States did not really become a global manufacturing titan until the early 20th Century.  By the post war period it was gigantic in that status, in spite of the Great Depression.  World War Two demonstrated that dominance and the United States came out of the war as the only intact industrial power.  From 1945 until the 1970s the US absolutely dominated manufacturing globally.

But by then things were changing.  The countries whose industrial bases were wiped out by the Second World War were recovering throughout the 1950s and 1960s and came back into their own during the 1970s.  Some nations that had never been industrial nations in any significant global fashion, such as Japan, achieved that status.  This all cut into the US's dominance. All that, of course, is very well known.

Less well understood, as a topic, is that the US, either by design or default or a little of both operated to eliminate the bottom end of its manufacturing.  People who follow this sort of thing closely argue whether this is merely an example of Adam Smith at work or, rather, a calculated decision to make Adam Smith work (or work in something else) but it did occur.

During that period of time in which the United States was a true industrial giant, nearly everything was made here, from the very high quality to the very low.  Starting in the post war period, some overseas manufacturing became associated, in comparison, with junk.  "Made In Japan", for example, was sort of a joke in the 1950s and 1960s.  By the 70s it wasn't.

But what also wasn't by the 1970s were the really bottom basement manufacturing jobs that such industries began to support. As the US had a lot of better paying jobs, they were not missed.  Soon, however, by the 1970s the better paying manufacturing jobs were disappearing as well.  By now, a lot of them have wholly disappeared.

It's seems hard to believe now, looking back, that the US once had, for example, a major textile manufacturing industry and that it remained such a big deal that in 1979 a movie about a heroin organizing textile workers into a union would be a popular movie. But Norma Rae, with Sally Field in that role, was.  Likewise, those who watched The Deer Hunter in 1978, with its depiction of Pennsylvania steel towns, didn't find that setting odd, while now it very much does.  Lots of U.S. heavy industry has simply disappeared.

As it disappeared the tech jobs rose up with it, and for some economists this is argued to be more than a beneficial offset.  Technology, it is argued, allows employees who would have spent their days in steel mills, textile mills and doing other dangerous work are now able to do much more lucrative and productive work in high tech.

I've heard that argument made many times in many shades, to include not only folks who have an interest in economics or who are economists, but also by such notables as Barack Obama, who basically argued that not only were the old heavy industry jobs never coming back, but we didn't want them back as well (those left out in this transition made their voices heard in the 2016 election, and we're still seeing how all that will play out).

There's always been something about that argument which is distasteful as it assumes a lot about what people should want. But then, a lot of this entire topic assumes that.  People should want, the argument goes, these "better jobs".

That assumes that everyone is capable of doing them.  It assumes also that every wants them, and that they actually are better.

Indeed, that assumption has been made so well that, ironically enough, a lot of blue collar jobs the nation has now go wanting, including some fairly high paying ones.  People have been so schooled in the notion that those jobs aren't worth having, that people who are at the job entry level don't even consider them anymore, so they go unfilled.

Ironically, if you look at a lot of the "better jobs" we've gone to over time the evidence is that they may very well not be. And that takes me back to my working today.

I've worked manual labor jobs and so have a lot of lawyers my age and older, so I've seen both sides of work, indeed as this has more than one side, I've seen a lot of sides of work. But a lot of the younger ones never have.  And as I look out on the ones who have really followed the dream, by which I mean following the brass ring to the huge firms in the huge cities, I'm seeing a bunch of people who look to be living in misery and know no other way of life.  And that doesn't apply just to people in this field, but in everything, or at least everything that requires advanced education.  People leave smaller towns and smaller cities to work 24 hours a day in high stress situations.  Why is that?

Well, in no small part its because we are all told as a society that this is what we want, even if we don't want it.  People want to live in the big cities, people want to work in the glass and steel towers, people want to wear the expensive clothes and drive the expensive cars and be tied to a job whose income has to be large as their expenditures are also large.

Right?

Well, I don't think they do.  The entire economic culture of the country has has sold its soul to this idea and lots are lost.  We have confusion of every type as a result, and a large number of people seeking to identify themselves with something they know is lost but which they cannot any longer find.  The byproducts of that are frightening.

I suppose what we never asked ourselves is the question that Wendell Berry put to us so long ago, "What are people for?".  We've built an economy which doesn't seem to be for people at all, and we continue to rush head long into it. We did that when we created an economy that industrialized and then we amplified that with a consumer economy that was all about materialism. We've forgotten that there is any other purpose to an economy and now believe that so strongly we don't know any other way, even if that economy is making people unhappy. And the needs of that economy became so paramount that it took over everything else, and ultimately wiped out a lot of the achievements that labor had won so long ago, including a five day work week with two days of rests, and holidays that were actually days off.

Which I suppose takes me back to my comment about working today.  I'm doing that by necessity and I do normally take off Labor Day and I'm glad to do so. I'm not complaining about that, or if I am I'm not complaining much and that's not due to anything that I've noted here.  I don't live in the big city.  But I do note that as I occupy one of those many good jobs that at one time did in fact have many good side benefits. As the urban upper middle class miserable have spread their misery by insisting that all must partake in it, it begins to seep into everything everywhere.  I've noted here before that practicing law isn't what it once was due these developments, and indeed those from the wealthier classes no longer enter the profession much as they know that.  And that's all part of the same process that enforces every greater urban consolidation through such horribly misdirected policies as the Uniform Bar Exam, an exam boosted by law schools and the profession to make licenses "transportable" but which in actuality simply sink things down towards the center of gravity and make things worse for every member of the profession that refugees from the practice of law, such as law professors, claim they wish to help.

So the point?

Well, I don't know that there is one, really, other than this.

On this day of celebrating Labor, we don't have as much of it as we' used to.  And maybe we're worse off for that.  And as we continue to contemplate wonderful economies of the future, perhaps some contemplation into how people fit into that is merited. . . even if that means looking back rather than forward.