Wednesday, February 4, 2026
The Agrarian's Lament: Where have all the local businesses gone? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 6.
Where have all the local businesses gone? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 6.
Donald Trump reportedly just can't grasp why average Americans don't think the economy is doing great. It's doing great for everyone he knows. It's doing great for the the Trump family. It's doing swell for Jeff Bezos. It's doing great for Elon Musk. It's only not doing great for his pal Jeff Epstein, as he checked out before he could be spring from jail in one fashion or another and go back to being a teenage girl procurer.
So what, he must be thinking, is the freaking problem?
Well, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the entire Trump family are the problem (and people like Jeff Epstein are as well).
In other quarters people like to debate whether or not the United States is a "Christian nation". Whatever the answer to that might be (I think the answer is yes, but that it's a Puritan country) it was definitely a small freeholder country. That is, the country was mostly made up of small yeomanry and small tradesmen early on.
Indeed, the widespread use of corporations was illegal in the 1770s and for many years thereafter. Part of the rebellion against the crown was based on what effectively were export duties, a species of tariff, on chartered businesses, i.e., team importers, that the colonist had no control over and they reacted by destroying the property. Ironically the very people who emblazon themselves with 1776 themed tattoos in 2026 would have supported King George III doing what he did, just as they support King Donny doing them through executive order. Shoot, Parliament had actually voted on the tea duties.
Nonetheless, teh country has always had some very large business interests that, when allowed to, operate against the economic interest of everyone else. They don't want to "share the wealth". They think their getting wealthy is sharing enough, and good for everyone. Up until 1865, or instance, we had the Southern planter class, a market set of agriculturalist who destroyed land and people in their endeavors, but believed in it so strongly that they'd argue for the perversion of the Christian faith to support slavery.
It wasn't just Planters, however. Coal magnates, industrialists, foreign ranch owners, the list is pretty long.
It wasn't until later that absentee merchants dominated "main street", both the actual one or the metaphorical one. The first chain store is claimed by some to be The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which was founded in 1859. Woolworth's started twenty years later in 1879. Piggly Wiggly, the grocery store, showed up in 1916, and proved to be the model for "grocery stores" that would wipe out locally held grocery stores, for the most party, in the next couple of decades.
Since the mid 20th Century this trend has continued unabated and unaddressed. Every Walmart represents the destruction, probably, of a half dozen or more locally owned family supported stores. The appliance section represents the closure of local appliance stores. The entertainment section of record and video stores. You name it.
None of this had to be.
There's been a lot of ink spilled on the rise of Donald Trump and what caused it. We've done that ourselves. Others have noted the presence of small businessmen in the MAGA ranks, but it's been underreported in contrast to the blue collar Rust Belt members of the MAGA rank and file.
It shouldn't be.
When I was young, which is now a very long time ago, the Democratic Party was still regarded as the part of the working class. Unions, which have never been strong here, were still strong enough to host the annual Jefferson Jackson Day that backed the Democratic Party. But by 1973 the Democrats started to board the vessel of blood that would end up causing thousands to get off the boat. By the mid 1990s the party that had been the one hardhats joined became one in you had to be comfortable with a focus on disordered sex and infanticide. The Democrats, for the most part, forgot the working class.
At the same time, the Republican Party was widely accused of being the Country Club Party, with good reason. If you were a member of a country club or chamber of commerce, you were probably a Republican or you were weird. The thing is, however that the economic outlook of the hardhat class and the country club class was closer to each other than they thought and the same neglect hurt both of them severely.
As early as the 1960s, successive Democratic and Republican administrations were really comfortable with exporting business overseas. Nobody ever outright admitted that, but they were. And both Democratic and Republican administrations simply stopped enforcing anti trust legislation. Aggressively applied, entities like Walmart would be busted up, but it just doesn't happen. Aware of what was going on at first, and trying to struggle against it nearly everywhere, local business failed to arrest the destructive march of the giants. In part, their efforts were so local that they were like those of Russian peasantry trying to arrest the Red Army. They tried, but doing it locally just won't going to work. You can't wait until the Red Army is in sight of the village. Nobodoy lifted a finger at the national or state level to help.
The march of progress (which it wasn't) and free enterprise (which it also wasn't) and all that.
So the small business class became desperate, and in desperation they turned to the guy who offered no answers but who seemed like he might help, Trump.
What an irony, really. Trump doesn't "shop local" and he doesn't have the faintest grasp of what small business is like. He's spent his eight decades around the wealthy and is more comfortable with bullying smaller economic interest than helping them.
Even now, the bones a small business economy remain. In order to advance that interest, however, small businessmen have to do something they really aren't comfortable with.
They have to be militant about it.
Part of that involves being militant at the polls.*
And that involves asking some questions, but first it involves waking up to economic and structural realities.
The first of those realities is that the United States does not have a free market economic system, and hasn't for a long time. It has a Corporate Capitalist economic system that favors state created economic creatures given fictional personhood which favors economies of scale. The goal is to make prices cheaper, and part of that is to make wagers cheaper. The consumers are expected to adjust to this by getting new jobs at higher wages, sort of like the protagonist in Kansas City Star.
So, in essence, if you have an appliance store and are taking home, let's say, $150,000 a year, and with that you are trying to provide for all of your family's living expenses, and Walmart comes in, well, you should have become something else, and now this is your chance to go and do that.
Except you probably won't. You'll probably close the store and retire, if you are over 50, or go on to another lower paying job if you aren't.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Okay, not facing that grim reality, what you need to do is find out if politicians are more interested in their super sized huge television having a low, low price, or helping you. And helping you means leveling the playing field with legislation, not "buy local" campaigns.
And I'll note here, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which is trying to defend the Wyoming Business Council, is a prime example of people who are there to hurt you.
And so we begin.
1. Where is his bread buttered?
In other words, how does he make his money.
That may or not may not be a reason to vote for or against somebody. In Wyoming, fore xample, there are small businessmen in, and opposed to, the Freedom Caucus at the legislature, and voting for the WFC is a complete no go. So the question is informative, not determinative.
Having said that, there are certain answers that, in my mind, are nearly disqualifying.
One is a near complete lack of private business experience, even as an employee. Wyoming in particular seems to get a lot of candidates who cite "I was in the military" as a reason to vote for them, based on a lifelong military career. Well, that isn't like working for a private business at all. There's never been a time in the history of the U.S. military in which a soldier wasn't going to get paid, save for the government briefly shutting down. And almost all member of the military don't worry about overhead and payroll expenses. They also don't have to worry about the country coming to them and saying, "Gee, U.S. Army, we've really liked you here, but the British Army made us a better offer so we're doing to close you down. . . "
It's not just a lifetime of sucking on the government tit that should be concerning. People who have a lot of family money are in the same category.
I"m not necessary saying don't vote for somebody who is rich. I am saying you need to weight it carefully. It's hard to get politicians right now, at least at the national level, who aren't fairly well off, due to the Citizens United case. But if a person is rich because they inherited it, a pause should be made on the voting lever.
2. Do you support the American System?
Of course, when you ask this, you're probably going to get the answer of "yes", because it includes the word "American" and nobody wants to be against the American canything if they're a politician.
So you're going to have to ask them some questions or question which shows what they know what the American System is.
They probably won't know.
Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."
Okay, right now I'll note that this included tariffs to protect American industry, and I've been hard on those. I also don't live in the first half of the 19th Century when industry had barely achieved a foothold in the U.S. And, it might be worth noting, that Clay didn't propose tariffs as people hurt his feelings. At any rate, post 1890s tariffs have proven to be a disaster.
What I"m noting, however, is the second and third parts of the American System, that being a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture.
What I'm really getting at is the use of public funds to assist local businesses.
A good example of the American System in Wyoming has been the Wyoming Business Council.. The carpetbagging Wyoming Freedom Caucus is attacking it basically because it uses public money. If you are in Wyoming, a good question is whether or not the pol supports the Wyoming Business Council being defunded. If the answer is yes, this pol doesn't care if you evaporate and is instead mindlessly adopting twattle that the WBC is "Socialist". First of all, I don't care if it is socialist, I only care, and so should you, about whether its effective in generating local businesses.
3. What actual legislation would they support to help local business.
By this, I mean concrete examples.
Chances are, you won't get any, so you'll have to press them.
4. What is their position on taxation?
By this, I mean the whole smash. Local, state and Federal.
The local press always asks this position of our pols, and they rarely give any kind of a detailed answer. Right now, most of them note that they aren't fond of taxes, but they don't support the WFC's effort to gut state property taxes either.
That's not specific enough.
5. What do they think of the out of staters buying up all the ___________and what would they do about it?
Here, and in much ag country, this would pertain to ranch land. But I'm sure it pertains to other things as well. Shoot ,around here it also would seem to pertain to tire stores, it's just ridiculous.
Expressing "concern" doesn't mean anything at all, even if you are Lisa Murkowski.
Doing nothing, I'd note, is an answer. It's not an answer too many would be willing to give, but at least its an honest answer.
6. What do their employees, if they have any, think of them?
For some reason, this is never asked, but it should be. If the answer is that the candidates employees hate the candidate with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, that probably needs to be considered. If, on the other hand, the employees widely admire the employer/candidate, that says something else.
I'll note here that personally I had people come to me as late as the 2010s who had worked for my grandfather and wanted me to know how he had helped them out in tough times. He never ran for anything, but that says a lot about his character.
I don't think we've heard anything like that from any of Jeffrey Epstein's employees.
I'll also note that as a businessman myself, it seems some businessmen are willing to fire people the second they might have to take a little less home. That's a character defect that's disturbing, at the least.
7. Why are they in the party they're in?
Again, an honest answer.
Right now you can't be a Republican or Democrat and be 100% comfortable with either party. That would suggest that you are letting others do your thinking for you. Businessmen have a right to know what drew a candidate to the party, what ever it is.
They also have a right to know what a candidate disagrees with about the positions of their own party. If he doesn't disagree with any party position, he's an unthinking stooge.
8. What business related or policy related organizations are they in, or endorsed by?
This is often overlooked unless those organizations step out themselves, which they sometimes do.
Make Liberty Win is, in my view, a big no/go for a candidate. The Club for Growth is as well. The latter favors an economy that will screw you.
Footnotes
*They really need to be militant about it everywhere, however.
Last edition:
What have you done for me lately? Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 5.
Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.
Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 3.
Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.
Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.
The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.: I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location. It wasn't until earlier this f...
Dreams denied and abandoned.
I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location. It wasn't until earlier this fall that I realized that it's all on Federal Land.
I walked in, as you have to do, while hunting doves. I only saw one.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Monday, September 24, 1945. Hirohito threw Tojo under the bus for Pearl Harbor. Elevator operators on strike.
Hirohito threw Tojo under the bus for Pearl Harbor.
Manhattan elevator operators went on strike.
It's odd to think of them going on strike. They were common at the time, and were into the 1960s. Now, of course, they're so rare that most people have never encountered one.
Related threads:
Mid Week At Work. Elevator Operators
Last edition:
Sunday, September 23, 1945. A call to arms.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.
Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.
St. Philip Neri.
I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.
The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.
They're mad.
I'm not really sure at what. But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.
This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens. Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.
Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it. The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I. The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.
What the crap?
"They could have done that years ago. . .".
Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.
Same person has something much like this shorter term.
I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person. The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated. It's a bad combination.
A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly. This person does that repeatedly. If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.
It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation. When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader. But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on. They have to. New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.
Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way. You can tell they know that themselves. The spotlight moved on.
There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they? And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.
Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.
Truth be known, Americans always have been.
If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all. You could simply make it:
We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind. Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.
But that's only one such ill that warps our nature. How did we get there? Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about? Yes. But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a big party for "fulfillment" Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.
So too those who now identify their religion with any political party. Our home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod. If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.
Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night. We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future. The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls. Let us resolve to be right with God today.
Probably everyone would be mad
Which gets me to this.
Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian. He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things. He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.
As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one. That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.
That describes most Americans, quite frankly.
That hasn't always been the case, however.
Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion. When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like. Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.
And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.
And, also, here's something else.
I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.
Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story. Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.
Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?
Well, they're black, African, and Catholic. Ho hum. . .
But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits. Charlie Kirk was murdered last week. Most Americans no longer care one bit.
That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth. Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care. They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football. Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.
We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence. And they'll be disappointed.
Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.
And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.
Frequently it plays out with the same script. Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men. The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy". What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.
Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all. Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.
The story for a lot of men isn't much different. I see it with professional men all the time. Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job. Oh horseshit. There's just nothing left. The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left. Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.
Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.
She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist. She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters. They're getting a "grey divorce".
The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago. There's some fault there. A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.
All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.
Well, it was never going to.
I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply. He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones. It clearly tortures him as he knows better. Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.
And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that. Same with the folks mentioned above.
And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.
The State bar convention is going on. I never go it in person. I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically. I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits.
I wish I hadn't.
The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit. It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world. That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour. All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.
I hope some students were in the audience to see that. If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.
The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel. Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously. That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on. The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships. They just aren't doing it. They were urged to do it.
As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors. It's extremely obvious. The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that. If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.
Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd. The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.
It's disappointing for sure.
For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success. I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply. I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it. I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing. It's just a feeling, and not a good one. When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.
It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.
Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation. He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law. I was so surprised I called him. He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.
