Showing posts with label free market economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free market economics. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: A Depressing Visit to the Cabela's Mothership

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

I haven't kept up on the Cabala's news, but frankly Cabela's in recent months have been a bit depressing.  So it wasn't a huge surprise when I read the Southern Rockies Nature Blog entry here:
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: A Depressing Visit to the Cabela's Mothership: Entrance to the Cabela's store in Sidney, Nebraska. I first visited Cabela's headquarters store in Sidney, Nebraska, when it was st...
My comment there:





I used to love Cabela's, probably the same way that some people loved the old Herter's catalog.  And it frankly had that model, it was a catalog store.  Herter's, for those who can recall it, also had a unique catalog that used to come full of outdoor gear and which also contained commentary from the owner of the store.  Herter's actually inspired the original owners of Cabela's with their business model, and as it began to come up it bought some lines, including foam decoys, from Herter's.  After Cabela's did that, in fact, Herter's slid into bankruptcy, ceasing to exist in 1981.

By that time, Cabela's was very much in the ascendancy. . .using the same model.  You'd get a catalog a couple of times a  year, but frankly the only one you really paid much attention to was the fall catalog, and maybe the winter catalog.  You could tell that these guys were out of small-town Nebraska.  The hunting stuff was waterfowl centric and good.

The Sidney store itself was a bit of a charming mess.  It was tiny, weirdly organized, and had the great "bargain cave" that was packed with great stuff wall to wall that somebody had returned.  I still have a pair of Chippewa packers boots that somebody had returned, something I could not have afforded otherwise, that I picked up there probably in 1989 or so, the first time I went there.

The people who worked there, moreover, were really knowledgeable.  Men from the town who were hunters themselves.  You had the impression that this was a part-time job that gave them extra money while they were doing something else. . . maybe working on the farm or something.

Then they moved to the highway.  

Lots of people hve fond memories of the huge headquarters out on the Interstate, but it was never as good as the downtown store. This doesn't mean it was bad, but it wasn't as good.

Well, the United States being what it is, a nation that's completely failed to grasp that Capitalism and Free Marketism are not the same thing, it was probably inevitable that the success of the headquarters interstate store meant that identical stores started popping up elsewhere.  The first one I was ever in was in Rapid City, and indeed I found something on sale there that I bought, so I shouldn't complain. That store and the one in Billings, weren't bad.  One then sprung up in Thornton Colorado, and frankly it's never been more than okay at best.  I still stop in there, but it's been uniformly disappointing in recent years.

In 2017 Bass Pro Shop came along and swallowed up Cabela's.

That was part of the capitalist anti-free market monopolistic impulse that inevitable as well. Bass Pro Shop was and is a big outfit.  Focused on southern bass fishing, it had built itself up into a huge retail chain.  At some point some of its catalogs wound up in my mailbox but unlike the Cabela's catalog, they usually ended up in the trash pretty soon after that.  I don't live in the South and while I fish, I don't do that kind of fishing.  When the merger, or buyout (more accurate), came, I worried that it would mean the end of Cabela's.

And it more or less has.

The Bass Pro Shop conglomerate owns Sportsman's Warehouse as well, and I can't say that I've seen a change there, as Sportsman's was never doing that well here, and it may have actually improved somewhat, but you can see the problem here.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

All giant retailers can and do exist as they have a corporate structure, and corporations are creatures of the government.

Eh?  What about free market and competition, and all that jazz?

Nope, they're creatures of the government.

It as the British who invented them, and more specifically, they came about due to British colonialism.  It simply wasn't possible to raise large amounts of capital, i.e, cash, from people who would risk it all, like it would if you were investing in a partnership, for giant colonial enterprises.

Here perhaps an example would best illustrate the situation.

If I'm looking to put together a bunch of cash to invest in a colonial enterprise in East India, and its going to take a lot of it, I'm going to have to get a lot of it from a lot of people. But most of those people are going to stay safe and warm in Old Blighty  So, when I go to Lord Smithers, or whomever, and as for £10,000 Sterling, and he asks how safe his investment is, if I’m honest I'm going to have to tell him about the risks, and part of that risks is that some competing enterprise or person might file suit against all the partners, if that's what we are, including Lord Smithers.  At that point, he'll probably decide to keep his silver and go back to forcing Scottish peasants off the land so he can raise sheep instead.

But, if I get Parliament to create a new legal creature, the corporation, I can tell Lord Smithers that all he's risking is his personal cash.  No individual liability at all. That's a much better deal.

Indeed, that will not only appeal to Lord Smithers, who has big amounts of spare cash, but also to the new middle class.  Lots of Mr. Jones, and Mr. Smiths, who don't have £10,000 Sterling, but who might have £10 or £20.

You get the point.

But there was a dark side to that which nobody anticipated at the time.  Sure, corporations allowed for the build up of lots of cash in a new economic system, capitalism, but nobody ever thought that it would be used for anything other than gigantic investment high-risk entities.  Sure, the East India Company (really the first true corporation) or the Hudson's Bay Company, but not retailers.  Indeed, early on corporations were restricted in their existence and took specific legislative acts in order to exist.  The first free corporations act, i.e., a bill allowing for parties meeting certain requirements simply to incorporate on their own, in the US first came about in 1811.  That New York act was restricted to manufacturing.  The first general incorporation act in the US didn't come about until 1896.

1896.

So when you hear all the stuff from confused free marketers about how this has always been, and how corporations should be free of government influences. . . well, they're creatures of government influence and haven't been around in the moder form all that long.

They've certain spread and like all businesses, they have a monopolistic instinct.  People may tell you that they're all hip and cool in competition, but truth be known, every business would prefer to be a monopoly. And that's why they buy each other. Medium-sized retailers buy out small ones, big ones buy out large ones, the goal is to be the only one.

The irony is that as this occurs, service doesn't really improve.  The larger things become, the less it knows about the local.

Indeed, Cabela's showed its Nebraska origin throughout its independent existence, which was okay if you were from a neighboring state.  And it somewhat got the neighboring states too, as its winter catalog and summer catalog showed. As noted, Bass Pro Shop never did.  Sportsman's Warehouse, even though it was founded in Utah, obviously didn't as it would stock stuff in its stores that you'd never use here.

On top of it, big v. small ultimately becomes a price v. quality war, which was probably part of Herter's problem.  Herter's stuff was good.  But at some point, the real attraction to big is low price to an extent.  This is only partially true of a niche store, like Cabela's, as part of it is also having stuff you can't find elsewhere.  Indeed, L. L. Bean, which has just started to go down the fatal extra retail outlet road, really had that down for eons.

The ultimate example of this is of course Walmart, whose low low prices have depressed the quality of retail goods in the US.  Things really aren't as good as they used to be in some categories, quality wise, because of Walmart, which is so aggressive in its desire to have the lowest prices in the universe that it's caused manufacturers of some durable goods to use cheaper components. Consumers don't see this.

All of this has done a bunch of different things to the American retail scene.  On one hand, it had really served to drive prices down.  It's also served to drive manufacturing overseas, although there's more to it than that, and its served to drive prices down as well.  And its drive local businesses out of existence.  Americans who praise this particular system in its current form, and there are many, probably more than who critique it, fail to note that at some point low low prices by a giant retailer mean that everyone has low low wages and can't afford to buy crap.  And indeed, there's also the problematic economic problem of the tendency of profits to decline, which has been theorized upon by every economist from Adam Smith on, but which capitalism ultimately can experience for some of the reasons we're noting, although there are many other factors and the rule isn't an iron clad one itself.

Anyhow, all of that gets back to this.

Chances are that a local sporting goods store, or even a small chain, may better serve your needs than a large one.  I've seen that a lot of times with sporting goods stores and chains, and I start to worry when one is so successful it begins to expand. I really worry when it starts to buy out its competition.

Probably the only real saving grace of all of this is that it tends to function much like the analogy noted above, if left untreated.  Things get so big, they cease to function efficiently, as they can't, and die.

That may be beginning to happen to the Bass Pro Gargantuan.  I still have my Cabela's card for some reason, but it does't have the attraction it once did.  And now, more often than not, I just drive by the one in Thorton or Billings and don't stop.  And my catalog isn't met with anticipation the way it once was, and it head for the round file pretty quickly.

I'll bet I'm not the only one.

Friday, July 9, 2021

Blog Mirror: The Good Old Days.


Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.

I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society.  No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.

In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is.  Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky.  For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative  Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists.  As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT

I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct.  They correctly note, for example:

We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.

They go on to honestly note, however:

The good old days are now.

However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:

People had lower expectations and were less bombarded with images of all the other lives they could be aspiring to.

The nub here is that second important lesson of economics, there are always opportunity costs. The true price of something is what is given up to get it. If we have more choices then the price of gaining any one of them is giving up many more of those alternatives.

Here's an interesting item on this:

This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.

The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days".  And it makes some pretty solid arguments.

All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. [1]  It wanted reader comments on the same.

The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas.  It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times.  My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT.  Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.[2]

Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now.  But it is interesting that female happiness is declining.  And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.

A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.

The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one.  Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it.  One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.

Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out.  There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main.  The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour."  Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.

But I digress.

Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.

There are those who take this to mean that society should regress, to where those opportunity costs are lower and therefore we would be happier. The correct answer to which is that 50% child mortality rates did not in fact make people happier.

We’ll take the vague unease of having so many choices over parents having to bury half their children, thank you very much, we really do think we’re all truly happier this way around.

That's pretty hard to disagree with.

What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past.  One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.

Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past.  Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.

To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage.  No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion.  This is not a surprise.

What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth.  I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry.  It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.

Additionally, infant mortality was really high.  Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children.  Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now.  Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.

Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down.  We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms.  I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth.  I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.

So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.

But it also begs a point.  If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.

That gets back to what we've noted before.  People aren't really meant to live this way.  I.e, in an industrial society.

And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.

We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once.  It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home.  I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.  

We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time.  However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home.  When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it.  It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares.  People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.

Starting to resist that are women themselves.  We just dealt with that more recently here:

A lamentation. The modern world.*

That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:

Kay (momma of two)
@jacelala
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true.  What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.

Why is that?

Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field.    In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.

And we could always rebuild that.

Footnotes.

1.  My favorite reply to the question was this one:

I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...

2.  The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Pope Francis in the New York Times and the Fatigued Audience.

In the past here, up until this past year, when a Pope made a major statement I usually commented on it.  I've pretty much given up doing that with Pope Francis.  Indeed, I've come to the point where I dread his new proclamations as all too often they're followed by clarifications and explanations, and the like, and generate confusion.

Indeed, I find the Catholic Answers responses to this interesting.  I tend to find that the apologist who comments there that I like the most, Jimmy Akin, simply doesn't comment on them as they come up in general, an overall wise approach in my view.  Others take to trying to explain them which can be difficult not because they aren't explainable, but because the Holy Father simply isn't a good writer, at least in so far as the English translations of his works would have it, and he tends to speak without really internally vetting what he's saying.  Tim Staples, whom I normally don't listen to, was simply gushing in his praise of the Pope's most recent encyclical declaring it absolutely brilliant, for example, which probably was really only persuasive to those who were already convinced, and pretty much turned off by those who were.

The entire recent "Pope approves of civil unions" matter was such an example.  Put in context the Pope was in fact not declaring that the Church now approves of civil unions nor was it modifying its positions on marriage in general. But his remarks frankly were hard to explain and caused at least one really orthodox but not rad trad apologist, Matt Fradd, to react with despair.  Indeed, the Pope allowing his comments to end up in a public medium being misconstrued yet again, even if they predate his Papacy (which they seem to have) was pretty much the tipping point for a lot of orthodox Catholics who are not rad trads.  If he couldn't have prevented his comments from being used, which he very well might not have been able to do, and if they predated his Papacy, there should have been some quicker response than there ultimately was so that there wasn't a widespread press declaration confusing the rank and file in the pews and causing figures like Fr. James Martin to declare them to be "first steps", which they were not.  I.e., I think orthodox Catholics have sort of turned Pope Francis off, and "liberal" or "progressive" Catholics are an aging declining demographic whose views, frankly, really don't matter.  The support, therefore, by Fr. James Martin, SJ, really matters only to the Press, not so much the people in the pews.

Compounding this, while the Pope isn't a good writer, he's a proficient one, and its gotten so a person can hardly turn around without a new Papal writing appearing.  Just in the last couple of months he issued a new encyclical that was an extremely lengthy text which appeared to a be a summation of all of his prior encyclicals.  Indeed, this was so much the case I wondered if it was some sort of final compilation prior to a resignation.  It doesn't appear to be, but its hard to figure out why he issued an encyclical which is a lengthy summation of his prior encyclicals.

That wasn't his only writing, however, this year.  Just a few weeks ago the Pope issued Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, which I have not read and which I'm very unlikely to.  This book was apparently written during a Coronavirus lockdown and comments on a lot of contemporary social matters, including protests in the United States.  And now, over the past few days, he has an op ed in The New York Times.

I'll note here that I don't expect the Pope to really be familiar with the Times, and I'll give the Times credit for running it.  The Times does have one highly orthodox Catholic columnist on its staff who writers very Catholic themed articles.  Having said that, the Times isn't what it once was, so to a degree choosing the Times is an interesting choice by whomever made it.

Additionally, the Times has a "pay wall" and that means people who regularly read it will probably not be able to unless they're a subscriber, which there's no point in being.  Be that as it may, I did read it.

I was frankly prepared to dislike it as I'm frankly very tired of the Pope saying things that have to be explained as they creep up on falling outside of orthodoxy.  I'm like Matt Fradd and a lot of other loyal orthodox Catholics that way in which there's been so much, I'm just tired of it and probably have the volume on pretty low at this point.  A lot of us, rightly or wrongly, are at this point just marking time until the Boomer generation ages out of high Church offices and a new age of orthodoxy resumes, which it will.  It's not that we're not respectful or loyal to the Pope, but we're probably resuming the mental attitude of Catholics of the 18th Century or 19th Century who didn't really expect to hear from the Pope much and are accordingly sort of tuning out now.  Or maybe more accurately we may have the view of Eastern Rite Catholics who are fully Catholic in every sense but are more insular and traditional in ways that don't allow the outside world to impact them to the same degree.  Indeed, quite a few orthodox Catholics were headed in that direction anyhow. 

Well, at any rate, the Pope has published in the Times with an op ed entitled:

A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts

To come out of this pandemic better than we went in, we must let ourselves be touched by others’ pain.

We should note that headline writers, and not the authors, write headlines for papers like the times.  If that seems sort of an un Francis like headline and subheading, it probably is.  It was no doubt written by the Times.

Anyhow, I read the entire op ed and didn't find anything unorthodox or shocking, although it may be signaling an intended effort, which I'll address below. So as is frequently the case, I was a bit pleasantly surprised.  So far on Francis' encyclicals, I've found them that way.  I also find their views often uniquely foreign in a way, but then he isn't an American, after all.

A lot of the Pope's article is personal about the events leading up to his lung removal many years ago, and the experience of pain and illness.  A lot of it is, in fact, deeply personal and an homage to two sisters who were nurses when he was ill, noting as he ties it back in:

Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.

My conservative friends, I'm afraid, aren't going to like it. There's pretty clearly a swipe at Americans, and perhaps the Trump Administration, and a common view in the United States, where he states:

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

This gets into an interesting Catholic belief which is that governments, all governments, derive their authority from God and therefore are charged, accordingly, with responsibilities.  That belief is the one that causes people to misconstrue the old "Devine right" of kings, which isn't what it means, so much as it means that all authority is ultimately God's and any legitimate exercise of authority, whatever it is, is only to the extent that God permits it, and therefore must be used accordingly.

Of course, this is also a lecture aimed at individualist who value personal freedom or collective safety in this context, which is something that has been seen all over the globe.  The Pope clearly disapproves.

And that's where the op ed then takes a big turn, returning to common Francis themes.

God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.

In doing this its interesting to see the references to the Catholic Social Teaching of Solidarity.  Solidarity and Subsidiarity are old Catholic themes, prominent in the writings of Pope Leo XVIII and best recalled from Rarem Novarum.  A really well schooled Catholic will recognize the references to Solidarity right away, but Protestants, and frankly most Catholics for that matter, won't.

The editorial also recalls themes that Pope Francis has had throughout his papacy in regard to economics, and which seemingly have evolved towards a certain type of internationalism in a way more recently, but it's not specific on them.  Criticism of capitalism, however are nothing new in Catholic circles and indeed Rarem Novarum criticized both capitalism and socialism, giving rise to the development of distributism.  Interestingly, that latter fact is hardly noticed anywhere, and hasn't been by Pope Francis himself, perhaps because capitalism has come to so dominate free market economies that the free market concept of distributism is hardly known to even exist outside of the small population of (somewhat gadfly) distributists.

At any rate, it's not a bad editorial.  I doubt it'll be very impactful, however.  Pope Francis has spoken too much, and too vaguely, and written too much, and too vaguely, to really be noticed very much now outside of Catholic circles, and the orthodox, who would be most likely to normally listen and try to heed what he says, have assumed a sort of fatigued state of indifference.  There's some sort of lesson in all of that. 

And part of that lesson has to deal with his intent.  If you read all of his works that touch upon the economy, and there's a bunch, what you are left with is a pretty clear impression that Pope Francis is arguing for a overhauling of the entire global economy in a way that reflects his writings.  This would emphasize a certain sort of international Solidarity (in Catholic social teaching terms) acknowledging everyone as our brothers and sisters, with a certain sort of regionalism reflecting, vaguely, Subsidiarity, while also stress the need to aid the poor and not fall into the vices of consumerism.  Here too, however, the problem is that those themes have been intertwined with numerous other ones and never clarified, so they're lost, irrespective of whether we agree with them or not.

Popes, contrary to what some Rad Trads tend to believe, have never decreed anyone system of anything, including economics, to be "the" Catholic ideal.  And they're not going to.  So Pope Francis isn't straying off the well paved road in that respect.  But Pope's have been a lot more direct and succinct.  As Pope Francis hasn't been, it'd take a clear, limited and precise encyclical or writing to do that.  If that's coming, it's coming late in the day and after so much has already been written that getting everyone to turn the volume back up to listen will be difficult.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (e). What about those other industries?

The shaded stool of Wyoming's other economic sectors.

More economics?

Yep.  We still haven't covered it all.

But then the candidates haven't either, and that's the point.

In the June 24 issue of the Star Tribune there's an article over concerns in the tiny Carbon County town of Rock River about a lack of housing there that threatens to soon become a problem due to an economic boom.

Coal coming back to Carbon County, you might be thinking?

And indeed, the last time southern Carbon County had a boom that's what brought it about.  But that one skipped Rock River.  Rock River last was doing really well a long time ago, although it still did well enough at some point that a relatively new modern school was put in there since the 1970s.

What the anticipated boom in this case would be caused by is an expiration in Federal wind power subsidies which is causing companies that put in wind farms to rush to try to get theirs in, and qualify, before the subsidy expires, which it is likely to do.

Wind turbines have been used for power generation since houses were first wired with electricity.  Indeed, one of the missions of the Rural Electric Administration was to get farmers and ranchers off of windmills in their yards and on to the grid.  Granted, the grid was probably safer than the wind generators of the time, but, none the less.

Now, this isn't an article on wind power.  I've had others on that topic. Rather, this is an article on the topic of "the other" industries that candidates in the election will vaguely reference, but rarely specifically actually address.

It's odd.

In part this doesn't occur as, at least now in the GOP, you just can't say "well. . . oil and gas is doing fine and coal isn't going to get better, so we better look at . . . .".  The official mantra is that coal will recover and oil and gas wouldn't be boom and bust if only the Federal government would stay out of things.  That's naive.

And we know that its naive at that, but we don't want to say too much.  It's sort of based on the power of wishful thinking thesis, but nobody wants to really deal with the decline of coal.

Which is all the odder when we consider that Wyoming at one time had a lot of other extractive industries.  Wyoming was an iron producer, for example, and was well into the second half of the 20th Century.  And Wyoming was a major uranium producer.  All that is no longer the case, due to market forces. Uranium, I'm pretty convinced, will come back.  But you only have to go to Shirley Basin to see that its gone.  There's no town there, where once there was a mining town there.

But there are windmills there, that's for sure.

Wind mill installation has become a big deal in Wyoming. That doesn't mean you could plan an economic future on it, as installation is like petroleum exploration.  It isn't really steady.  It goes in, and then you have the infrastructure.  So, for places like Rock River and Medicine Bow, you have to deal with the boom in construction followed by a bust, but the infrastructure and the jobs associated with it, remain.  And they remain for a very, very, long time.

Now, this post isn't the "why aren't the candidates speaking about wind power" post, although so far they don't seem to be.  It's the "what are those other economic areas" they vaguely reference?

This is probably too broad of category to make a fair post about, frankly, but some attention does need to be given to it. There are a lot of economic activities in Wyoming and we've addressed a lot of them.  But not all by any means. When candidates speak of "improving the economy", what are they talking about.

Some candidates, to be fair, have made specific references to other areas.  Galeotos and Throne have both spoken about technology, although oddly Galeotos was sort of uncharacteristically hostile to the topic in one instances, assuming the Tribune is reporting that accurately, as Throne seemed to get to it first.  Having said that, Throne and Galeotos both have spoken about trying to harness the computerized technological advances of recent years to Wyoming's benefit, and they seem to have some concepts, vague though they may be, about how that would work.

Hageman seems outright hostile to any discussion that doesn't involve 100% application of Wyoming's traditional industries, by which she is pinning her hopes on the extractive industries.  That doesn't seem to show much vision at all, but she's not the only one who likely looks at the economy in that fashion.  If you are in a line of work, and most Wyomingites are not, which is somewhat insulated from booms and busts, that is in fact an attractive way to look at things. . . somewhat.  It has its own problems no matter what, but suffice it to say if you are a small business owner or a laborer, this view really has its problems.

Other candidates simply promise to fix the economy.  Foster Freiss, for example, notes that he's a successful businessman and he can be trusted to fix the economy. Well, being so successful that you can keep a home in Jackson and another in Arizona means something, but what it doesn't mean is that you know anything whatsoever about Wyoming's economy.

And a lot of things go into an economy.  You can't just "fix" them.  Economies are natural in a way (although the corporate capitalist model we have is not a "natural economy" in the pure sense).  That's a big aspect of the economy that the candidates haven't really addressed in a full on way, although some have topically.

As an economic unit, the state, the state has to play to its strengths and attempt to build some where they are lacking.  Some have noted that, and that's particularly noted by people who are strongly reliant on the extractive industries. But it is missing in regards to other things, such as agriculture, in the discussion.

Be that as  it may, there's been little (some, but not much) reference to our weaknesses. Those weaknesses are specifically what the ENDOW study looked at.

There's a lot about Wyoming that makes development of its economy outside of the existing areas its strong in tough.  We lack good transportation and we lack intra state air travel nearly entirely.  We have no passenger rail at all.  Travel during the winter season can be death defying. . . or in fact deadly.

It's also popular to note that we have no major urban areas, but in fact we do.

Wyoming does have a major regional city.  Or actually two such cities.

And those cities are Denver Colorado and Salt Lake City Utah.  Maybe more than that.

Now, that may sound like I'm missing something, but the opposite is true.

Wyoming does have its own culture within the regional culture.  But we have to acknowledge that it is still part of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Northern Plains. And that matters as, at the end of the day, while the states and provinces (did I say provinces, as in Canadian provinces, why yes I did) have their own cultures, their boundaries are not natural ones, for the most part, and therefore they do not have the geographic impact of natural boundaries.  The line separating Wyoming from Colorado, in other words, is not the Rhine River or the Atlas Mountains.  It's just a line.  That line is real in various ways, but you can cross it and never know.

Indeed, as an aside, when a student in Laramie I had a deer license in southern Wyoming and the only really good place I could find to hunt was so near Colorado in those pre GPS days that I constantly worried about crossing into Colorado.  I'm really good with a topographic map, but none the less I worried about it.  Oddly enough, I was hunting in an area where there was a very large stream, a proto river, present and instinctively you found yourself thinking that "across the river is Colorado".  Not so much.

Anyhow, we live in age of increasingly improved transportation and communications. And we live in an age in which economic consolidation has moved towards the cities.  It's been often noted by demographers that, over a long period of time, indeed a period of time exceeding a century, Americans have been leaving rural areas for cities, and leaving towns and small cities for big cities.

Whether this is good or bad is another matter.  Frankly, I feel its nearly universally a negative trend. But it being a negative trend doesn't mean it isn't a trend.  And in our region, that has meant that for much of Wyoming Denver Colorado is the regional hub. For far western Wyoming, that hub is Salt Lake City.  And that's the way it is.

That may be more fine with most Wyomingites than we care to admit (and I'll have more in that in an exciting conclusion to this series) but the truth of the matter is that our major hubs are regional. Denver and Salt Lake City.  If you expand out just a bit, the hubs also include Calgary, St. Paul, Minnesota and Houston Texas.

If you feel otherwise, consider the evidence.  I've worked with and for people in the oil industry who worked in Denver and had bosses in Calgary or Houston.  If you grew up in Wyoming and have an advanced degree, other than in medicine, veterinary medicine, dental medicine, law or accounting there's a really good chance that you moved to Denver, Salt Lake or St. Paul.  Shoot, a lot of Wyomingites end up moving to Denver or Salt Lake simply due to economic reasons, irrespective of their educations.  That includes individuals with nearly no education, and those with advanced degrees.  One friend of mine with an advanced degree grew up outside of Hanna, worked in the mines for awhile, before ended up with what will be a life long career in Denver.  Pretty typical.

And this is the way it is, and we're not changing it.

So, when we speak of those other areas, we have to accept the geographic and economic realities, including that we can't really change a lot of that.

So what are our plans, really?

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Blog Mirror: The Aerodrome: Air Subsidies Continue for Cody and Laramie. .. for now.

Air Subsidies Continue for Cody and Laramie. .. for now.

 


From Today's Casper Star Tribune, the following headline:

Air service subsidies expected to continue in Cody and Laramie. But larger questions loom.

But that apparently doesn't mean that such subsidies aren't on the firing line still, to some degree.

For those who might not be aware, air travel to Cody is subsidized by the Federal Government for the winter months, and for all passengers all year long for Laramie.  This provides for twice a day winter flights, for example, to and from Cody to Denver during the winter months.

It's pretty safe to assume that without these funds air travel to Cody would be impaired and for Laramie it would simply end.  The Tribune notes, regarding how this works;
United’s new contract to provide service to Cody guarantees the airline an annual payment of $850,000 to provide 14 nonstop trips each week from Cody to Denver between October and May.
That doesn't provide a reason to continue the subsidy, of course, and pure free marketers would argue that if the market doesn't support it, it should end.  On the other hand, it's been proven that a lack of convenient air transportation hinders Wyoming's economy fairly massively.  
The Wyoming Department of Transportation presented an ambitious fix to the state’s reliance on commercial air carriers, who can currently decide whether and when to provide service — allowing the fortune’s of Cowboy State communities to rise and fall based on the whims of national corporations.
WYDOT proposed effectively creating its own airline, determining which communities would receive service as well as schedules, ensuring, for example, that it was possible for business people to catch an early morning flight into Casper or Rock Springs.
The state would contract with the same regional providers, like SkyWest or GoJet, that United and Delta Air Lines use on branded flights to connect relatively small communities, like those in Wyoming, with major hubs in Denver and Salt Lake City. These arrangements are known as capacity purchase agreements.
“This idea of capacity purchase agreements, for decades, has worked very well for airlines,” WYDOT director Bill Panos told lawmakers last summer.
At a bare minimum, a lack of air service certainly isolates Wyoming's economy.  So, at the end of the day, the argument somewhat comes the degree to which you favor practicality over economic purity, or whether you believe the government should have any role in subsidizing transportation.  The Governor's office noted, according to the Trib:
“Commercial air service is a significantly limiting factor,” Endow’s Jerimiah Reiman said earlier this year. “There’s a lack of air service particularly to global destinations.”
Of course, if we're going to go for economic purity, at some point we'd have to request that the Federal Government cease funding highway construction, which is a subsidy and a fairly direct one.  I can't see that request coming any time soon, but its interesting how in a state that tends to argue for a fairly laissez faire type of economics, we don't feel that way about highways.  No, not at all.  Of course, to be fair, funding the infrastructure, massively expensive though it is, is not the same as funding transportation itself.  I.e., there's no Federal bus subsidy, or Federal car subsidy. 

There isn't a Federal rail subsidy of any kind in most places, of course, although we do still have Amtrak, so I guess that's not fully true.  When railroads carried passengers everywhere cars were not as commonly used for over the road transportation and the Federal Government hadn't gotten in to highway funding yet.  Indeed, if the Federal Government quit funding highway construction it'd change the transportation infrastructure massively and we'd have to wonder if railroads and airlines would be big benefactors.  Anyhow, even at that time the railroads weren't necessarily super excited about passengers and the Federal Government somewhat forced the rail lines to carry them, but it didn't subsidize them.  The U.S. Mail was a big moneymaker for railroads back then, which it no longer is in any fashion, so the railroads had to listen to the Federal Government for that reason if none other.