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Nobody Gets Off In This Town
“The Greyhound stops and somebody gets on, but nobody gets off in this town.” – Garth Brooks
Kevin Williamson recently set off the journalistic equivalent of a nuclear device at NR in his article about the travails of the white underclass. The article has been mischaracterized by many as Williamson expressing hatred for the subjects of the article, and some outlets blatantly mischaracterized the piece and tried to demonize its author. Williamson’s basic thrust is that — for those living in dead and dying small towns — the best option is to avoid self-destructive behavior and to move to where opportunity can be found. The response to the article has been intense and it raises some real questions about what can be done, if anything, for those left behind.
This is not a new problem. Towns have been dying since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. Most towns came into being for economic reasons: proximity to a port or railway line, access to a natural resource, to support local farms, to support workers at local factories or mills, etc. But once that economic reason is gone, the town dies.
Many, many towns have died or are in their death throes because of the mechanization of farming that began to rapidly accelerate in the Thirties (Oklahoma’s Greer County had a population of 20,000 in 1930; today’s it’s about 6,200). And it’s continuing still. It isn’t hard to imagine remotely controlled farm equipment, or the use of drones to check on cattle in distant pastures. The same is likely in store for other industries, including oil. The construction of the interstate highway system led to the death of many towns along the older highways. There are now few kicks to be had on Route 66.
So what is to be done? The answer, perhaps, is nothing. As conservatives, we must recognize that not all problems have solutions, and that grim reality must eventually be faced. There is no possible government policy that is going to bring people back to Greer County.
I’ve seen it suggested — by Williamson in fact, in a different article — that we restructure unemployment benefits so that you get paid a lump sum for getting a job before the benefits run out and/or have Uncle Sam help pay to relocate workers to where the jobs are. These aren’t solutions, but ameliorations, but they’re likely the best we can do for folks in those towns. Maintaining them there in dependency should not be in consideration.
One idea suggested by some is to prevent factories from moving overseas in order to save those jobs and towns. Should that be tried, it isn’t hard to predict what would happen: Either the factories will close because they can no longer compete, or they’ll automate their production reduce costs. Either way, it doesn’t result in new jobs.
What about protecting the industry? If we apply tariffs, it may save the local jobs for a time, but would almost certainly invite retaliation, costing jobs elsewhere. It just moves the problem to a different community, and makes us all a bit poorer into the bargain.
It seems there is no good solution, other than to do what humans have been doing forever when local resources run out: Move.
Published in General
My dad goes to St. John’s on business sometimes, and hotel rooms there can be hard to come by.
There are some poignant songs about young people from Newfoundland relocating to the mainland:
As some have pointed out, our grandparents or great grandparents took a long and dangerous boat ride over a fricken’ ocean to a country with a language they didn’t speak and $100 in their pocket in the hopes of building a better life in this country and now people don’t want to move to another state or even within their own state to improve their lives? Give me a break.
Americans have become a very soft and weak people.
One of my boys has proposed a business model: Bachelor Cleaning Service. It would go something like this:
Bachelor Cleaning Service comes in: “Looks OK to me… Got any beer?”
Looking for investors?
Perhaps, but that is enabled by a political class that saves itself from oblivion by creating an ever-expanding welfare state to prevent the public from noticing that anything is going wrong- and then reacting accordingly.
Absent the welfare state, we’d have an entirely different political dynamic- and very likely an entirely different political class.
Side note- I used to work at a steel mill. A significant fraction of the people I worked with had been laid off, moved to another state, and came back only because they could make more money at the mill, or liked the area.
I suspect many more simply moved to another state and never came back.
And overvalued housing does not help.
Is it that they are more risk-averse overall, or risk-averse about different things?
At least some poverty habits tend to strike the middle-class as risk-preferring. “Desperate” or “nothing to lose” behavior is risk-preferring. Pardon the source here, but this seems a valuable insight:
I think about different things. They are risk averse when it comes to investing or starting businesses, things like that. Day to day stuff, probably not so much.
It’s far from a solution, but going back to a crazy patchwork of state and local regulation would help a little. It would probably reduce total GDP (collective wealth) a little, too.
Mr. Williamson’s reporting on this issue has been remarkably spot on and elucidates the problems many small communities face. This transition is clearly not easy.
Kate Braestrup “I’ve thought a lot about this KP, especially since I’ve had personal experience with the federal program for disabled people, SSI. To make an unconscionably long story short, the program is officious and humiliating and so sloppy in its accounting that any recipient who doesn’t have educated, determined and dedicated advocates is likely to get casually screwed over by completely unaccountable and incompetent bureaucrats…who are being paid good salaries with benefits to make the lives of the disabled unnecessarily difficult.”
Kate, As a disability examiner, or, to use your words, a “completely unaccountable and incompetent bureaucrat[]”, I can tell you, the number of people who receive, and keep receiving, SSD and SSI are both too high. The bureaucracy is not inclined to deny people who are deserving. Instead there is an atmosphere of allowance, such that those who shouldn’t receive benefits are allowed.
Your “in perpetuity” idea of benefits means that those who recover after 2 or 3 years of being unable to work are discouraged from returning to work. SSA’s problem is not that too few people receive benefits for too short a time. It is that too many people receive benefits for too long a time.
I’m really glad you referenced that, as I missed that article. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be considering.
People often make bad decisions because we goad them into it. That’s dumb.
Let me repeat. The administrative state is the reason the economy is stagnant and adjustment more sluggish than ever, leaving more people permanently unemployed or on welfare. The sources of disruption will always be with us, being more competitive doesn’t really change the fundamental challenge because if we export more we will import more, and there will be more rapid technological development. Moreover, many of the workers who lose their jobs will not be the sorts that can be easily retrained for the growing edge of the economy. There are ways to help, but the Federal government shouldn’t be empowered to deal with it because it can’t. The Federal government is beyond fixing itself. It is the problem. The states may be beyond help as well, but some are still well run and they may figure out how to juice up education and training so that we learn how to move people out of dying industries toward growing industries even as it is obvious we can’t know what those will be two years from now. Another thing we must not do, is assume the government can know what a growing industries will be and how to incentivize them. They will incentivize industries that already have perch on k street. The next industries are in people’s heads and even they don’t know whether they will succeed and stay successful. Some won’t. Only markets sort this stuff out, but we are strangling them.
My employer, Bill Cook, built a plant in his dying home town of Canton, IL on the site of what was an International Harvester plant. He also invested in restoring buildings on the town square. The result has been the rebirth of the community. Other business have moved into the community and real growth is happening. It is a true success story.
The company had plans to do the same for 9 other small towns. The plans got shelved due to the Obamacare tax on medical device manufacturers.
I think a lot of small towns are suffering, not just because businesses have left, but because burdensome taxes and regulations make it too hard for new businesses to start and grow.
Towns die, cities die, you know what people notice do not die? Government jobs, those babies stay. Government institutions. Nice and solid even if they do not do anything that anybody knows about or understand.
I have been around a lot of dying towns that companies have been reduced. Worked with paper and pulp mills till changes in government regulation push them out of the country. Worked with coal companies till changes in government regulation pushed them out of the country. Worked with tobacco companies till changes in government regulation pushed them out of the country. Notice a theme here?
It would be nice to have a government that created an environment that encouraged companies to thrive instead of creating regulations that make them unprofitable and either pushing them out of country or shutting them down.
Here is what people in small town America know. Their small town companies were pushed out and closed down because of government regulation. These same type of companies in big government connected cities thrive because they have the political connection and cronyism to get exceptions to these regulations.
There is a youtube clip of Obama saying how you can have a coal company but they are going to use regulation to put the industry out of business. Hillary has a clip saying that she is going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business. Small town America knows they do this for all industries. The political class hates them.
For those of you arguing for workfare or lifestyle restrictions on welfare recipients: What happens when a major recession hits causing massive and non-voluntary unemployment? Will the state simply assign work to this sector of the population to prevent the habit of sloth? One assumes additional beaurecrats would need to be taken on for the continued drafting and enforcement of “rules” governing which type of purchases are allowed for those on the dole. I cannot escape the feeling that such legislation would be an important step in the sovietization of American society, one for which the right, shamefully would bear primary responsibility. Conservatives should resist the temptation to use the existence of the welfare state and the logic of “not on my dime” to actively seek control over their fellow man, both because of the long term consequences for freedom and the unavoidable outcome that far too many of us will come to enjoy and feel entitled to the exercise of that control. The outright abolition of welfare will not be an achievable goal anytime in the near future but it is the only one which will allow conservatives to avoid the pervasive moral corruption raught by the welfare state on so much of the rest of our society.
Sorry, I was probably intemperate. The problem, in the case of my loved one, wasn’t in who does or does not get declared “disabled.”She’s definitely disabled, and if there is a cure, and her situation changes in two or three years, we will all be blissfully happy.
The issue was that a sloppy, stupid error by an accountant (faceless, since we never saw him/her) prompted an immediate shut-off of my loved one’s benefits, accusations of fraud, threatening letters about fines, and a stack of paperwork that—had she not had educated, self-confident advocates—would have bewildered and discouraged a healthy person, let alone one with an acute mental illness.
What would have happened to her had she not had us in her corner?
And this was a random error—how often do such errors take place? How many disabled people are being deprived of their benefits because a well-paid accountant mindlessly added a non-existent extra bank account into the paperwork?
How many genuinely disabled people are up to making multiple phone calls to different SS offices or of standing at the local office’s counter for a two-hour long in-person discussion of the issue; how many would be confident enough to keep insisting that the math be checked while the well-paid, non-mentally-ill clerk sits on the other side, smugly assuring them that they’re wrong (until it was too obvious they were right)?
Exactly, lets not be too clever. We want to end welfare and adjustment assistance by letting the states sort it out. One or more may figure it out. The notion that the Federal government with its non accountability, lack of information and political psychoses can manage these kinds of adjustments in the largest most complex economy and most diverse population in history is insane.
Again, our experience was that the honest disabled person can get screwed over by rules that the dishonest “disabled” person easily learns to elide.
Incidentally, at the conclusion of our meeting at the SSI office, the clerk gave us, unsolicited, a tip: if any family member wants to give my loved one money for Christmas or a birthday, we should make sure it is given to her in cash rather than by check. That way, the accountants whose job it is to monitor (and, evidently, occasionally invent) the bank accounts of the disabled won’t know about it.
Nice.
agree
This is my core issue with it. Not only is it ineffective towards the desired ends of the program, but it takes from those for whom the program was intended. We say we are for helping those who truly need help, and we know that attacking “wastefraudenabuse” is generally a political ruse, but there really is a problem when the system hurts those it should be helping and helps those who probably deserve to have a hurt put on them.
This is true, isn’t it? The “block grants to states” thing makes sense; what would work in a state that has plenty of jobs but an unwilling workforce won’t work in a state with willing workers but no jobs.
Here’s a question, though: what if the jobs are in a different state? Would state politicians be inclined to, for example, offer relocation vouchers if it meant depriving themselves of potential voters and/or taxpayers?
Pretty darn good argument for not taking the tax dollars out of the states in the first place.
Maybe the answer is to create an environment where the whole country thrives instead of just the major cities.
We can’t design a program that covers all contingencies, nor can we predict what politicians, business or individuals will do, but if it’s not their money it will be abused and it won’t be accountable to the people who pay. It shouldn’t be block grants from the Feds, if it’s state money paid for by state tax payers the trade offs are more market conforming. We need the Feds out. I imagine dynamic states who want to import skilled workers, will come up with programs that use existing growing business to help attract and train workers from other states. It doesn’t matter if they were unemployed in some other state, indeed the last to lose their jobs may be the most trainable and confident enough to make a move. The main point is we can’t know. Just get out of the way and if state tax payers want to fund some ways to help, more power to them.
yep. Feds out, market in and if the government must do something state tax payers decide.
I’m all for making it harder to qualify for disability to begin with. I’m also happy to support checking up on the disabled to make sure they really are (still) disabled.
The problem I have is that by adding in requirements like “the recipient of disability payments cannot have more than $2,ooo in his/her bank account(s) at any one time” means that honest disabled people have accountants checking their bank statements, threatening and punishing vulnerable people while (evidently!) remaining prone to serious errors for which there is apparently no mechanism in place to catch and remedy.
Meanwhile, the dishonest “disabled” learn to game the system. Wouldn’t it be less expensive and more humane to make qualifying for disability the hard part…but once you’ve qualified, receiving benefits is simple and easy? Isn’t having a disabling condition misery enough?
Ah. But what about really poor states? (Not being difficult—really interested.)
How do you erode bedrock? By the drip and flood and ebb and flow of govco transfer payments until bedrock is but a worry stone in hands of transfer-payment recipients. We bemoan the lack of growth in our economy but we scream about impacts of the ‘creative destruction’ without which there is no economic growth.
It is a valid question. I think the answer from the article is that they’ll fix being really poor, or the poor will leave for greener pastures and alleviate the problem.