if i were you i wouldn't bother reading this article, because it makes way too much sense in its own little disconnected way (it really isn't, but you have to read a bit to put it all together: i have tried to make it enjoyable enough), and it all seems so obvious when you think about it.
but, here is what i would do to eradicate poverty in the world, and to develop the developing world. i write this, only because so many others have made such a hash of the issue, that someone needs to come in and straighten it all out.
1.)people need to learn to read and write.
2.)kill all the lawyers. (well, i was one, but it is so "literary" to say it. but, there is a point. no need to make a complicated legal structure onto simple economies. period. see the end of this essay.)
3.)kill all the bureaucrats. and, kill all the socialists who never made anything their whole lives: but, as mark twain said, i repeat myself. now, i am really serious about this.
to the few working stiffs left on the face of the earth, i would give each 10 copies of "all the kings men" by robert penn warren, a fiction novel which is wonderful history, and a copy of "huey long," by t. harry williams, a history which shows that fact is not very far from fiction. it is cogent of us to remember that events are made by humans, and history and fiction are made by writers a good deal after the fact, with various levels of leavening. in the best of each genre, there is not a whole lot of difference. but, i digress.
to the point of all of this, short and sweet.
when huey long became governor of louisana it was a corrupt backwater with no roads and no economy. it's chief product may be said to have been the manufacture and export of poor people.
when huey long was assassinated, reviled by some and hailed as the second coming of jacksonian democracy in american by others, louisana was a corrupt backwater with roads and the beginnings of rural economy, progress and electrification.
this little epistle could conclude right here, i suppose, for the perspicacious. (but, where would i be? outa work, like the bureaucrats in a perfect world, the blood sucking leeches.) for i propose to do no less than tell the developing world how to get with the program, and how to make those little stink piles they now have into prosperous countries. that feed their own. that need to go begging, no more. simple as that.--
the rest of this article is for those of you who haven't quite grasped the obvious parallels between rural america in huey long's time and most of the "developing" world. i grew up in rural eastern oregon in the 1950's. i can remember united states senator wayne morse coming to speak in the grange in the tiny hamlet of umapine, oregon on rural electrification, and the benefits of good roads. friends, that means that umapine, oregon did not have electricity from a utility at that time.
years later attending law school at the university of oregon one of my many professors to try and crack this tough old walnut of a head and impart some learning was orlando john hollis, dean emeritus of the school and a companion and great friend of wayne morse's. legend had it that they road around town in a black carriage in tails and white gloves, squiring the college girls and any other female guileless enough to be taken in by such tomfoolery, and legend has it as well that they did quite well by themselves following this tactic.
wayne morse was a champion of the humble person, whether in the guise of being a republican or a democrat: he switched back and forth from time to time. he was a bit of a maverick, the only u.s. senator to vote against the gulf of tonkin resolution. his opponents explained his politics by noting they were because he was kicked in the head by a horse, and survived, when perhaps he shouldn't have. professor hollis probably thought the same of me, as he found how resistant to a law school education i could be. i don't know if he ever overtly said that, but i suspected it of him.
nor did we have a lot of roads.
and wilbur schubert had not made the transition to self propelled wheat combines, self leveling or otherwise. were it not for google, and the ability to look up anything, i would bet each of your $5.00 that you hadn't the slightest idea in creation what the "h" in john deere 95h stood for. when i was a very young child, wilbur schubert pulled his combines on the hillsides of north eastern oregon with draft horses: i can still remember going out to the schubert "rabbit piece" after harvest, gathering a few shocks of wheat not run through the combines, and bringing them in by horse to be run through stationary combines.
wilbur kept 3 or 4 of these huge horses "at" pasture for many years, out of affection and nostalgia, to a day in which men were steel, and ships were wooden.
clarence braden in walla walla, washington owned braden machinery, a john deere and caterpillar tractor dealership, which was once one of the largest such dealerships on the face of the earth. he was so fortunate because he had the caterpillar dealership during the heyday of the construction of the great hydroelectric/flood control/river barge projects on the columbia and snake rivers, and during that heyday those rivers had the greatest concentration of heavy earth moving equipment known to man. i am gonna tell you how clarence braden started out, a little later, to make a point.
there's hoover damn on the colorado. and then, there is big bonnie about 40 miles east of portland, oregon, and grand coulee damn near coulee city, washington, and mcnary at umatilla, oregon and the dalles damn, near the dalles, oregon which has the burden of having obliterated the waters rushing over celilo falls, near the dalles. before the slack water lake behind the damn filled, the umatilla and yakima indians, plus all the rest of the tribes of the columbia reach fished the falls, constructing flimsy scaffolds over the rushing waters from whose perch they netted the king salmon that came up the river in untold numbers: and, occasionally from whose perch they perished in the rushing waters. you can read about the falls and the indian fisheries in lewis and clark's journals, their narratives of the lewis and clark expedition.
in 1805.
read that again. the lewis and clark expedition was from 1804-1806. the state of oregon was incorporated and admitted to the union in 1859. my friends, there is still a lot of "here" out here, and i can take you places in oregon and we can drive for hours without seeing another living soul. some of those roads will not be paved, and some of the gravel roads will not be graded all that well.
roads. electricity. wheat, corn, fruits and vegetables of all kinds, forest products, cows, sheep, goats, and computer chips and the learned professions.
and, hard fucking work.
i can drive you places in north eastern washington, just the east sides of the cascades, and out to roads that service vast acreages of wheat fields, and all you will see is the north cascade mountain to the west, rising from the plains uninterrupted by townships, power lines or any other visual obstruction, as beautiful a vista as ever conceived.
and, seemingly devoid of habitation and people. now.
and abandoned farmsteads, houses and barns and schools houses, evidence of somebody's vision of the future that did not pan out, evidence of human failure, and tragedy, and in the larger scheme of things, absolute confirmation of the frailty of things.
proof that the edifice of success may collapse and decay and rot into ruin.
but, evidence of failure. of risk undertaken, of risks not surmounted, of danger succumbed to. the remnants of failure.
my friends, the state of oregon was as underdeveloped in 1859 as i suppose any nation on earth. we have verdant timber lands, and the wonderful willamette river in the western part of the state to compliment the majesty of the great columbia, which is our border with washington, .... , this verdancy supported lane county, home of the university of oregon at eugene, by producing more lumber product than any other county in the united states, and more than most states. when i drove down i-5 to eugene upon entry into the law school, i drove under train trestles upon which lumber bunkers were drawn in mile long lines, each train car carrying but a single log, filling the car from top to bottom.
but, much of our state is arid, indeed in some times of the year the little walla walla river running through milton freewater, oregon (it doesn't go through walla walla, washington, something that never fails to amuse me) is so low that you could walk across it without getting the water over your gym socks, sometimes without shipping water over the top of your gym shoes.
in fiscal year 2006 the state of oregon had a gross domestic product of $158,223 millions of u.s. dollars, to rank 26th amongst the united states. that is roughly comparable to algeria and kuwait ranking 50th & 51st in the world in gross domestic products for calendar year 2008.
oregon has a population, just off the top of my head, of about 3,800,000 souls. this is how oregon has grown in roughly 150 years of development, from a state which had very few non-native americans in it.
i have explained how it all happened, above, if you were paying attention.
roads.
i will tell you how important roads are in oregon and washington, by explaining the current status of the law on road creation in washington state: "current" means "even yet." if the public walks across a stretch of ground to make a footpath, or a horse cart path, or even a ski trail and that goes on for a bit, it creates a public right of way. if a county maintains that right of way for 5 or 7 years, i cannot remember which, it is a county owned right of way. no necessity of eminent domain required, it just becomes a county road by operation of law. with a 30 foot right of way, either side of the center line, foot path, goat path, ruts for wagons coming and going, makes no difference, it is a road.
indeed, through much of the west, great controversy rages over the operation of some of the federal law which intended to open the land up to public exploration before we have environmentalists, trying to prevent that very thing. the federal law was so expansive, that if you drove cattle to markets, it could create a public way. i don't exaggerate very much.
when huey long was governor of louianna, he did not build grand boulevards in the middle of town, he built little stretches of roads and intersections in the rural areas, to help farmers and small business get their products to market. and the clamor for such roads became so great that it begat more roads.
socialist "planners" and "bureaucrats" don't know from bupkis about this. but, i will guarantee you, if you had ever ridden in one of wilbur schubert's old1939 ford flathead v-8 trucks, exhaust pipes coming out both sides of the fold down hoods, over a sort of graded gravel and a sort of just plain not so graded dirt track, then you will have understood quite vividly the need for roads.
roads build agriculture as an industry that can sustain the food requirements of nations, and not just of families or well favored & well situated villages.
roads are markets, because they create the ability to travel to and take your product to the market. it may be so unprepossessing as a grain elevator named barret station, just out of umpine and milton freewater, and it may be as unglamorous sounding as the pendleton grain growers, but it makes the weston mountain and dry creek grain growing region a viable money maker. and, rest assured, that the grain from oregon & washington feeds your scrawny butts, just the same as the grain from kansas and oklahoma and texas and montana.
and, roads never stop providing this. they never stop developing markets.
oregon and washington have become elite sources of wine production in the world, and wines from my humble little milton freewater & walla walla area habitually make the pages of the snobby "wine spectator" magazine, and the industry continues to grow. barret station is now surrounded by the "seven hills" estates, promoted and financed by a former n.f.l. quarterback who played high school football for the walla walla blue devils, drew bledsoe. the wires and posts for the vineyards went in several years ago, and it won't be too long before the vines will be producing. indeed, a lot of the grape production comes to milton freewater now, because our foothills, the southern boundary to the walla wallavalley, have better slopes and exposures, and are not "cold sinks" where frost damage can occur, and where the grape berries can be stunted of sunlight, as was the condition of the earliest grape ground. walla wallawill have the wineries, and we will grow the grapes, because we have better ground. (sort of a third world situation right there, ain't it? yes, it is. walla walla prospers, milton freewater lags. walla walla has two very good 4 year colleges, whitman college and walla walla university. milton freewater has an extension building for blue mountain community college.)
(go figure.)
roads make commodities.
the "electric", as it is still called out here in the northwest.
environmentalists hate them. i love the g_d dam damns, i love the g_ddammed things as the majestic, monumental and aesthetic structures that they are: no other living thing made of concrete comes close, not even the concrete dinosaurs trying to lure you off the freeway in south dakota. you don't think they are living things: then stand in bonneville's weeping chambers immediately above the penstocks putting the water of the columbia onto the generators' turbines, and tell me that: they vibrate and shake as though possessed. mcnary is a pretty damn, stretching 7,000 feet across the columbia and 183 feet high, and passes prodigious amount of water over her spillways at peak flood, some 2.2 billion cubic feet of water per second. this from memory, i will look it up later.
big bonnie, the dalles, mcnary, priest rapids, rocky reach, ... , on the columbia, ... , dvorak, ice harbor, the hells canyon dams , ... , on the snake, ... , hydroelectric power all over the northwest, cheap and plentiful.
and, what if a country is not blessed with bountiful water, from which to extract energy and make electrical energy as it falls from the mountains to the sea? atsa tough one. they are gonna have to figure out something, aren't they. i will tell you, however, but water begets more water, ... , it is kind of mystical.
feed grains and fruits and vegetables.
all g_d's childrens gotta eat. if they don't, they starve.
economies grow upon agricultural production, first, last and in between. and, people need feed grains. either you eat rice as a staple of your diet, or you eat wheat as a staple of your diet, but, however you do it, if you do not have either or both of these staples upon which to subsist, you go hungry.
it is as simple as that.
oregon and washington both have what are called "land grant" universities, and so are overrun with agronomists and extension agents and agricultural scientists of one sort of another, and agricultural extension stations.
in washington, a humble civil servant by the name of walter clure is the grand father of the washington wine industry, espousing it, nurturing and tending it, and helping develop its product from the humble little agricultural extension service station located in prosser, washington. prosser, washington by the way is the home of kellon moore, who is the sophomore quarterback for boise state university, boise, idaho. now, you never heard of kellon moore before, unless you are a college football fanatic, and you never heard of prosser, washington before unless you are from the northwest. (stranger things happen, i suppose.)
now, the critical among you will say, "but wasn't walter clure a pointy-headed bureaucrat?" in a way, he was a state employee. but, he didn't have a $1500 suit to his name, and you can bet he didn't muck around in vineyards all day long, or work in his lab, in $600 suits. and, he could have multiplied his salary many times working for a winery or consulting, but he made enough, and he wanted to shape an industry. he was, simply put, a public servant. i have never, ever, heard a nasty word uttered about the man. he was the sort who makes empires, and never aspired to be emperor.
but, the point is this. these people, and these places, and the work and enterprise of people captured by their visions and enthralled by their settings and vistas, are what have made the industries in the northwest. and, it is not just wine. it is wheat. mr. gaines, i don't recall his first name, was an agronomist at washington state university, and he is almost single handedly responsible for a great surge in the yield of dry land farmed wheat in the states of oregon and washington, giving a lot of areas average yields of over 100 bushels an acre: some midwestern states, such as nebraska, are lucky to average 40 bushels an acre in good years.
i am sorry, i cannot remember the names of the various varieties of wheat grown in the northwest when i was a kid, my brain is aged and feeble, compared to earlier years. but, i can tell you mr. gaines's nickname, on a reasonably probably basis. it is probably "shorty," because that is the type of wheat he developed, short stalked (no use wasting water you don't have) and large heads, full of big wheat berries.
you see, most grain production in the northwest is based upon "dry land" farming. my own walla walla valley illustrates. we get about 15-16" of rain in the valley a year. we'll go months in the summer time, often, without any measurable rain. sage brush, and alkali flats, comprised a lot of country. but, we get a little rain each fall, before the ground freezes. i introduce to you, winter wheat. it is planted in the fall after a little seasonal rain, and it germinates and grows in the fall, before the arrival of snow and the cold. and, then it lies dormant, until late spring when the first heat begins to arrive, and springs forth from the ground to be harvested mid june or so, before the land is again parched. remember the walla walla not shipping the tennis shoes in late summer?
"shorty" gaines, we shall call him, developed the first hybrid wheat designed to fully exploit this kind of growing cycle, all over the northwest, and especially the great western slopes of the blue mountains, and the plateaus around spokane, pullman and eastern washington, and the towns of moscow and grangeville, idaho. and, gaines wheat, and the subsequent strains of the same, made the oregon and washington wheat belts even more fertile than they had been.
were i a developing country, and a developing country's agronomist, i would pay attention to something like this.
and, i would do something else, were i developing a country. i would make it from the bottom up, and let it develop its complexities as it needed them, and not before. the model of nation building now seems to build a superstructure first, and then look below to see if anything else i going on at the bottom of things: and, when it isn't, because it is stifled by so much weight above, it simply collapses, to everyone's surprise. you have to do the basics first, you must be content to let things develop over time.--
when i started working, i started at the bottom. with a broom. you may have got hired in my day, but you didn't have a job unless you demonstrated that you could work, and you demonstrated it with a broom or washing dishes. if you worked out at that, then you got the real job. and, no, the broom was always there, so that when you finished, you cleaned up. i have worked in factories and ships that were cleaner than my house now. the broom.
you start simple. you build from the simple, layer by layer.
you start at the large & grandiose, and you fail. every time.
you remember clarence braden. well, clarence braden started out a mechanic with caterpillar tractor company, shortly after they moved from california back to the mid-west: it made no sense to catepillar to ship all the steel and other stuff need to make the tractors to california, and then ship the steel back to the mid-west where most of their market seemed to be growing. but, at any rate, clarence learned how to mechanic the great beasts. and, i use the word on purpose, because clarence had even more experience with another kind of beast, the lop eared horse and mule variety: he had grown up with them, and knew his horse flesh. he made his business a growing proposition by taking mules and horses in on trade for his flame belching contraptions, and then selling the animals shipping them to otherr areas still dependent upon horse and mule flesh for farming. and, it is not so far fetched, really, there are mule and horse farmers who still occupy a viable niche in agriculture, with those animals.
the point is, agriculture, and hay and grain production can be carried on simply.
if you are a developing nation, you don't need huge machines to till the land, it can be done by animals very productively. and, when the transition in agriculture is ready for it, you can move from animals to simple and small machinery. the wheat and corn in the midwest is grown by machines that seed the ground in the control of computers and gps's location devices, that plant the seed in densities determined by the last year's harvest as recorded by computers and the gps, and when the machine gets to a certain location where the yield was low, in goes more seed, and in goes more fertilizers, all at the same time.
in some sense, in my opinion, it is tomfoolery, and a horribly expensive indulge on the part of farmers. land was seeded in the old days in simple drills, machines on steel wheels, behind tractors driven by farm kids.
and, remember wilbur schubert's old horse drawn combines. they worked just fine. he used the same combines, drawn by little crawler tractors, and he had his harvest in the granary first, every year.
if i were i developing country, i would use simple drills to put the seed in the ground, and utilize human labor to do it: cheap, and plentiful.
i would use small combines, capable of being drawn by two to four horses, and powered by a small gasoline engine for the scything and the cutting/sickle operation, and for the threshing. in the united states and the industrialized nations, great huge combines do this, and they cut vast acreage each day at a dizzying pace, the draw back being that they go so fast they put a lot of threshed wheat out the back. no need for this in a developing world combine, as the wheat would be placed in gunny sacks, stitched and tied by hand by people riding the combine, and left on the ground to be loaded onto flat bedded vehicles, whether horse or oxen or engine drawn.
i know that this is a productive and viable way to support both rural and urban populations, because this is the way my brothers and i worked on the farms around the milton freewater and umapine, oregon locals.
small, simple machines. hand labor. horses, and small motor driven implements.
and, finally to the first points. i would kill all the bureaucrats in the third world countries, unless they were engineers or chemist or physicists or agronomists, or something similarly useful. all those with m.b.a.'s or poli sci or sociology on their degrees, i would put them down the river to the crocodiles, and grin good riddance.
and, i would import two driving engines for my economy.
one would be the small reciprocating gas or diesel motor, probably the diesel motor, because it is simpler, and the fuel easier to make. and, were i in a place that add iron or aluminum ore, i would foster the growth of a small home grown automobile industry. i don't mean mercedes for the mucky muck ministers of government, or the princes of subsidized by the west extractive industries, but i mean small motor bike and horse drawn wagons and trucks, and multipurpose vehicle such as brilliantly exploited by the chinese.
only, not so smoky.
and the other great engine for my economy.
i would also kill anyone who even uttered the notion of a planned economy.
i would simply let free markets and entrepreneurial instinct take over. look, our economy is complex, probably more so that it need be. economies don't have to be so complex. food. shelter. transportation. education. and, really good looking ladies. and, college football, or rugby or soccer if you really want to insist.
and, get government the hell out of the way. government doesn't need to tell people what kind of vegetables to eat. or wheat to eat. or cows or pigs or sheep or goats to raise, or to consume.
this will come as a surprise to you, but people have been deciding that for themselves for millenia. just let enterprise and initiative and vision, and a personal investment in quest take over, and people will find a way.
just get the hell out of it. and, they will provide.
am i optimistic on this latter subject. not particularly. the developing world seems as resistant to the notion that they are basically where the developing world was 100 to 150 years ago, and that they can use the same templates to develop, only more quickly, because they have resources available to them that the developed world never had, e.g., the developed world, as i was in law school to what orlando john hollis tried to teach me.
were i a leader of such a country, i would do three things, immediately. build roads for markets. you don't need huge machinery for such matters, a goodly majority of the roads in this country were built by horse drawn machinery: i look at pictures, wherever i go. i would get the electric to the rural areas, and not for fucking air conditioning, but to power industry and enterprise. and, i would grow the food for my people.
food, and shelter.
a good woman. a good man. children.
education and moral and ethical values.
those things, i would worry about first.
plenty of time for the statutes and military jets and helicopters later.
and, i would also keep the structure of the country simple. i have read a good portion of the fnccc proposed treaty, being gone over in copenhagen right now. it is stupefyingly complex. the petty fucking little bureaucrats who wrote it, with help from the petty fucking little bureaucrats from the ngo's who also contributed to it, want to build these elaborate bureaucratic structures into the terms of the convention if adopted by the nations, and they want these elaborate bureaucracies to figure out how to dole out money to the developing countries, and they want to have equally elaborate bureaucracies as parallel or shadow establishments in each of the developing countries, to figure out what to do with all the money they figure the developed world will be showering on them. (phew!! i think that sentence works, i will look at it in the morning.)
well, as in the immediately preceding post here, i think they got another think coming on the money issuing out of this treaty, and it is not gonna be the gusher that they all anticipated in the developing world. it is going to be a good deal less.
the world simply cannot function with that many people doing nothing except telling other people what to do, which those others are entirely competent to decide for themselves in the first place.
so keep it simple.
when i was a young lawyer in the yakima valley, we used the yakima valley form contract, no. 1417 1/2 to sell/buy/transfer real estate holdings, mostly home sales, but sometimes small farm sales as well. for bulk sales transaction involving businesses with inventories, it was a little more complicated.
but, the 1417 1/2 was printed on both sides of two sheets of paper, and almost everybody who ever signed on had a pretty good understanding of what he had just signed. the closing documents, for disbursement of fees and taxes due, and the like, took another page and 1/2. my first wife and i bought our first house using one, and the keys got us in the front door and the heat kept us warm and cozy, and the roof didn't leak. it was, all in all, a pretty satisfying experience.
the last house i bought was closed at a closing agent's office, someone with a limited law practice license: in other words, somebody who has wrested this aspect of the business away from a lawyer, but someone also functionally totally ignorant of the law on real estate, except what they new as gospel.
the closing documenters ran pretty close to 750 pages. who in the hell knew what was going on. i sure didn't, and i was a lawyer of 23 years or so, with a lot of real estate experience.
5 1/2 pieces of understandable paper. versus. 750 pages of incomprehensible bullshit.
the developing world has a choice in this. were i them, i would just get some 1417 1/2 forms from the yakima bindery, and go with that.
but, you know they won't. not in those $1500 suits and $600 italian made shoes. and, the mercedes limo's. not a chance. laughing.
john jay @ 12.15.2009
p.s. and, if it is not perfectly obvious, people make nations. by their enterprise, and vision, and dreams. and, yes, sometimes by their avarice and drive and over weening ambition.
but, no country develops without clarence braden, without walter clure, without "shorty" gaines, and no economy thrives without the wilbur schuberts who rose early and bedded late, and who were not afraid to get dirt and grease under their nails, and sweat on their forehead. for years, when i was a kid, the old tattered work hat, baseball cap or felt, was not a symbol of anything until it had been soaked so many times in sweat that the crown showed the stains all the way to the top, and a little spattering of tobacco juice always seemed to find its way on them, and maybe some cow plop or grasshopper guts put there by a friends.
countries are built by men. if you go to the washington state historical society museum in tacoma, washington you will see wonderful displays of the men and woman who built the state, blazing road bed across the forests and the mountains, occupying the timber camps that felled the giant trees, tilling the fields and harvesting the grains and the fruit crops.
countries are built by labor. nothing less will do.
men like sam hill, the railroad magnate and champion of the improved road. he became enamored of some sort of romanian nobility, and built her a magnificent castle like edifice overlooking the columbia gorge, on the washington side of the river. the view is spectacular.
he brought her there to suit her. i can only imagine her growing horror as she traveled into the desolation of eastern oregon and washington along the river, for in spite of the river's presence, it was largely desert before the great columbia basin project brought the water from the river bottom onto the great plateau. (yes, the government financed it. see woody gutherie, who wrote "roll on columbia" for the wpa. but, it was an obscure newspaper reporter/editor from moses lake washington who conceived it, and proselytized it, and sold the concept after literally giving his entire life to it, who brought it to fruition. some would call him a "booster," out here "hero" will do.) it was a vast desolate area, and she was singularly unimpressed, and she left mr. hill in her lee as she hustled on back to the cozier confines of europe.
yes, this is precisely the sort of story that gave rise to the phrase, "what the sam hill?" it is not, "what the sam hell?" trust me on this one.
but, hill's vision was justified.
mary hill winery is now the leading destination winery in the state of washington, and a major winer producer and tourist attraction.
and, the view of the columbia and the great strato volcanoes of the cascade mountains to the west, and of the enormous plateau to the east, are still as breathtaking now as then. and, i might add, however many times you see it.
and, this my friends, defines nation as well. if you get my drift.
"...i would bet each of your $5.00 that you hadn't the slightest idea in creation what the "h" in john deere 95h stood for...."
And without looking anything up, I'd bet the "h" stands for "horsepower".
Posted by: Robert | December 22, 2009 at 09:27 PM