Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: History

  • Studying Capitalism

    Karl Marx spent about six weeks writing the Communist Manifesto, and his entire life writing Das Kapital, but we know him as the originator of Communism rather than a long-term student of capitalism.   The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center interfaces some Marx-like observations of modern Capitalism (things that were not readily observable during Marx’ lifetime) with Tainter’s theory of Complexity:

    “capitalism is currently suffering from chronic, degenerative conditions – namely, faltering dynamism and inclusion combined with increasingly dysfunctional politics.”

    “After all, contemporary postindustrial capitalism features a mass elite of entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals. Comprising some 20 to 30 percent of the population, this is the largest elite, both in absolute numbers and in size relative to society as a whole, that any social order in human history has yet produced, and – making due allowance for all the problems that bedevil life at the top today – its members are flourishing at a level that would stagger the imagination of aristocracies past. Thus, capitalism as a system for producing mass flourishing is overextended: It works for the top quarter or so of society, but not so well for everybody else.” 

    Karl Marx died in 1883 – before capitalism managed to pull most people up from abject poverty.  He chronicled the problems associated with capitalism – yet years before his death wrote “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.  Still now, 140 years after his death, the problem of Capitalism is that “capitalism as a system for producing mass flourishing is overextended.  It works for the top quarter . . . but not so well for everybody else.”  

    That phrase strikes me as today’s most legitimate criticism of capitalism.  It doesn’t lift everyone equally.

    I’ve worked and researched the most successful communist group in North America – the Hutterites.  Simply enough, their society functions for two reasons – first, the communal ownership they espouse has a strong religious component. The belief is that it is much easier to ascend to heaven from the communal society – which can be one heck of a motivator.  The second reason is that the folks who are born Hutterite but do not share the beliefs can easily move from the communal colony into the larger, mostly capitalistic society. I suspect that Karl Marx would have recanted his manifesto had he observed late twentieth century communism in all its forms.  

    So here’s the next quote from The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center

    “One fundamental reason for capitalism’s difficulties in promoting more widespread flourishing is the steadily diminishing nexus between economic growth and well-being. It’s not true that more money above a certain threshold has no effect on happiness: The most recent examination of this issue found that reported happiness, both in terms of positive affect and overall life satisfaction, continues to rise indefinitely. Importantly, though, happiness doesn’t increase in linear fashion as income rises; rather, it increases in linear fashion with every doubling of income.”

    And that brings us back to the chart that the Niskanen Center shows – demonstrating the decreasing returns to increasing complexity:

    Read the whole article.  I’ve seen the problems of communism on the small scale of the Hutterite Communes, the Soviet Union, and I owned a Yugo.  I don’t know how any economic system can make the lowest sixth flourish as well as any member of the top quarter.  Read the whole article,  The author does a lot better job at showing how Tainter’s theory applies to our own society than I can.   The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center

  • Complexity and Collapse

    The ending years of the 20th century saw three theorists developing hypotheses related to societal collapse of states.  George Cowgill (1988:263) saw internal economic reasons – societies that depend on taxation develop increasing numbers of people and organizations that are legally exempt from taxes . . . and increasing numbers of taxpayers find ways to avoid taxes illegally.  Bureaucracies – expensive bureaucracies – grow, with “increasing corruption, rigidity, incompetence, extravagance and inefficiency.”  Simultaneously, citizen expectations of state services increase.

    Jared Diamond looked at growing populations mandating agricultural intensification – and that intensification carries with it unanticipated consequences – soil erosion, problems with water management, deforestation, etc.

    Joseph Tainter looked at complexity – challenges in production are met with increasing complexity (1988:88-90) and listed 8 causes for the collapse of complex societies.

    1. Resource Depletion
    2. New Resources
    3. Catastrophes
    4. Insufficient response to circumstances
    5. Other complex societies
    6. Intruders
    7. Mismanagement
    8. Economics

    Economic factors and mismanagement kind of go together.  If we look at the bureaucracies that keep our nation state functioning, we find ( https://www.federalpay.org/employees ) 

    2,807,126

    EMPLOYEES

    732

    AGENCIES

    $76,667.77

    AVERAGE SALARY

    $215.22B

    TOTAL SALARY

    Now if these numbers seem large, the Census provides us with numbers for state and local governments: 19,768,685 employees, with $89,265,296,554 in total salary.  Frankly, I don’t trust my data – it comes from two sources, and the proportions look a little strange.  But questionable data isn’t the problem – we’re talking over 22 million government employees to manage.  Tainter’s 7th cause of collapse is mismanagement.  

    The total number of jobs listed for the US in February 2022 was 150,399,000 – and a little bit of rounding tells us that about 2/15, or 13% of US jobs are for one form of government or another.  On one hand, 13% of the nation’s jobs are to make government work – which is a large expense.  On the other hand, there is a tremendous opportunity for Murphy to get into a system this large and complex and arrange for things to go wrong.

    Under the heading of Mismanagement, Tainter’s explanation is “The elite in a civilization may so abuse their power and direct so much of the surplus wealth and labor of their society to their own benefit that not enough is left for the maintenance of the economic and political system, leading to collapse.”

    If you’re politically on the left, you can readily see where the fat cat right wing elite can do this.  If you’re politically on the right, the stories of Joe Biden and son that are available support Tainter’s explanation.  If you’re somewhere in between, Tainter makes even better sense.

    Simply enough, the more moving parts there are in a system, the more opportunities Murphy has for things to go wrong.  The less competent management is, the more opportunity there is for systemic failure.  It kind of goes back to Malthusian demographics – for a bit over 225 years, our society has developed increasingly complex systems that made Thomas Malthus wrong.  The thing is, Malthus only has to be right once.

  • A Right to Your Own Opinion But Not Your Own Facts

    I always credited this quote to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It turns out that the original was Bernard Baruch, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

    According to QuoteInvestigator.com “In 1983 U.S Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a member of the National Commission on Social Security Reform. He employed the saying within an op-ed piece in the “Washington Post”:

    “There is a center in American politics. It can govern. The commission is just an example of what can be done. First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.” So I have the original Moynihan quote – and it is a little different from the Baruch quotation.

    My father credited Moynihan with the destruction of the Black family – when I finally asked the right question – basically a why do you believe this- I realized he had never read the Moynihan report – the title is The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (published in 1965 and available at https://old.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/

    Dad had confused the messenger with the message. Perhaps because Lyndon Johnson continued his ‘Great Society’ message and policy despite Moynihan’s recommendations, possibly because Johnson never bothered to read Moynihan’s report. Moynihan wrote the facts as he saw them in 1965 – and history has demonstrated that he was correct.

    I’m sure Moynihan never knew that Dad had the wrong opinion of his report and the wrong facts. I’m fairly sure that he knew President Johnson had a flawed opinion based on incorrect facts.

    A lot of our current political differences can be seen as people insisting on their own facts. When the definition of “woman” becomes something we don’t agree on, we have a communication problem. I have a tendency to accept Mussolini’s definition of fascism – others accept Joe Stalin’s. Those different ‘facts’ have been around for nearly a century – and the Soviet definition included all Capitalists.

    When the definitions change, people have their own facts. In the mid-eighties, when I taught at Trinidad, only one hospital – Mount San Rafael – and only one surgeon – Dr. Stanley Biber – was performing transexual surgery. Biber required a lot of counseling before performing the surgery – no one considered the surgery, available only in a rural Colorado hospital – to be normal. Now, with athletes and assassins arguing the meaning of the word “woman”, and with at least one Supreme Court Justice unclear on the definition, we have disagreements over facts.

    Are Palestinians facing genocide, or did they attack and murder/kidnap 1300 people a couple years back? It’s past time to quit changing definitions. We can’t afford to have people who are a couple bubbles off making their own facts.

  • School District 53 — Older Than Lincoln County

    School District 53 – Trego School – started in September of 1905.  I finally understand why it’s District 53 – it started when the community was still in Flathead County.  Matter of fact, Flathead County had only split from Missoula County in 1904. Lincoln County began in 1909 – 5 years later.  The lower numbers – such as Troy’s District 1 – are Lincoln County numbers. A lot was happening in 1904 – and the map of School District 53 showed another thing I hadn’t realized.  In 1905, there was no Fortine Creek.  The map clearly reads Edna Creek.  The dam running logs down to Eureka Lumber was built in 1904, and 1904 was the year for the first railroad mainline relocation.  The first main line, running back of Marion to Libby was replaced by a line running from Stryker, through Trego, Fortine and Eureka, then dropping into the Kootenai valley to run down to Libby.  (The second mainline relocation occurred along with Libby Dam).The map shows that railroad – and the predecessor of highway 93 – both running to the west of Dickie Lake.  No road shows where the highway now is to the east of the lake. Thinking on it, School District 53 was there before either Fortine or Trego received the communities names. Trego was a nameless construction boom town for the first time.  1904 brought the railroad relocation,  a new dam being built (on Edna Creek, before it was named Fortine Creek) and a new Ranger station was under construction at Ant Flat.  Small wonder that Flathead County got news of a new community that needed a school district ASAP.  It would be over sixty more years before the second railroad relocation and new dam (this one on the Kootenai) would repeat the situation to build a new school for District 53. When we get the copies of those old maps ready, we’ll add them to an article – but for now, it’s kind of neat to realize that School District 53 means that Trego school was created before Lincoln County – and the higher district number means that it was a Flathead County district and got the number from Kalispell.

  • Trego – The Hippie Years (and an occasional remittance man)

    If I were forced to set a date for the end of Trego’s boomtown years, it would be somewhere around 1970 or 71. First the tunnel was completed, then Koocanusa filled and the rails that had once connected the county along the Kootenai were picked up. The last construction project finished was highway 37, connecting Libby and Eureka. As the reservoir began filling, 37’s completion was less essential because there was a paved Forest Service road on the west side of the Kootenai – or Koocanusa. The boom ended with many of the construction boom workers moving north for jobs along the Alaska pipeline, and others becoming locals. Mike Brandon married Peggy Hilliker, went to work with a chainsaw in the woods, and became as much (or more) a part of Trego as any of his neighbors. Sam Chaney married Keith Calvert’s daughter, and lives his life on what remains of the Calvert ranch after the rails took so much away. But as the construction boom ended, Trego, like the rest of Lincoln County was left with a housing surplus. Through the seventies, the cheap housing of Trego, indeed all of Lincoln County, along with rapid population growth beginning in the Seattle area, was pressed into a new group of people.

    Anthropologists use the German term “volkswanderung” to describe the movement of groups across Europe during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Those wandering groups were barbarian tribes who found a better, possibly easier life in declining Rome. Our ‘volkswanderung’, again comes with social change – rapid population growth in northwest Washington state, accompanied by rising land values and rents, followed by the migrations – in this case, gradually and eventually to Lincoln County. Unlike Europe’s ‘volkswandurung’, ours had a physical end to it – the Canadian line and Glacier Park meant that people couldn’t move further in search of cheaper living.

    To be fair, not every newcomer was a hippy – some were straight as they could be. But low cost rentals drew in the hippie lifestyle, and they were a bit more distinctive. Some of these new residents more closely resembled the classic ‘remittance man’ of the old west. (Wikipedia gives a description: “the “Remittance man” is defined in The Canadian Encyclopedia as “a term once widely used, especially in the West before WWI, for an immigrant living in Canada on funds remitted by his family in England, usually to ensure that he would not return home and become a source of embarrassment.” ) Relatively inexpensive land, often off-grid, provided a spot where families could set up the modern remittance man. Others made use of government support programs until 1996, when the Welfare Reform Act changed the game. Still others – probably more common – found places to buy and work on the local economy, little different than their neighbors with a possible exception of being a bit more likely to use ‘illicit chemicals’.

    Following Lincoln Electric’s member revolt in 1988, powerlines were extended up Edna Creek, resulting in fewer off-grid homes. While Lincoln Electric Cooperative’s return to expanding electric power was short-lived and incomplete, the Interbel telephone cooperative took expansion of telephone and internet services as part of their mission, and many homes that are otherwise off-grid are served by fiberoptic lines and have full modern communications.

    This is the time when Edna Creek and Butcher Creek lands were sub-divided, mostly into parcels that could be described as a portion of a section and sold without a survey. While fuel cell technology has not provided an acceptable alternative for these off-grid residences, solar panels have created a power source that has moved the off-grid homes and residences far beyond the typical home of 1945. Likewise, the portable gas and propane generators have improved the quality of life off-grid.

    This is the time when a single individual affected Trego’s composition – for most of the 20th Century, Trego’s growth and development was an outgrowth of national trends – in the late seventies and through the eighties, Al Luciano’s Land Store sold and financed parcels of land – particularly raw land around Butcher Creek.

    After the Great Timber Strike of 1917, Trego spent nearly a half-century regarded as a place filled with socialists and IWW supporting unionists (despite the fact that our only self-identified socialist was raising sheep). Butcher Creek has merely became the part of Trego that continues that external perspective – in a smaller area (or at least my conversation with a Whitefish resident suggests that to me).

    If I had to set a time when Trego’s Hippie Years began to end, I’d pick the middle of the 1990’s.

  • Fascism Defined

    If you look at the back of a Mercury dime, you will see the fasces, a bundle of sticks around an axe (well, you will see it if the coin isn’t too worn, Mercury dimes haven’t been made since 1945).

    Please note that the dime illustrated has a 1916 date. The word fascism apparently came into use in Italy, and the year was 1921. Obviously, the fasces on the dime weren’t connected with fascism.

    The word ‘fascist’ is thrown around loosely – largely because the Stalinist Communists used it against both the real fascists (Hitler and Mussolini) and any capitalist they wanted to tar with the same brush. The only people who weren’t fascists to the Soviets were fellow communists.

    Benito Mussolini described fascism as “the marriage of corporation and the state.” I can’t say that Benny invented fascism, but he did start the first fascist government. Anyone remember that, in his second month as President, Barack Obama fired Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors? Fascism focuses on putting the nation first. Anybody remember red caps that say “Make America Great Again”? Fascism calls for total control by authoritarian leaders. Can anybody recall some of the extreme controls that came with Covid? Like Newsom activating California’s Guard to work with covid tests?

    Fascism promotes a strong, centralized government, ran by an authoritarian leader. Barack Obama, despite having fired the CEO of General Motors, doesn’t qualify as Fascist. Biden, despite leaning toward authoritarian, doesn’t qualify. Donald Trump – despite the red caps that say “Make America Great Again” doesn’t hit all the bases. It’s easy to find one aspect of each president where he touched on one of the aspects – but none of them meet all of Mussolini’s criteria, and Stalin’s criteria were never correct.

    Mussolini, with coauthor Giovanni Gentile, wrote The Doctrine of Fascism. It’s only 33 pages, and Benny the Moose was a decent writer – it isn’t a hard read. If you think about calling someone a fascist, it’s available at https://dn721808.ca.archive.org/0/items/mussolini-archive/The%20Doctrine%20of%20Fascism%20Benito%20Mussolini.pdf