A bar in Montana is advertising that it has the "only
shuffleboard in town" and has just installed a new Pac-Man machine. A North Dakota college lists its curriculum
offerings, a list that ends with "... welding and music." Local talk radio is interviewing a person who
goes around the state offering seminars on how to survive Obamacare.
Ah yes, among Obamacare's faults, according to this fellow,
is that it takes the health costs of high-medical needs people and transfers it
onto the backs of the healthy. One
wonders if he even grasps the concept of insurance. You know, where if your neighbor burns down
his house, you have to pay for part of it because you have the same insurance
company. Sounds like socialism. Sounds like an insurance plan.
But it is the far west corner of North Dakota that deserves
a focus. The explosion of oil field
development is everywhere. In Dickenson,
the ground zero of fracking I picked up a copy of the "Bakken Breakout
Weekly", a tabloid-sized paper devoted to chronicling developments.
Reading it, and driving through the region puts one in mind
of a Colorado boom town in the late 1800s.
It's all here: rapid influx of unattached men (and some women) being put
up in temporary field camps. An
explosion in rent and home prices (a two bedroom apartment is going for $2,000
a month in some places). Cities scrambling to keep up roads crumbling
under massive truck traffic, building schools, hiring police (and subsidizing
their living expenses). One school
district is going to a 4 day week to save costs because they can't afford the
operating expenses of a fifth day.
I didn't read about any gunfights over cheating at cards in
a local saloon run by some modern day Miss Kitty, but I wouldn't be surprised
if it had happened.
There are some differences: a company advertises its skill
at helping oil companies comply with regulations regarding archaeological
issues, historic preservation and consultations with Native tribes. I doubt that happened a hundred years ago.
And there is the environment. Rapid development never looks very
pretty. Oil drilling equipment is strewn
about everywhere. Natural gas is being
burned off in flares (something I hadn't seen in years) because there are no
pipelines to capture it.
I hope some sociologists and historians are out here doing
research. It would help us understand
that Colorado boom town.
The weekly paper is shot through with issues of the
relations of business to government. The
city is ticked that the state isn't giving them enough revenues back from what
the state collects. The Bureau of Land
Management is being castigated for standing in the way of progress (cut the
government!) – and for not inspecting oil wells fast enough because they lack
the money to do so. A school district, which had lost money due to
sequestration cuts has made up for it by increased federal subsidies to districts
that have to support students who live on federal tax-exempt land. A third of its' budget comes from federal
payments. This school district is
building houses for its teachers. Residents
of a local trailer court are protesting rent hikes and want – seriously – the government
to impose rent control. How socialist of
them.
This paper, and the radio show just how impoverished our
language is for discussing the economy's relation to government. No matter what is happening, the government
is wrong. The talk show host is on a
rant about how the BLM won't let you ride your four-wheeler on "your
land", by which he means federal land, which he demands be "returned
to the states" (that's another government, isn't it?), states that hadn't
been formed at the time the feds gained control of the land.
Government is always wrong, even if it is one government
complaining about another government.
And even when the demand is that the government do something – like stop
letting people with less than a year of experience be in charge of inspecting a
pipeline, or inspect those oil wells, or build some roads – the solution is never
mentioned, because the solution is to fund those activities. Then, after a short silence, someone goes on
to demand that government get smaller.
A bleak account of a bleak land... I used to have faith in the Deweyian dream that a good education system would enhance the quality of democratic deliberation, but I am not so sure anymore...
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