An Epiphany I had About Early American Government and the Welfare they Gave to the Poor.

While away from a computer for several days, I did have an epiphany, one of those things that ties a lot of things together.

The Tea Party keeps waxing nostalgic about the America of small government that in one form or another lasted from the founding days of the Republic into the early twentieth century.

They like to point out that the Government at this time did not provide welfare, and people who had no job and no food had to somehow 'make it on their own.'

Only that's not quite right. They gave them welfare, in a different form. Via the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 and later the Homestead Act of 1862, they would (after clearing the Native Americans off the land and mostly stuffing them onto small tracts of undesireable land or packing them off to Oklahoma) offer them land (160 acres, in plots all tracted out into ranges and townships) on which they could establish a farm and feed themselves and their family. Eventually, they even opened up Oklahoma, which had been set aside for the Native Americans who they had driven off their land elsewhere, but even that ended by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state.  But for the first century and a quarter of the time that the nation was in existence, the phrase 'go west, young man' was a part of the lexicon, and the government had land in abundance to give away as 'government welfare' to anyone who would move there and work it  (though they did so very reluctantly, it should be noted, for African Americans, for whom the promise of 'forty acres and a mule' never materialized and forced most of them to work as sharecroppers, especially in the South, but that's a different discussion.)


Now I also can anticipate what some Tea Party supporters will say. They won't disagree with me (since history records that this is exactly what happened) but will instead pull out the 'Cliven Bundy' card and complain about how much land the government still owns, especially in the West (after all, the Northwest Ordinance gave out parcels of land in what is now the eastern third of the U.S. and the Homestead Act more or less focused in the same way on what is now the middle third, but no similar act was every passed, at least on a significant scale, for the West.)  And it is true that even today the majority of the land in the West is owned by the Federal Government (though anyone who argues that the Federal Government somehow doesn't legally own it is wrong, since the Federal Government paid for most of it for $20 million (the combined purchase price of the Mexican Cession and Gadsden Purchase) and obtained the rest by an international treaty with Britain over the Oregon territory in 1845.)


But, they will argue, if in fact the Federal Government owns the land, why not just give it away in a similar manner to what was done before?


First, it's because a lot of it is not land you could farm on. The places you could farm on, have virtually all been transferred to private ownership already, but most of the rest doesn't make good farm land.  Around here, and around a lot of the rest of the southwest, it is too hot, too dry and the land too unsustainable to be able to farm, except perhaps in small areas that have consistent water like river valleys.  We are already outstripping our water supply, and it's hard to see how thousands more farmers would (if we had them) do anything beyond drain the scarce resource faster.  In fact, as the jet stream moves northward, we have already seen reports that precipitation in the Colorado River basin could decrease by 15-20% annually.  Yeah, I know, some skeptics of government welfare probably don't believe that either, but the science is sound and denying that a hungry lion is coming towards you won't prevent it from eating you when it gets there.  But even without it, we are losing the water battle in the southwest, and most of the land the federal government does own is either marginally useful as grazing land (which they already allow ranchers to graze on it for $1.35/cow per month, a fraction of what private grazing rights run)  or it is part of a national park, national forest or national monument. Cattle ranches (and I know several ranchers) will always be an activity that at least in the west requires thousands of acres, so even making people on welfare into cattle ranchers would result in a relatively small number of them being given this land, because ranches in general are so large and the cowhands who work on it now, would still be working on it then.


 Keep in mind regarding national parks, forests and monuments, that we do allow some kinds of economic activity in these areas (such as logging in national forests) but these are areas that are preserved for all of us to share. Do you really want the government to throw open Yellowstone  or Yosemite to people who would come in and just turn it into a bunch of farms?


But beyond that, even if they did do that, DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE that the people that they would want to get the land would be a bunch of welfare recipients from New York or Chicago?  Of course not. They expect it to be some kind of  'patriotic Americans' (probably meaning them) though in reality it would likely be a bunch of multinational corporations.   And frankly, compared to the value of the kind of land needed to farm or ranch on, the value of public assistance is much less.


So in conclusion, the people who argue that the small, federalist government in the days of the founding fathers didn't give welfare to people who needed to feed themselves is false. They did understand the need to do so and that it was the duty of the government to help provide for people, they just used a different kind of currency.

Life lessons learned from NCAA football

It is not often that I venture away from politics and into the sports arena here on Deep Thought, but I am doing so today. The occasion is that Boise State beat Oklahoma 43-42 in overtime. But in the end, there is a social commentary here that applies way beyond the football field.

What it means is that Boise State, of the Western Athletic Conference, is now the second non-BCS team (the BCS consists of six 'major' conferences, plus Notre Dame) to force its way into a BCS game and it has won (for a mid-major team to force its way in there it pretty much has to be undefeated and even then it has to depend on the polls and the computer geeks to make the cut.) Two years ago, Utah (of the Moutain West conference) blew away Pittsburgh 35-7 in a game that was probably not even as close as the score.

The question then becomes, why Florida (12-1) is playing in the national title game against undefeated and unanimous number 1 Ohio State rather than Boise State, and whether a playoff would fix this apparent inequity.

Naysayers will suggest that tonight's Fiesta result only proved that Boise State was slightly better than Oklahoma (which entered the game 11-2). However, Oklahoma should be 12-1 (remember that the Sooners began the season gunning for a national title and then had a game against Oregon stolen by several unexcusable calls that even the PAC-10 had no choice but to suspend the officials for.) So in reality, in a universe in which a win is really a win, Oklahoma should have had the same record going into the bowl games as Florida, and would likely still be rated ahead of the Gators after playing a brutally tough schedule this year. So if Oklahoma is really about as good as Florida and Boise State is just slightly better than Oklahoma... well, draw your own conclusion.

For that matter, two years ago, while Oklahoma and Southern California were both undefeated during the regular season, Utah (ironically coached by Urban Meyer, the current Florida coach) was clearly playing at that same caliber just by the way they completely destroyed Pittsburgh (which was 8-4 during the year but was in a BCS bowl anyway, not because there weren't some better teams available-- there were at least a dozen which more deserved to go, but because they won one of the six BCS conference titles in a down year for the Big East.)

Tonight's win by Boise State does make the mid-majors 2-0 in the rare occasions when they get a chance to go to a BCS bowl-- proving decisively that they are good enough to play with the big boys and win.

What this means is that while the addition of one more bowl has made it a little easier for mid-major teams to get into a bowl, they are still effectively locked out of a national championship game, not because they don't deserve to, but because the powers that be in College Football don't want to let them take that final step to the top.

Why is this? Easy enough. Division 1 College Football is divided neatly into two groups. The 'haves' (teams which are members of the six BCS conferences) and the 'have-nots' (so-called, 'mid-majors'-- teams which are members of another conference). There are a few teams with no conference affiliation-- of which Notre Dame is 'in the club' (because they are Notre Dame and everything that entails) and the rest are part of the 'have-nots.' And with BCS bowls paying a lot of money ($17 million per participant this year) plus all the extra TV exposure, merchandising revenue, etc. that goes along with it, that's a big pot of cash that the BCS conferences (i.e. the 'haves') have control over and don't want to share a dime they don't have to.

And the truth is, that a 'have-not' can do everything possible (after all, you have the schedule you've got at the start of the year, including all but three or four of your games being against other members of your conference-- and most schedules are decided years in advance) by winning every game, 1) in theory could still be locked out of a BCS bowl subject to the whims of geeks and poll voters, and 2) even if they get in, they won't get a chance (as they would in Division II or Division III football) to play for a national championship.

If they were lucky enough to start the season in a BCS conference, then a team like Boise State would have a chance to play for the national championship (well, still maybe not-- just ask Auburn), but being in a non-BCS conference the die is pretty much cast before the opening game kickoff that there is a ceiling on how high they can rise.

Why is this relevant? Simple. Because it's like the situation in America today, and even more so like the situation that conservatives want for America. There are the very rich (the 'achievers') and the poor (the 'non-achievers'). Now, in theory, 'achievement' is such that those who achieve deserve to be rich. And I have no problem with this concept, except that the way the system is set up there are those who are born on top (and hence have the advantage of going to the best schools, having the money to pay for college wherever they can get into, and having the social connections via their family to get wherever they want. Not that they all get there, but even the failures have enough money so that they can fail in venture after venture after venture and still not have to be worried about what long term impact this can have.

On the other end, there are those who are born into poverty, again because of their family background. They can in fact work hard, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve. But to suggest that this makes the system fair is to be intentionally ignorant.

How we choose to address this problem is up to us. College Football needs a playoff but the social divisions in society don't have such an obvious answer. But to ignore them is to be morally bankrupt.