Family Discourse

(this something I tried to write to a family text chain. Following last night’s Washington drama, our text chain seemed to devolve. This is what I came up with this morning) 

I guess, mainly, the cynical side of me is afraid that this sort of apparent family disagreement is exactly “the point” of all this. As long as we are arguing between ourselves about which figurehead to blame/credit for our failures/successes, we’ll miss the point and let the big things slide. As long as we bicker over a few tax percentage points or a dollar on a gallon of gas or how many guns I get to own or who wants to conserve what or who wants progress for its own sake or any of the cultural issues that inflame, we’re not looking at how much of our time, money, and freedom is going to the real big dogs. I, for one, am less concerned about how much government assistance my neighbor gets when I realize just how much government assistance huge companies are getting. Arguing about the pennies among neighbors and peers blinds us to the real damage done way over our heads.

Like [my cousins], I run some businesses. It’s sort of a mess but it can be said I run three different businesses. 

First, I have two rental properties. The way for me to profit the most on these would be to rent them, short-term, through Air Bnb, to “digital nomads” and vacationers. This, in an area where workforce housing is scarce and unaffordable, mainly because of the competition with said short timers. I choose, on principle, to rent both properties long-term and took special care to make sure that all tenants are working in the local economy. The principle-based approach is working so far, but the draw of greater profit is there. The Air Bnb move would make me a little more money but make Air Bnb a lot more money and the loss of housing units would greatly cost my fellow working-class citizens that are still renting. Call this example number one of how “the system”, supported by both sides for decades (centuries?), encourages us all to participate in an economy that funnels wealth upward, disproportionately. 

Next, I do some freelance writing. I write ridiculous gear reviews for a third party. Basically, my compensation is an aggregate of weird little fractions of pennies from on-line ads linked to my articles. Google and Amazon coordinate this ad revenue exchange, send me a little bit while pocketing huge chunks of it in their stock value and management/executive compensation. In this case, I don’t work on principle. I work for the dollars, and die a little inside each time I’m forced to acknowledge just what a pawn I am. 

Finally, I take people into the mountains. This is what I do the most. I work for a couple dozen regular, long-term clients and occasional new clients. I take them into mountains all over the country (and beyond, but mainly in the US). Most of our mountainous terrain in the US is on public land. To use our public land, I need to account for that. That makes sense. You all own it, and I’m using it for commercial gain.  It makes sense that I would need permission from you all, by way of the government. 

That’s where the logic ends. Basically commercial use of all US natural resources (mountain recreation, public land grazing, oil extraction, public-land logging, etc) is regulated by the same type of system. For a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, existing businesses are artificially protected while new and smaller businesses have barriers to participation. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with existing businesses, but I have an issue when those existing businesses have protections that I do not, simply because of scale or tenure. Having started guiding just 15 years ago, I’m definitely one of those newer and smaller businesses. Aside from a few token destinations, I cannot work for myself as a mountain guide. Almost every trip I do has to be done through an established company. The proprietors of these companies do very well, and have for decades. Much like Exxon, Tyson, Cargill, etc, these guiding companies are leveraging a sort of “regulatory capture” (Basically, get your business big enough and the regulations start working for your business. How f’ed is that?) to prevent competition and just get bigger. Regulations that protect and favor larger companies have continued through decades of US history and across the whole political spectrum, while we “small folk” argue about the few pennies we get to play with. 

Really, on principle, I shouldn’t be participating in the guiding business the way it is. It’s dramatically unfair. To participate is to endorse the unfair system. But, I love these clients and I love these mountains. I ponder this every day, and for a while now I’ve come down on the side of participating, but also being active in improving the career. I am on the board of a non-profit guiding coop that facilitates entrepreneur public land access, for one thing. From time to time I engage  in forms of “civil disobedience”  in protest of “the system” that artificially protects established operators. And, like I said, I love what I do. 

There are countless other ways to look at this whole situation and see that bickering like we did this morning preserves the status quo for the really big dogs. I especially liked [cousin]’s example of looking at it from a business perspective. Especially for those of us under 60 y/o that don’t have kids, our businesses are a huge part of our lives. 

Don’t worry... writing this didn’t cost me much time. Writing for Amazon etc has trained me to spew out words at a preposterous rate, like a good “worker bee”.