Assets?

Bev and I have been gallivanting over southeastern Kentucky in search of pumpkin pie. We have taken a wonderful three day fall break to Berea, Kentucky and on to Cumberland Falls state park. As luck and good planning would have it, there was a full moon. Which at Cumberland Falls State Park means, it is moonbow night. The Cumberland Falls is a 60 ft fall that generates enough mist that on the night if a full moon enough refraction occurs that you can see a moonbow. For the rest of my life any time that you see me utter the word moonbow, you should hear the words snipe hunt. Moonbow isn't even in my spellchecker. I started to get suspicious when I went into the gift shop and did not see t-shirts that said "memaw and papaw went to moonbow and all I got was this lousy . . . Don't get me wrong. I loved the park. To sit there in the gloaming and listen to the roar of the falls relaxed me and lowered my blood pressure 10 points and will long be a favorite memory.

By the time the spectral or specious moonbow was sighted, Bev and I were tired and hungry. We got out of Dodge and started our search for pumpkin pie. Did you know that Cracker Barrel doesn't do pumpkin pie until November. What? According to my TV Guide, "Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" always showed during October. So we spent the next 18 hours rueing Cracker Barrel and set off the next morning in search of Indiana and Bob Evans. 250 miles later the crisis was averted. We were sitting in the Shelbyville Bob Evans eating pumpkin pie in one of it's twelve appropriate months.

The back story to this trip though was the cd that I have in the car. I have been listening to Shelby Foote's "The Civil War; A narrative." The cd version contains 3 volumes and runs for 110 cd's. I have been listening since the family summer vacation to Gettysburg in July. Well, the end had finally come. Lee was holding off Grant around Petersburg and one Union probe went a little too well and the South had ran into the end of its assets. It had used up or had its men, material, and morale destroyed. Suddenly what had been defiant and stood for four years disappeared in just a few weeks.

Listening,  I kept being taken back to  my biggest collapse. When after 10 years of struggle, I had to stop farming because there were not enough assets to continue the fight. That was a constant refrain in telling the story about farming to interested supporters. I can't remember how many times I would say, "we are making our operating expenses but I am not saving up any capital." In the end,  it finally caught up.

You see that all over agriculture today. It is very seldom that you see a farmstead that is in good repair. I know that Bev and I are even now considering what to do about a couple of 100 year old barns that are on our farmstead. We have no use for them. They need $15,000 in new roofing and currently, we are paying the county government approximately $400 a year in property (rent) taxes. While we all sat behind some very expensive equipment this fall during harvest, much of it is bought on credit only to be repaid by the hardest effort and often in need of replacement before that last payment is made. The one place that I have not seen that was in Kentucky. Bev and I made a commitment to not drive on the interstate to our destination this weekend. So we went on the state roads of Kentucky. What amazed me were the number of farmsteads that were not falling in. All of these barns, well painted, well roofed and full of tobacco.

Now I don't want to get caught up in the great debate surrounding tobacco. I am only acknowledging that tobacco farmers have carved out a segment in this  society that thrives there with long term asset creation and is not failing through asset depletion.

It seems to me that we live in a time of unreal assets. Instead of farms, barns, houses, businesses creating long term wealth, most of our thriving enterprises are in pursuit of the transient. The cell phone industry creating moments that last long enough to transmit "OMG did u c what she was wearing? lol." TV whose assets are (in some cases) the wiring to our houses and the intellectual property of the latest show that is a hairs-breath away from jumping the shark. Look at Indianapolis, the only buildings in town with brick on their exteriors (which has long been an outward sign of stability and wealth) are the hospitals and our sports venues. Hospitals at best as supplying short term remedies to the ultimate asset depletion and our sports venues provide nothing more than palliative benefits to a city that can't keep its kids in school, businesses open, or buses running.

Certainly, our biggest repository of asset valuation is the stock market which to my mind makes us even more susceptible to sudden collapse. How much did the 2008 crash cost investors?  The market lost 54% of its value from 2008 to 2009. Which means nothing to me. How much was that worth? Other than a lot or gazillions. The ability to create and destroy so much wealth in months is unprecedented and unstable. Even more troubling is the fact that it is controlled by so few people. 300 million people in the US. Certainly there are less than 10,000 people of influence doing that creation and destruction. While many good and honorable people work in those positions of influence, it does appear at times that their numbers are not enough to warrant our trust.

There is no solution is this blog. Only the vague sense that we are using assets that were provided by those before us and in some cases to be paid or defaulted on by those who will follow.

Shelby Foote ended his work with a quote from Lincoln given on the night of his re-election from the balcony of the White House.

"What has occurred in this case must ever occur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong, as silly, and as wise, as bad, and as good. Let us, there-fore, study at incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from."

A store of wisdom;

take care.

Roger