Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

October and already the leaves are fading away in the Adirondacks. 🍂 Most shocking to me is that we are less then a month away from November, which in many ways should be a sigh of relief with the craziness of work and with the deep blue skies and crisp days of that month.

Landowner, not a homeowner

|

Eventually, I plan to become a landowner more then a homeowner. Land not just a place to have a home on, but land where I can call my own, use for my own purposes, study nature and wildlife, hunt and trap on. Public lands are a fantastic resource, but they aren’t really my own even though I temporarily occupy the lands.

As a landowner you become responsible not just for your home, but also maintaining the land to maximize habitat and value to you. There are many ways to use land, farming, firewood, timber, hunt, trap, and so forth. Careful methods of use can maximize both the value of the land to you and wildlife that lives on it.

Land is more important to me then any kind of home I would have on it. I don’t want to chop down the forest or develop it more, I’d much rather take an adapt an existing structure, and use as much of the land that I own for natural purposes — be it agriculture or forest property. I would like to meet as much of needs on-site as possible, from renewable energy to food, to an live with as small of an externalized impact as possible.

Cabin

Delegitimizing government is a feature not a bug of Trump

|

If there is anything that I really like about Donald Trump is that he is making government less legitimate and heald in less esteem then it often has been in the past. I’m not at all convinced that government workers and politicians are all noble people, indeed most of them are there primarily for a job and getting paid.

Calling government work noble and declaring government workers to be heroes is simply an excuse to underpay government workers, have unsafe working conditions and generally be uncompetitive to the private sector. Parades for fallen cops and soldiers doesn’t make their work places safer or better compensated, it simply strokes egos without improving anything. And it causes cops and soldiers to do inferior work as they believe they are special for being underpaid and forced to work in an unsafe work environments. And it displaces jobs potentially done better privately.

Trump is tearing down the notion of “the people” in the courts, holding the government rather than individuals in contempt. A ruling of any court is inherently political, all judges are either elected or are appointed by elected officials. They have biaes they face when interpreting the law. He’s also reminding us how laws are often rigged to favor incumbents and established players – and while he likes to point at Democrats and liberals – it’s pretty obvious it cuts both ways.

It’s not to say there is no role for government. There is. But government service is no more noble than any private persuit, indeed cops and soldiers are just as essential as farmers, plumbers and software engineers and cell phone manufacturers. Truth is modern life is impossible without all facets of the economy and government workers really aren’t any more important to society than any other industry.