In the 1980s I lived in a small town. Somebody that I didn’t know came to town and tried to run a service station, so when I needed a car battery replaced I gave them my business.
They didn’t bolt in the car battery properly, however; two or three days later I was just driving along the road, minding my own business and shooting my 30.06 out the window at some ill-mannered cows, when all of a sudden my car battery came loose and started bouncing all around the engine. This interfered with the proper operation of the vehicle, and there are cows that are alive today due to this miracle. Probably not today; it’s been 25 years.
Anyway, I went back to the service station, and asked if they would fix the problem. They somewhat grudgingly agreed to replace the car battery, which was less than 60 hours old at the time of its adventure, but refused to pay for the rest of the damage to the vehicle, which was a couple of hundred dollars. What could I do? I’m not going to sue them for $250.
But I knew that that service station would be out of business in months—and it was. You just can’t do business like that in a small town. In a small town there are a very limited number of potential customers, and those potential customers have a very high level of knowledge about every business with which they trade. They know whether the businessman is honest and ethical, and if he isn’t, he’s out of business.
In a city, of course, it is different, not because city people are different but because the risk/reward calculation is different. In a city a businessman has hundreds of thousands of potential customers, and each of those potential customers has very little knowledge about all of the businesses in town. An unethical businessman can thrive by grazing constantly on the stream of new suckers.
At the start of the 20th century something close to 90% of the American population lived on farms or in small towns. By the time my memory starts this was no longer true, but the ethics that dominated commerce were still the ethics that had been forged in small towns. Businessmen would not lie to you, in general; they would not cheat you, they would not mislead you, and they would stand behind their products.
In the modern world the swindling of customers by businesses is endemic. People take it for granted that businessmen are unethical and businesses will cheat you and steal from you without conscience. You sign a contract for phone service, or internet service, or cable TV service, and God knows what you are agreeing to. The contract is written in language that they understand but you can’t. You sign a contract saying you don’t need a modem; you get home, get your bill, you’re being charged $4 a month for a modem you never got. It’s a game. You go to buy clothes; there is a rack of neckties with a big sign saying "Clearance sale--$3 each." You get to the cash register, those two neckties are $22 each. Oh, well. . .we didn’t mean those.. These three neckties here, on the far end of the table; these are $3 each.
I went to a Big and Tall store, there was a big sign "EVERYTHING IN THE STORE—ONE HALF OFF" and, at the bottom, in small print "regular sizes only." I pick out $150 worth of clothes, get to the cash register, it’s $380. What? Oh, that was only regular sizes. We’re trying to close out our regular-size merchandize.
What do you mean, it only applies to your regular-sized merchandize? It’s a Big and Tall Store. And anyway, these are socks; it says right on them, "fits sizes 11-17." We live in a constant battle to avoid being cheated by thieves running businesses. There is a motel near my home that has a billboard, "Singles--$29.95 a night." They haven’t rented a room for $29.95 since the Carter administration. It’s $29.95 a night if you book three weeks in advance and pay cash for a room with a twin bed, but the only room they have with a twin bed is the room where the night clerk lives when he is off duty. Nobody expects to rent a room for $29.95; everybody knows that’s just a shorthand way of saying, "We’re a cheap, dirty motel."
Motels are models of integrity compared to hotels; hotels will charge you $5.99 a night for the convenience of having a mini-bar in your room from which you could, if somebody else was paying for it, select a small basket of cheeses for only $17.95. You order a $7 breakfast it’s listed at $11.99 plus $4.99 for the coffee, but the real cost is more like $40 once you add in the delivery charge, the room service fee, the tip and the mandatory gratuity.
Airlines sell you a first class seat; my contract with a company with which I consult calls for me to fly first class, because frankly I am too big to sit in regular seats. The airline sells you a first-class ticket, cancels the flight, puts you on another airline, you wind up sitting in a seat the size and general shape of a waste basket. What happened to the hundreds of dollars that you paid, or somebody paid, for the first class seat? Nothing; they just keep the money. This happens regularly.
You rent a car for $199 a week; you "reserve" it in advance. You get to the desk, no $199 cars are available. These other cars are available which are exactly like the $199 cars, except different somehow, only they’re $299 a week. You can rent the $299 car, or you can have a seat and wait to see if one of them $199 beauties comes in. And we have your credit card.
Even restaurants now will try to bamboozle you, slip $4 items onto your bill, charge you $4 to pour your wine, try to make you think that an entrée is $12.95 when it’s actually $12.95 without the meat, $18.95 with it. You spend $70 on a meal with your wife, it’s $95.
My point is that in regard to ethical business practices we are slipping backward at an alarming rate—and the government is doing nothing about it. Large, successful national businesses now are devoted to fleecing their customers. This was not true 50 years ago. Republicans talk constantly about "de-regulating" businesses, getting the government off the backs of the businessmen. What are you, friggin’ nuts? Who is it that you’ve been doing business with, who doesn’t need to be regulated?
As most of you know, I’m at least 40% conservative, and I think the Republicans are right on many issues. I do not want the government doing things that businesses do better, and the things that businesses do better, in my experience, are "almost everything". The city of Los Angeles has put in red-light cameras that have issued tickets for $400 million—and the city has managed to lose money on the deal. That’s government for you.
The worst businesses are the ones that present themselves as models of integrity: The TV news shows. They lie to you so often they’ve entirely lost track of the fact that they’re doing it. A stunning development in the Clara Rogers Case, right after the break!! It’s actually right after the fourth commercial break, 22 minutes later, and the stunning development turns out to be some crazy neighbor who thinks she saw Clara moon-walking through the suburbs with Willie Nelson. "Experts" turn out to be hacks and frauds. There’s an all-new episode of House debuting tonight. . .only it turns out that’s it’s not a new episode, at all; it’s just a re-run from three years ago. How does this differ from fraud? Some network snake has realized that the words "all-new debut episode" and "stunning development" have no legal meaning, and thus can be applied to anything without consequence.
What they haven’t yet realized is that after they lie to me a certain number of times, I lose interest in whatever they have to say. I don’t understand how networks can fail to process this: that when they lie to me, I stop watching. Am I alone here? Doesn’t anybody else get tired of this stuff?
There are two businesses in America that are the targets of constant attacks by the left: Walmart, and McDonalds. They’re under attack for selling fatty food, busting unions, mistreating employees, running local businesses out of town; you name it, they get hit for it. I am certain that many of these complaints are valid.
But this is what people miss about Walmart: Walmart will not lie to you. You buy $30 worth of stuff at Walmart, it’s $30. Same thing with McDonalds; there’s no deception here. Nobody is claiming this is eggplant and spinach. What you see is what you get. And that is very much of the secret of those companies, the reason that they keep moving forward despite the efforts to stop them: people trust them.
What government should be doing, if anybody wants my opinion, is regulating businesses. That’s high on the list—but I don’t mean selling permits to do business, or telling businesses what they can sell and what they cannot sell, or telling them who they have to hire and who they can fire. What I mean is, kicking them sharply in the balls when they mislead customers.
I advocate laws that create stiff penalties for businesses that mislead their customers. What should be prohibited is not any specific practice to mislead customers; it is the misleading of customers itself. Putting up a sign that says "Neckties--$3" on a table that is mostly filled with $22 neckties is deliberately misleading customers. Selling a passenger a "first class" seat and delivering a coach seat and making no effort to refund the money is misleading customers. Pricing electronic services so that no one can say what anything actually costs is deliberately misleading customers. It is fraud, and there is no reason for us to tolerate it.
De-regulate business? Shit, I can think of 50 national chains that ought to be regulated out of business in the next 30 days; I’m fine with it, recession or no recession. And if anybody needs more regulation, it’s the bankers; they’re the first people who ought to be regulated. Banker shouldn’t be able to go the bathroom without the fear of an investigation if he accidentally pees on the floor. You’re handling other people’s money. There should be no leeway for playing games with it.
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Also as many of you know, I’m prone to rant about red-light cameras. Here’s a link to an extremely good article on the subject:
Having endorsed the article enthusiastically—I think this may be the first time I have used this platform to link to somebody else’s article—I now need to back away from it a little bit in several directions. The article says that "governments initially justified them under the rubric of public safety—the cameras were supposed to make intersections safer. . .but the fig leaf of safety frittered away as study after study showed that the cameras made little difference and in some cases actually made intersections less safe. Drivers, knowing cameras were watching, tended to jam on their brakes suddenly at yellow lights, causing accidents." I would prefer to believe that that’s true, and intuitively I have known from the first moment I heard of a red light camera that businessmen would promote them by doing specious studies that heroically overstated the safety value of their product, but by the same rough skepticism, I know that people who write polemics very often say things like "study after study has shown" no matter how muddled the evidence actually is.
The more serious issue is that parts of the article are stated in right-wing cant that is likely to drive a wedge between Red-Light camera opponents and those who should be our strongest allies. The article talks about Red Light cameras as a further intrusion of the Nanny State into our daily lives, which is code to portray Red-Light cameras as being foisted on the population from the left. The reality is that it is businessmen who are selling these things, in league with avaricious local politicians. In the 1980s, when businesses got a toehold running private prisons on contract from the government, who was it that took the lead in opposing that? It was, of course, the left.
Well, this is the same thing, isn’t it? It’s turning over a police function to private business—and it should be opposed on those grounds; police powers cannot be delegated to people who could misuse them to generate income. There is too much opportunity for abuse, and businessmen are not universally ethical. The real problem with Red Light cameras is not that they don’t promote safety—for all I actually know, they may promote safety—it is that they create a profound confusion between the goals of public safety and the pursuit of wealth.
Also in the 1980s, there was a period in which it was a popular idea that police should seize items used in a crime and sell them to raise money for police departments. A more terrifying concept would be difficult to come up with—and who was it that took the lead in opposing this? It was, again, the left—and these policies were in due course prohibited by the courts as a threat to civil liberties.
Well, this is the same thing, isn’t it? It creates the same terrifying confusion between what is being done in the broad interests of the public and what is being done in the financial interests of the state, thus allowing the government to shake money out of your pockets on the pretense that they are legitimately punishing you for violating laws that you never had the slightest intention of violating.
Governments should be fanatically careful as to when they punish and who they punish. A wise father does not indiscriminately punish his children. Educated and sophisticated people know that punishments backfire frequently and at a high cost. This is careless and indiscriminate punishment. It is both stupid and immoral, and we need to put a definite stop to it.
Small Towns and Post Offices
The Parking Lot bus at the Kansas City airport used to stop and pick up passengers who had not yet reached the booths where passengers were supposed to gather and await the bus. One day they put up a bunch of signs. "In the interests of efficiency," the signs said, "our buses will no longer stop to pick up passengers other than at the designated collection points." Think about it. How is this "efficient"? It’s more efficient for them; it’s less efficient for you. If you’re 30 seconds late for the bus, it drives on by and you go wait ten minutes for the next one. This is not efficiency; it’s just a reduction in service.
Rob Neyer is on kind of a campaign now to help keep small-town post offices open; they are being closed in the name of efficiency. "How many bombers would we have to give up," Neyer asks, "to maintain post offices in our smallest towns?" Why is it always the bombers we have to give up? This nation spends a hell of a lot more money on totally unnecessary medical tests than it does on bombers; why doesn’t anybody ever want to give up a radiologist?
Anyhoo, there used to be a full set of schools in every small town in Kansas, schools that were built by the local people of their own initiative and at their own cost. In the late 1950s the state legislature of Kansas, in the name of ‘ficiency, voted to "consolidate" the schools into larger school districts. This was being done all over the nation at that time. The people of Kansas rose up in arms, forced the school-consolidation law to a public vote, and soundly defeated it. Undeterred, the legislature put another school-consolidation law on the ballot; it also was defeated. Finally, they figured out a solution. They put a school-consolidation law on the ballot that asked the voters "Would you rather consolidate the schools under this plan, or would you rather consolidate the schools under that plan? It’s up to you." Then, since the public had "approved" the plan and voted on it, the courts ruled that the law was immune to a public referendum, and the state could proceed with closing schools.
And murdering small towns. Once the schools were gone, the little towns turned to dust. It was "efficient" to close the small-town schools—from the standpoint of the money spent on education—but the school was the heart of the small town, the absolute heart of it. Whether this was efficient or not depends on your point of view. From my standpoint, it was merely a reduction in service.
Were the small towns doomed from the beginning? I don’t know. If you can live further from where you work, how does that hurt small towns? If you can travel easier where you need to be, how would that hurt small towns? When we improve long-distance communication, how does that hurt a small town?
If you took government funding away from Atlanta and gave it to Memphis, what effect would that have? Small towns don’t have airports, generally, or harbors, or tourist attractions, or convention centers, or subway systems, and because they don’t have these things, they don’t get money for them. They have schools—or used to have—and post offices. But if, in the name of E-fish-NC, we eliminate those services, what chance does Lake Wobegon have?