Bigger isn’t better

Little by little, the fabric that holds our cherished rural communities together is unraveling.

As implements grow bigger, so too do farms. And farm families proportionately shrink. But it’s not just movement toward mega-farms that’s bringing us down. Similar trends plague other local businesses.

As local businesspeople look to turn essential operations over to the next generation, what they find is that the next generation has, for the most part, left — or, at least, the money it could have used to buy into the businesses has departed.

Stung by bad deals in the past, moneyed residents who used to invest locally now focus on the markets, not Main Street. Return is greater. Risk is less. And investors don’t have to worry about whether up-and-comers they’re investing in have skills and drive to succeed.

Even if a business gets started, it’s quickly buried in a swamp of regulations and demands imposed by government and other businesses they deal with.

Years ago, a typical resident could serve as bookkeeper and relatively easily figure out how much tax to take out of employees’ checks. Now, virtually every local business depends on costly software or outsourced payroll services to do what an individual hired from the local job pool used to calculate for them. And then they have to fork it over to the government by electronic transfer no later than 9 p.m. on payday.

Regulation and desire have led to massive outsourcing of what local businesses used to do on their own. But in outsourcing tasks, businesses inadvertently may have outsourced their futures.

Time was a person starting a business would buy tools and equipment that would last a lifetime. Now, it’s all software, intentionally made obsolete every few months so that it must be repurchased just to keep the business alive.

Private enterprise isn’t alone in attempting to cope with such burdens. Just this week we noticed what we thought might be an error in a municipal financial report being published as a legal notice. Sure enough, it was wrong. But the municipal worker involved had to call a software vendor to solve the problem and admitted afterward that she really didn’t understand where most of the numbers in the report came from. Her computer just spits them out. And occasionally the spit drips a bit, making it take that much longer to do a task that used to be a lot more straightforward.

Increasingly, local jobs aren’t positions that fulfill the American dream of being able to run your own business and create and fulfill your own destiny. Most local jobs are merely cogs in giant corporate machines. The people in charge aren’t local. In most cases, they haven’t even stepped foot in the community in which their business is located, and they couldn’t care less how it’s doing as long as the local branch remains profitable or can be gutted and sold off to make more money.

As we approach high school graduation, it’s no wonder so many of our best and brightest find greener pastures anywhere but home. It’s not that college education has made them fail to appreciate small-town life. It’s that small-town life simply isn’t what it used to be.

Meanwhile, rural areas become dumping grounds for such people as so-called gypsy cops, trying to escape wrongdoing in other communities and start fresh with more wrongdoing in another small town.

Congressman Derrick Schmidt is to be congratulated for being among the few in Congress who seem to care about such issues by attempting to bolster laws requiring government employers to disclose why employees leave. That way, other places aren’t stuck hiring bad apples whose worms and bruises are too easily hidden by communities eager merely to see them leave.

But more is needed. Businesses and even governments, which become ever more expensive because of the big-city mandates imposed on them, need relief — not just lower taxes but lessened demand and maybe even a bit of built-in advantage to level the playing field against mega-corporations and overly demanding bureaucrats.

We accept the notion that little schools should have to play big schools in sports, but when the game no longer is a game but has become a question of economic survival, the tiniest must compete head-on with the mightiest.

While we in rural areas still have enough political clout, thanks in no small part to the way the Electoral College is structured, we need to stop being distracted by hot-button issues that address largely non-existent problems and start insisting on answers to the existential questions facing rural America.

Otherwise, within a few generations, our descendants won’t have hometowns to return to. They’ll be ghost towns, haunted by the dying spirit of the American dream.

— ERIC MEYER