This past week I traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to
give a continuing education program to the South Dakota Bar Association. South Dakota lawyers are not required to have
continuing education, so those who attend are motivated by the need to provide
competent services to their clients, who are often entrepreneurs. These participants are deeply connected to
the reality of doing business in a world where competitive conditions create
the parameters of expected behavior.
They need to deliver value to clients who in turn deliver value to their
customers. It is a virtuous cycle.
Our journey to Sioux Falls was so enjoyable because of
encounters with people having these value commitments. We first took a small detour to visit my
sister and brother-in-law on their farm in Northwest Iowa. We traveled off the interstate highway and
the typical tourist pathways through rural America. In nearly every town, we
find a Casey’s gas station and convenience store run by cheery locals and
delivering the products that people need:
gasoline (at a fair price), clean restrooms, coffee, donuts, and other
snacks. I think the employees are cheery
because they like being part of a successful team. Isn’t it always better to work where people
are getting their needs met and happily pay the price?
Other signs of life are also evident in rural America. Churches were having socials and community
events. The schools had full parking
lots and signs with their activities for sports and music. Local civic clubs were having a fundraiser or
a social event around the holidays. As
Charles Murray will tell you in his book Coming
Apart (and Alexis de Tocqueville before him will agree), these are signs
of cultural prosperity, which have persisted over decades. Not even televisions, computers, and mass
entertainment have been able to extinguish them entirely.
My wife and I paused to imagine the early immigrants to
these regions, coming from Scandinavia, Holland, or Germany and bringing their
customs from the Old Country along with a willingness to work and to build
something together. They formed families
and worked together on farms, which are dotted with their names with “and son”
often added as a monument to their legacy of hard work and devotion to growing
things from the earth. Livestock is a
big part of the farm ecosystem here, as it permits greater economic rewards
through transforming crops into a value-added product (i.e., meat) using
home-grown “factories” that consist of cows, sows, ewes, or hens (turkeys and
chickens). The wealth these folks are
able to build (and in many cases, it is substantial), was grown little by
little, usually with ma, pa, and the young-uns working together.
And as we know, Nature can be unforgiving. It does not notice your race, your people and
connections, or whether you have “privilege”.
It delivers sun, warmth, wind, rain, hail, snow, and freezing cold
equally to everyone. And everyone has to
rise to the challenge. I admire these
people and their accomplishments. It
must have taken a lot of courage to leave the old country and strike out in
something new. But the old country was
probably not so great for them. This one
worked out much better. Liberty produces
such wonders. Once you see the track
record of Liberty and what it produces, it is hard to imagine wanting anything
else.
After enjoying a great meal made by my sister (who inherited
cooking genes from my mother, who at 91 still dazzles us with her skills) and admiring
their beautiful herd of cattle (a product of 40-plus years of excellence), we journeyed on to Sioux Falls, reaching the
city just after dark. For those fans of “It’s
a Wonderful Life”, I think of Sioux Falls as another version of Bedford
Falls. It is architecturally fascinating
and at Christmas time the lights add a warm ambiance to a wintery environment.
Before dinner at our favorite spot (Minerva’s, which I
highly recommend), we shopped some of the downtown stores that were open late
on Thursday night for Christmas shoppers. Mrs. Murphy’s Irish Gift Store on
Phillips Street is run by expatriates (well, Mrs. Murphy is actually English,
but we’ll keep that a secret). They focus
on imported goods from their mother country.
I loved everything there and managed to acquire a very fashionable
hand-made Irish tweed hat as well as other gift items. The Murphys exemplify innovation and
entrepreneurial spirit in offering gifts that they select to honor the old ways
of creativity and craftsmanship. If you
want your Christmas presents to come from a craftsman’s hands, not merely from
some factory, call them. They offer free
shipping, too.
But entrepreneurial challenges do not make for an easy life.
The Murphys were working late to serve their customers, but the Swedish gift shop
down the street was going out of business. Not everyone who dares to offer
ethnic-oriented goods will have the world beating a path to their door. But through persistence and engagement, connecting
personally with the needs of their customers and bringing something new to the
marketplace, the Murphys seem to be doing just fine. God bless them and help them to prosper
(wait- isn’t there an Irish blessing for that – a plaque for sale, perhaps!?!). And what’s not to love about hand-made Irish
hats, socks, sweaters, porcelain, and such things in a mass-produced world! What a country that embraces diversity and
allows it to thrive in the marketplace!
When the world is losing its bearings, political leaders are
talking nonsense, and young people are hoodwinked into protesting without
giving much thought to the parameters of what they find to be unjust, it is a
relief to find a haven where people simply structure their affairs based on the
realities of meeting demands through honest trade. Political classes may pander to the interests
of one group of citizens against another, corrupted by money contributed by
special interests, but these folks seem to focus on what matters to their
customers, which ultimately inures to the benefit of all. Have you ever noticed
that where government is most active in redistributing, the claims of injustice
are loudest, but where government is getting out of the way and letting people
trade, they seem most happy and contented?
Perhaps there are lessons to be learned here.
As it turns out, free markets and property rights work
pretty well when we give them a chance.
I wish that the rest of America could witness these truths and the
beauty they can produce. How about
booking a vacation (or a field trip) to rural America?
EAM
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