Email: Oil and culture

Sean, 

My wife’s cousin builds oil rigs out in north Texas and Oklahoma. He’s a millionaire, has 40 employees, and never went to college. I’m pretty sure he would rather gnaw off his own leg than vote for a Democrat. I think oil causes these cultural shifts because it takes people from rags to riches without any help from the government or politicians. This is different from rich lawyers and bankers, who need the legal system to work a certain way in order to make them rich. What oil guys want isn’t for politicians to buy them anything, because they buy everything they want with oil. What they want is to be left alone so they can pull more oil out of the ground and buy themselves vacation homes and fishing boats. I think it doesn’t matter who you are, if you strike oil, you figure out pretty fast that the greens are your worst enemy and the best thing any politician can to do help is just get the heck out of your way. These guys also see first-hand that the motive force in this country isn’t the President or Congress; it’s them. They go, and the world goes. They stop, and the world stops. They see themselves as more important and more powerful than the government. How do you make someone like that a client?But they wouldn’t want the oilman anyway. The biggest threat to a clientele system is people who can exist without them.

Our definition of freedom is as outdated as the Industrial Revolution. It is more useful to think of freedom in the financial context than any other context. What is the enemy to financial freedom? Debt but mostly ignorance. Your wife’s cousin may not be able to read the fancy books in universities, but he will be able to read a financial statement. The clientele system has one thing in common with every faction, it relies on financial illiteracy. If you know how to generate your own money, you cannot be colonized.

I’ve noticed when people start making money, they like it and want to keep making money. I expect the FRACKING of oil in South Texas to convert that region politically.

I’ve noticed the two American parties have very different views on the concept of making money and its morality. When I look at the map and see certain parties switch states over the course of hundreds of years, I can only think that economically ascendant states go to one party and economically stagnant states go to another party. This is simplifying things, of course.