Wednesday October 20, 2021
I am reading Fiona Hill’s book “There Is Nothing For You Here.”
The title of which comes from her father’s plea for her about living in coal country in northern England.
He wanted her to get out if she could. However, you have to understand the extreme poverty there. She was so poor that when she got a full scholarship to a school she couldn’t go because her parents could not afford to buy her a school uniform. That’s poor.
What Hill points out is that where she came from is similar to the Rust Belt in the U.S. and rural Russia. When you are that poor there is no “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” because there are no bootstraps. What Thatcher and Reagan and Yeltsin in Russia did not understand was this basic fact. FDR did. That’s why rural electrification of the U.S. had to be done by the government. Actually, one could make the case that Roosevelt didn’t get it so much as his Secretary of Labor Perkins did, and his wife Eleanor who went out and visited those poor places.
We now face a similar problem to what FDR faced – infrastructure. Not roads and bridges as much as cell phone service and wi-fi. If you don’t have those services in you area you are in a communication desert. Who is going to provide those services to rural America? The only real solution is for the government to step in and do it. You can jump up and down and yell “Socialism” if you like but I’ve noticed those who are doing the yelling are also well off and usually from the help of their government.
Yup, we just had a chance to have super broad band here by our city, using Fed money, but of course, the majority city commissioners voted it down. One of the progressives said. ‘so, we’re just not going to do anything, are we…’
I want to read that book! I have a tremendous respect for that woman.