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Often it appears that the vast panoply of think tanks, centers and institutes in this great republic has examined every issue and produced an answer to every question. Hardly a day goes by that I don't read of some new study or survey, covering everything from anticipated world-wide silver production to the effects of airborne pies on Microsoft products.
But all this knowledge is not as comprehensive as it appears at first glance. Issues appear up all the time, and when I look for some scholarly research, I might as well go walk the dog for all the good it does me.
For instance, it is obvious that no one has studied the Lewinsky Tolerance Factor. Mine extends to about one sentence, perhaps a paragraph on a slow day. I have met people who can handle a full page, though no more than once a week.
Yet I can't turn on the tube without seeing her. The most recent Newsweek at hand devoted an acre or two.
Either Bill Clinton perjured himself and encouraged her to lie under oath, or he didn't. Everything else is speculation, and I can do that all on my own without any help from Newsweek or Nightline.
If the major-league media outlets had only bothered to ascertain the Lewinsky Tolerance Factor before launching this crusade, we might have been spared this onslaught.
Another topic which should have been researched, but hasn't been, is the Minimum Rancher Base.
Like many rural residents, I prefer cattle to humanity in the countryside, and ranchers are the keepers of the kine. I freely grant that cows leave plops in trails, overgraze meadows and demolish riparian habitat. But they don't drive sport-utility vehicles, demand that their roads be plowed instantly after every blizzard, or complain about woodpiles and clotheslines on neighbors' property. Life often offers us only a choice of evils, and cattle are the lesser.
But ranchers are under all kinds of pressure to
subdivide, and one once explained to me that ranch
enterprises are far from self-sufficient. We need
ranching neighbors so we can help each other out at
branding and roundups, to borrow parts for machinery,
he pointed out. And our town has to have feed and
implement dealers, and a sale barn nearby is almost a
necessity.
So ranching might continue if there were a dozen ranches, but falter if it fell to eleven?
Something like that,
he agreed. I don't know
what the precise number is, though. I just know that there
would be a point that if somebody sold out, the rest of us
couldn't stay in business.
Certainly the beef industry, with the resources to take on Oprah Winfrey, would have conducted exhaustive studies to establish the Minimum Rancher Base.
But I couldn't find any such data, and a couple of years ago, when I ran into Reeves Brown, then the director of the Colorado Cattlemen's Association, I asked him about this.
I'm sure there is that point where the infrastructure
to support ranching just collapses because there just
aren't enough ranchers to maintain it,
he said, but
no, I don't know of any research to find out where that
point would be.
This information would be more than useful for rural counties attempting to make land-use decisions -- they'd know the limit on how many rural subdivisions they could approve before there wasn't any more rural.
A related study, also much needed, concerns towns and how much growth they can accommodate before losing control of their own destiny.
During the depressed 1980s, Salida didn't have much business, but its major institutions -- banks, radio station, newspaper, retailers, hospital, natural gas utility -- were under local ownership.
As the area grows, so does the interest of the big guys in acquiring stuff here. We could end up in the sorry condition of Denver, where just about everything is a subsidiary or branch of some outfit headquartered elsewhere.
There must be a pivot-point in this process. If you're under a certain size, then mainstream acquisitive American capitalism has no interest in your operations, because better returns are available elsewhere. But if you exceed that size, then real money can be made in your town, and the merger mongers, acquisition specialists and franchise hustlers commence to invade.
However, again I find no research along this line. That is, no published research. You know that McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Columbia Health, Holiday Inns and the like all must have detailed analyses concerning how big a community must grow in order to be worthy of an invasion.
But they don't share those studies with us, and again,
such information would enable local governments to make
better decisions: If we approve Annexation A, we'll get
a Burger King, but with Annexation B, the hospital will get
bought out. So I'm going with A.
So, if there are any think tanks out there looking for projects to justify their existence, let them get to work on Lewinsky Tolerance, Minimum Sustainable Ranch Level and the Loss-of-Local-Control Pivot Point.
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