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I know, it seems like it can’t possibly only have _JUST_ wrapped up Q2, and yet.
Meanwhile, in reading, I am learning a ton! I feel like we need to revisit how we talk about political parties. We act like it is somehow weird, maybe even wrong when a party is made up of a slice of elite looking for fairly technical changes in how the government treats them plus a larger mass of voters who want something very, very different. You know: some of the party is there for the tax cuts, and the rest of the party is there for religious reasons. That kind of thing. But I’m staring at pages about how the tariffs interacted with “bonded warehouses”, and thinking, you know, I don’t think that’s weird. It hadn’t exactly occurred to me to think very hard about what the antebellum non-slaver parties cared about. I _knew_ they didn’t want to get involved in abolition (which is why I call them non-slavers, rather than anti-slavery). I _knew_ that they cared about _something_, but the active group of people that might have been their voters really cared about abolition instead, and more than one party collapsed as a result, until finally the South shot first and that clarified things for a time.
I’m starting to think that what they cared about might have been tariffs? Talk about not covering yourself in glory. No wonder they don’t want to talk about it.
Anyway. If you are a properly left-wing author who un-ironically quotes Marx, and you are talking about the politics of this crowd, really interesting paragraphs happen.
Next up: bonded warehouses being used for internally produced and sold domestic commodities like tobacco, whisky, etc. This makes perfect sense to me. If you are taxing a producer and they have not yet sold it, you can put the producer completely out of business. But there was no way at that point in time to tax at the time the consumer bought it. Letting producers sell their wares until it was fairly close to when they could sell it was a huge relief.
“To sustain the Union forces, Congress imposed a tax on whiskey in 1862 … Distillers pressured politicians for relief, and Congress obliged in 1866, granting warehousemen the right to store whiskey barrels under bond”
“The warehousing system incensed protectionists because they felt it undercut the rationale for tariffs. (These men were not buying that bonded warehouses gave succor to all Americans.) They adduced that, no matter how high tariffs climbed, imports would stream in, harbored in bonded warehouses, and that, consequently, merchants — mainly foreigners, “commercial parasites” — could hedge the political and economic vagaries of the national market. [Me: yeah, she really said national market, not international markets.] Merchants could mitigate an unfriendly tariff schedule by waiting it out, for rates were constantly changing. They could dodge a financial panic by shipping goods back to Europe, “rather than pay the duty on them or incur the risk of not being able to sell them,” as some did in 1857. If their time elapsed (they were granted up to three years of storage), they could withdraw their goods and sell them, capitalizing on the respite from customs duties. [If you can figure out what she means by capitalizing on the respite … please explain in a comment or email to me, because I cannot make any sense out of it. Happy to supply more context if you need it.] The protectionists’ barbs were warranted. [!!!] “The figures themselves” offered “eloquent” proof. In 1881, $9.5 million worth of goods were removed from bonded warehouses for re-export, versus $149 million for import — that is, to be dumped on the market.”
It’s a real puzzler. I mean, the tariffs had a range on them, but they were always high. And like sales tax, tariffs on a broad range of goods are incredibly regressive. Why did we do them? Well, the government needs to have money to operate, and you get the money from the people who have the money in a context where you can monitor it. The less labor-intensive tax collection is, the better it is. So, in the second half of the 19th century, tariffs were it. But that changed in the 20th century, of course.
I’m mostly weirded out by the use of the verb “dump”. That’s got a lot of present-day baggage, and I’m unconvinced that it was used that way in that era, which raises a lot of questions.
Moving on!
Farmers (and temperance advocates) wanting public storage of excess grain, with future value attributions, because that’s what happened with the whisky. Shades of politics around the strategic petroleum reserve today! Obviously, if you let someone put something currently worth 50cents a gallon in a warehouse and give them a receipt for $3 a gallon, its future price after aging when it is taken out for sale and when the duties would be collected, there is going to be abundant opportunities for shenanigans. HOWEVER, Orenstein goes straight to 1943 (yes, not 1843, but 1943) and tells a tale of someone who skipped entirely over the putting it into the warehouse type shenanigans and goes to fake bills. I thought earlier in the book that Orenstein used a poor analogy, when she should have been talking about earlier issues with bills; here it is again!
From Jake the Barber in 1943 to another mention of Salad Oil with the field warehousing scandal in the earlier footnote (see? She can see the relationship. These are not warehousing scandals; these are financial fraud scandals, closer to Bernie Madoff than warehousing fraud.). She uses 1940s and 1960s era scandals to intro this:
“Nonetheless, such transgressions fed a growing anxiety about warehousing”
OK, so, you cannot use a 1940s or 1960s era scandal to explain anxiety about warehousing in the 19th centure. You. Cannot. You have to use examples of the time, of which she supplies exactly none. NONE AT ALL. Entirely nothing. *sigh*
The actual anxiety about warehousing had a lot more to do with the fact that some industrial sectors were able to transfer their tax burden to closer to when they could sell the taxable item, compared to other industrial sectors, which had to bear that tax burden long before they could sell the taxable item. That’s it. That’s the whole story. This is a tax administration issue that was difficult to handle, and improved in a piecemeal, incremental way, and everyone who had not yet gotten their version of the problem solved was upset about it. Also, this is an era in which farmers who had been able to produce grain in the East were no longer able to compete with plains farmers, who were ramping up to change the entire planet with their oceans of grain, and all of that arises not even a tiny bit.
I really want to dig into the weird politics of innovative mill owners in the north aligning (in a super complicated and deeply problematic way) with temperance advocates, suffragists and abolitionists against working men in the North and planters (slavers before the war, and all-but-slavers after) in the South. It’s raging right below the surface of this book, but staying below the surface.
Anyway.
The balance of the anxiety paragraph includes “this unease was directed foremost at bonded warehouses … By the even of World War II, the security of the warehousing system was a source of insecurity. The wariness stemmed not only from the sense that bonded warehouses seemed to entice thieves and to incite invasions of imports. It also suggested that they threatened to expose cracks in the foundations of capitalism. The scariness of the second charge made the refutation of the first all the more pressing. For bonded warehousemen and their friends in government, the soundest response had long been to buttress the buildings themselves.”
Why is this here? She jumps _forward_ to Jake and Tino, which are _financial_ shenanigans, that NO AMOUNT of physical plant changes could possibly fix. Jake and Tino created fraudulent paperwork. They were engaged in a form of financial fraud (creating fraudulent bills). But it is used as a transition to go back to the 19th century, and talk about the physical plant.
Incoherent rhetorical structure. Not sure why it happened, because the next dense, long paragraph is a fucking _gem_ and I mean that with total sincerity. It describes how we got the built environment of ports before containerization. Storage on the waterfront meant less activity in the streets of the rest of the city (also! Less work for teamsters! Cost reduction but also decreases the number of workers, who were scarce in general, and when there was a crash, an idle workforce that could wreak havoc.), and required anyone stealing to go quite a ways before they could fence what they stole. Nice description of the influence of insurance companies in terms of getting people to build in fire resistant ways, and how construction techniques developed for mills spread to docks and warehouses.
Meanwhile, in reading, I am learning a ton! I feel like we need to revisit how we talk about political parties. We act like it is somehow weird, maybe even wrong when a party is made up of a slice of elite looking for fairly technical changes in how the government treats them plus a larger mass of voters who want something very, very different. You know: some of the party is there for the tax cuts, and the rest of the party is there for religious reasons. That kind of thing. But I’m staring at pages about how the tariffs interacted with “bonded warehouses”, and thinking, you know, I don’t think that’s weird. It hadn’t exactly occurred to me to think very hard about what the antebellum non-slaver parties cared about. I _knew_ they didn’t want to get involved in abolition (which is why I call them non-slavers, rather than anti-slavery). I _knew_ that they cared about _something_, but the active group of people that might have been their voters really cared about abolition instead, and more than one party collapsed as a result, until finally the South shot first and that clarified things for a time.
I’m starting to think that what they cared about might have been tariffs? Talk about not covering yourself in glory. No wonder they don’t want to talk about it.
Anyway. If you are a properly left-wing author who un-ironically quotes Marx, and you are talking about the politics of this crowd, really interesting paragraphs happen.
Next up: bonded warehouses being used for internally produced and sold domestic commodities like tobacco, whisky, etc. This makes perfect sense to me. If you are taxing a producer and they have not yet sold it, you can put the producer completely out of business. But there was no way at that point in time to tax at the time the consumer bought it. Letting producers sell their wares until it was fairly close to when they could sell it was a huge relief.
“To sustain the Union forces, Congress imposed a tax on whiskey in 1862 … Distillers pressured politicians for relief, and Congress obliged in 1866, granting warehousemen the right to store whiskey barrels under bond”
“The warehousing system incensed protectionists because they felt it undercut the rationale for tariffs. (These men were not buying that bonded warehouses gave succor to all Americans.) They adduced that, no matter how high tariffs climbed, imports would stream in, harbored in bonded warehouses, and that, consequently, merchants — mainly foreigners, “commercial parasites” — could hedge the political and economic vagaries of the national market. [Me: yeah, she really said national market, not international markets.] Merchants could mitigate an unfriendly tariff schedule by waiting it out, for rates were constantly changing. They could dodge a financial panic by shipping goods back to Europe, “rather than pay the duty on them or incur the risk of not being able to sell them,” as some did in 1857. If their time elapsed (they were granted up to three years of storage), they could withdraw their goods and sell them, capitalizing on the respite from customs duties. [If you can figure out what she means by capitalizing on the respite … please explain in a comment or email to me, because I cannot make any sense out of it. Happy to supply more context if you need it.] The protectionists’ barbs were warranted. [!!!] “The figures themselves” offered “eloquent” proof. In 1881, $9.5 million worth of goods were removed from bonded warehouses for re-export, versus $149 million for import — that is, to be dumped on the market.”
It’s a real puzzler. I mean, the tariffs had a range on them, but they were always high. And like sales tax, tariffs on a broad range of goods are incredibly regressive. Why did we do them? Well, the government needs to have money to operate, and you get the money from the people who have the money in a context where you can monitor it. The less labor-intensive tax collection is, the better it is. So, in the second half of the 19th century, tariffs were it. But that changed in the 20th century, of course.
I’m mostly weirded out by the use of the verb “dump”. That’s got a lot of present-day baggage, and I’m unconvinced that it was used that way in that era, which raises a lot of questions.
Moving on!
Farmers (and temperance advocates) wanting public storage of excess grain, with future value attributions, because that’s what happened with the whisky. Shades of politics around the strategic petroleum reserve today! Obviously, if you let someone put something currently worth 50cents a gallon in a warehouse and give them a receipt for $3 a gallon, its future price after aging when it is taken out for sale and when the duties would be collected, there is going to be abundant opportunities for shenanigans. HOWEVER, Orenstein goes straight to 1943 (yes, not 1843, but 1943) and tells a tale of someone who skipped entirely over the putting it into the warehouse type shenanigans and goes to fake bills. I thought earlier in the book that Orenstein used a poor analogy, when she should have been talking about earlier issues with bills; here it is again!
From Jake the Barber in 1943 to another mention of Salad Oil with the field warehousing scandal in the earlier footnote (see? She can see the relationship. These are not warehousing scandals; these are financial fraud scandals, closer to Bernie Madoff than warehousing fraud.). She uses 1940s and 1960s era scandals to intro this:
“Nonetheless, such transgressions fed a growing anxiety about warehousing”
OK, so, you cannot use a 1940s or 1960s era scandal to explain anxiety about warehousing in the 19th centure. You. Cannot. You have to use examples of the time, of which she supplies exactly none. NONE AT ALL. Entirely nothing. *sigh*
The actual anxiety about warehousing had a lot more to do with the fact that some industrial sectors were able to transfer their tax burden to closer to when they could sell the taxable item, compared to other industrial sectors, which had to bear that tax burden long before they could sell the taxable item. That’s it. That’s the whole story. This is a tax administration issue that was difficult to handle, and improved in a piecemeal, incremental way, and everyone who had not yet gotten their version of the problem solved was upset about it. Also, this is an era in which farmers who had been able to produce grain in the East were no longer able to compete with plains farmers, who were ramping up to change the entire planet with their oceans of grain, and all of that arises not even a tiny bit.
I really want to dig into the weird politics of innovative mill owners in the north aligning (in a super complicated and deeply problematic way) with temperance advocates, suffragists and abolitionists against working men in the North and planters (slavers before the war, and all-but-slavers after) in the South. It’s raging right below the surface of this book, but staying below the surface.
Anyway.
The balance of the anxiety paragraph includes “this unease was directed foremost at bonded warehouses … By the even of World War II, the security of the warehousing system was a source of insecurity. The wariness stemmed not only from the sense that bonded warehouses seemed to entice thieves and to incite invasions of imports. It also suggested that they threatened to expose cracks in the foundations of capitalism. The scariness of the second charge made the refutation of the first all the more pressing. For bonded warehousemen and their friends in government, the soundest response had long been to buttress the buildings themselves.”
Why is this here? She jumps _forward_ to Jake and Tino, which are _financial_ shenanigans, that NO AMOUNT of physical plant changes could possibly fix. Jake and Tino created fraudulent paperwork. They were engaged in a form of financial fraud (creating fraudulent bills). But it is used as a transition to go back to the 19th century, and talk about the physical plant.
Incoherent rhetorical structure. Not sure why it happened, because the next dense, long paragraph is a fucking _gem_ and I mean that with total sincerity. It describes how we got the built environment of ports before containerization. Storage on the waterfront meant less activity in the streets of the rest of the city (also! Less work for teamsters! Cost reduction but also decreases the number of workers, who were scarce in general, and when there was a crash, an idle workforce that could wreak havoc.), and required anyone stealing to go quite a ways before they could fence what they stole. Nice description of the influence of insurance companies in terms of getting people to build in fire resistant ways, and how construction techniques developed for mills spread to docks and warehouses.