Tree Pruners of Doom!

DISCLAIMER: This entry is NOT for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, skip it, and go here instead.

If anyone ever asked, I'd have to agree with them that I'm a "city" person. I grew up near Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA. I get uncomfortable in cities smaller than 100,000 people (except the five years I spent at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but you can't count college towns). When I was younger, I used to go fishing and hunt deer with my dad, but it's been years since I cleaned my shotgun, much less used it. That's why no one really knew what to expect from me when my inlaws invited Carrie and I up to Frankfort, OH for a chicken butchering. I think several of them - my wife included - thought I'd get freaked out by the experience.

First off, you have to understand my inlaws. Robin and Roy are what I'd call survivalists or hoarders (sp?). Roy has always vowed to be prepared for any type of catastrophe - war, weather, or economic in nature. Mom's music room is divided between her organ and several racks of canned vegetables and dry goods. Their garage is the same way - bottled water, sodas, canned and dry goods from the store, canned home-grown vegetables, several freezers of meat and frozen fruit, and bushels of produce. Roy looks for sales at the local grocery stores and then stocks up on whatever's on sale. He frequents local farmer's markets and auctions where he buys corn and squash in ten-bushel lots. He's always told us and the rest of his kids that he'll help us keep stocked up with food for our own houses in case of emergency. Frankly, after Katrina and the mess on the Gulf Coast, I'm starting to come around to where I think he's got the right idea. So when Robin and Roy told us they were going to buy a truckload of chickens and butcher them to put them away for the winter, Carrie and I figured it was a good idea. When my local Kroger has cut-up chicken on sale for $0.99/pound and we could get chickens for $0.75 each, you're talking about a savings of a couple of dollars per chicken. Add in the value of the time spent with family (and I've always said I could have done a hell of a lot worse when it came to inlaws), and it makes for a profitable opportunity.

My dad laughed at me when I told him what we were doing, and told me stories of how they used to catch a chicken, hold him down under a board, and pull his head off (I told you this entry wasn't for the squeamish). Then he told me how much it sucked to have to pluck feathers for hours to get them clean. That got me to wondering just how do you kill and clean a chicken? I got my answer at 10am on Saturday when they handed me the Tree Pruners of DOOM! That's right. Of all of the jobs they could have given me that involved working with dead chickens, I got to be the one do the killing. With tubs and sharp knives at the ready behind us, my wife's brother pulled the first chicken out of the back of his truck shell by its ankles, grabbed it by the neck to stretch it out, and held it there for me to cut its head off.

I'm sure you've all been told at one time or another that you were "running around like a chicken with its head cut off". I now know just how true that phrase is. After cutting the head off and dropping it in a trash can, Mike would throw the body 10, sometimes 15 feet away to let it bleed out before cleaning and dressing. Can I just tell you that those suckers hopped 3-4 feet in the air, and came bouncing right back at us most of the time? One chased my nephew across the campsite as if he were still alive. Pretty funny stuff if you don't stop to think about it too hard. In the end, I was the executioner (one of my brothers suggested I needed a black hood) for 48 poor chickens. My mom jokingly threatened to call PETA when she heard the story, but I'd say the tree pruner method got the job over quick. I won't venture to say it was painless, but it should have been quick. Once I'd cut the heads off, my brothers went to pulling the skin - feathers and all - off each one, and then handing them to Roy and the women to clean, dress, and cut each one in a process that probably would have rivaled Perdue for efficiency.

In the end, we came home with twelve chickens (48, split 4 ways; there were supposed to be more, but I think we're going to do another batch at Halloween). We also ended up with a carload of produce - 8 whole pineapples, another 5-6 cut-up pineapples in containers, squash, zucchini, a ten-pound box of bananas, bell peppers, hot peppers, banana peppers, home-grown tomatoes, a box of apples, and probably some other stuff I'm missing. I don't think we'll go hungry any time soon, and we'll get more servings of fruits and vegetable than we've had all summer. We've also decided to split a hog with one of Carrie's sisters (netting us something like 200 pounds of cured ham, sausage, bacon, and ham steaks), and we're talking about splitting a beef four ways.

It's a good thing we bought a new freezer...

Windfall Taxes for Oil Companies

Welcome back to another episode of "Search for Understanding". I'm Ted, an ordinary, middle-class white guy with very little formal training in politics or economics but a thirst for knowledge and a desire to keep up with what's happening in the world, even while admitting both privately and publicly that there's probably nothing I'll ever be able to do to change one damned bit of it. Today's topics are Capitalism and Democracy.

Not long ago, my good friend Freshboy blogged about an attempt to ban smoking in public establishments in the Washington, D.C. area. We got into an argument about the rights of American citizens and the ability of government to regulate their freedoms, where I realized I was no longer the do-gooder consitutionalist I had once been in high school. At the time of this argument, I wasn't ashamed to say that I thought the government's regulation of smoking was a good thing because I personally could care less for smoke and enjoy being able to walk into a public place without coming out smelling like an ash tray. I went so far as to say that if government ever threatened to further regulate bourbon, or poker, or Chick-Fil-A sandwiches - You know, something I care about - then maybe I'd worry about it, but until then they were welcome to regulate anything that didn't personally affect me. Even as I said it, there were alarms going off in the back of my mind and the old Ted was turning in his comfortable middle-class grace, but we left the debate unfinished, agreeing to disagree as we usually do.

Well, a few weeks ago, I heard a suggestion by Robert Reich - former Secretary of Labor under Clinton and regular commentator on the Marketplace Morning Report - that now might be a good time to reign in oil companies with a 'Windfall Tax'. Since his initial commentary, I've heard at least one congressman talk about the same idea. I'm no expert, but the way Reich justified this was in saying that the oil companies were reaping huge unexpected profits - proverbial windfalls - by charging Americans more than they had expected to spend for gasoline and heating oil. In order to recompense Americans for their unexpected expenses, Reich reasoned that the government should levy windfall taxes on oil companies and use the money to help Americans pay for those expenses. Now I'm no expert, but this suggestion sounds like one way of artificially controlling the country's economy by putting a price cap on one of the world's commodities, which goes against my understanding of the law of the invisible hand that controls markets. In a pure capitalist society, the law of supply & demand reigns supreme, and suppliers are going to sell product at the price that maximizes their profits. If demand drops off because the prices are too high, then the supplier usually has to drop their price to increase demand and profits. If prices remain elevated for a long time, then it usually pushes the demanders to seek other alternatives.

The U.S. is far from a pure capitalist society, despite what Cold War Communists and modern-day Islamic fundamentalists would have us believe. In a pure capitalist society, the main function of the government is to protect the people so the market can continue to function. In our case, the governments - local, state, and federal - spend large chunks of the taxes they raise to help the people live at a higher standard than they would were they left to their own devices. Still, with all that the government does for Americans, there's something that causes those alarm bells to ring in my head again when I think of government levying 'windfall taxes' on top of the normal corporate and personal income taxes they already get. That's like changing the rules in the middle of the game, isn't it?

Walmart has had a great decade of expansion; they've bullied their suppliers into selling to them at lower prices; and yet you don't hear any talk of 'Windfall Taxes' on their earnings.

How about America's defense industry? "Wow! No one expected a War on Terror this year, and you guys have sold so many tanks and made so much money that we're going to go ahead and take some of that off your hands."

Personally, I'd rather see more encouragement to pursue alternative fuels and technologies. I know the Bush administration championed the Energy Bill, which includes money for research and incentives for using agri-fuels, but we can always do more on all levels. Hybrid vehicles have been on the horizon for the last ten years or more, but they're still priced higher than gasoline-powered cars and not available in all areas. In my case, it makes more sense economically for me to drive my paid-for Jeep Grand Cherokee with its inefficient V8 engine than it does for me to switch to a car with better gas mileage. I average 50 miles a day during the week before switching to my wife's Impala for most of our weekend running around, so let's say 300 miles a week.

• @ $3/gallon for gas, in a Jeep that gets 15 mpg, I'm spending $60 a week or $240 a month on gasoline. At that rate, I'm spending another $200 a year on oil changes and maintenance.
• If I were to switch to a car that was twice as efficient, I'd still be spending $120 a month in fuel and close to the same amount in maintenance, but I'd have a $300+ car payment each month for the next five years.

I know there's some forumlas for carrying this example out to five- and ten-year cost-benefit analyses, but from my point of view, there's not much incentive to change.

Nevertheless before I get too far off my original train of the thought, I wonder what you - my few but faithful readers - think of this idea of 'Windfall Taxes'. Is it fair? Is it a good idea? Is it up to Uncle Sam to keep its people's heads above water in the first place? What do you think?