Dog In a Manger

I remember three preachers at Elsdon, the lady you mentioned, her predecessor Fred Tozer, and her successor Alan Anderson. Rev. Tozer was a kindly laid back preacher and everybody liked him. Rev. Schact was uptight and unpopular. Rev. Anderson was fresh out of college. The old people thought that he was too young to be a preacher and never gave him a chance. The young people liked him, probably because he wasn't a whole lot older than we were and seemed to understand our problems.

I guess I didn't make my "dog in a manger" story very clear. Let's try again: My paper mill colleagues were not the dogs, they were the cattle trying to eat out of the manger. The dogs were the Cheboyganites who didn't work at the mill and resented that we made more money than they did. The reason they were the dogs was that many of them had the same chance to hire in when we did, but declined to do so for one reason or another. They didn't want to work there, or organize unions of their own, they seemed content to work for low wages and thought there was something wrong with us because we weren't. This is kind of hard to understand, but it makes a little more sense when you consider it from the perspective of the "Who do you think you are?" syndrome. Most of these people's families had lived in Cheboygan for several generations. They lived next door to each other, went to school together, and married each other's sisters. There was kind of a social hierarchy based on family names, some families were more highly esteemed than others. Money had something to do with it, but it was more a matter of who you were than it was about how much money you had. I guess they expected everybody to "stay in their place", or something like that. I remember one guy who was a college educated entomologist ( an expert on insects.) He quit his job at a large Christmas tree farm and became an hourly worker at the mill because their entry level jobs paid more than he was ever likely to make in his chosen field, at least in this town. Now if he had stayed at the tree farm and complained all his life that the paper mill workers made more money than he did, he would have been a dog in a manger.

There is a popular myth that says, the harder you work, the more money you will make. If that were true, the guy who shovels coal down in the mine would make more money than the CEO of the mining company. Truth is, you are not paid for how hard you work, you are paid for the value you contribute to your employer's profits, and also how hard it would be to replace you if you quit. I'm sure the people in Red China, on average, work harder than we do, but they were doing that for centuries and it never got them anywhere. The main reason their condition improved is they came in out of the rice paddies and went to work making stuff that Americans wanted to buy. They wouldn't have had this opportunity if American businessmen hadn't contracted with the Chinese government to build factories and start businesses.

Although I am no fan of Chinese Communism, I don't blame any of the people involved in all this for doing what's in their own best financial interest. When I talk about the money they got from us, I don't mean Chinese money, I mean U.S. dollars. When our government borrows money from the Chinese government, it's denominated in dollars, not yuan or whatever it is they call their money. Back in the days of the gold standard, trade deficits were made up by transferring gold from one country to another, at least on paper. I'm not sure how they handle it nowadays, maybe I'll look it up this weekend. One way or another, though, China has way more of our money than we have of theirs, and I'm looking for some way to repatriate some of those U.S. dollars. Maybe we shouldn't be using our dollars to buy stuff from China in the first place, maybe we should pay them in scrip or something. Let me think about that and I'll get back to you.