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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
Governance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast joelkdouglas.substack.com Language: en Genres: Government, Philosophy, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Both Fly
Monday, 9 February, 2026
Blue sky, golden grass, tall sagebrush, mountains capped white behind. Chores done. Coffee in the sun room. He looks out across the south pasture. The tips of the tall sage quiver. The wind picks up the flags along the fence line, tugging at the screw lock chain links that hold them to the wire. The Stars and Stripes is up all the time, frayed at the edge. And the other. It’s been up since the election. Inside, a catalog open on the table. Maybe he’ll buy a new bull this year. He needs new genes. The best bulls make small calves that grow fast. Easy on the heifers, good for the pocketbook.Lot 42 has a two-year-old Simmental out of a high-altitude herd near Meeteetse. Good EPDs. Clean trich test. Should sire calves with a good frame and some thickness through the rib.He could go Angus. Tried and true. Good growth, good marbling, the sale barn in Billings knows what to do with a black calf. They’re nervous bulls, though. 2200-lbs and twitchy. His wife likes the Herefords. Red body, white face. She’s the one who has to move them when he’s at work in town, and Herefords are calm. She has made this point before, and she is not wrong.But the Simmental interests him. Supposed to be a good high-altitude cross. He’s never tried Simmental.He takes a sip of coffee. He’ll figure out the bulls later. The books come first.He closes the catalog and pulls the receipts toward him. The manila folder and the stack of printouts from the ranch supply account. He does the books every winter. Coffee, calculator, the table clear of everything except the numbers.He starts with what he knows. What he earned. What he spent. What the government says he owes and what it says it owes him. He’s not fast, but he’s careful. He keeps everything. His wife would tell you he keeps too much. But the numbers should tell a story that makes sense, and every year they do, more or less, and he files the return and writes the check or waits for the refund and keeps up with the work.This year, the numbers don’t.Not the income side. That’s fine. The calves sold. The cattle market was decent. He’s not complaining about what came in.It’s what went out that puzzles him.Act I. The BooksHe pulls the ranch supply printout and starts down the column. Fencing wire. He bought forty rolls in April, just like every spring. Last year, it was eighty-two dollars a roll. This year, one hundred and twelve. He looks at the number again. More than a hundred dollars for a roll of barbed wire.He writes it down. Moves on.The wheat didn't do much this year. It never does much. But he keeps the pivot running on the acres along the creek because his father did, and some years it pays for itself.Fertilizer. He spreads it on the hay meadows every spring. It’s not optional. You either feed the ground or the ground doesn’t feed the cattle. Last year, he paid four-eighteen a ton. This year, six-oh-five. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t ask. He just paid it because it was May and the hay meadows need it.Diesel. Up. Not as bad as the wire, but up. The bulk tank at the co-op, the same co-op his father used, the price on the board was higher every time he filled.Cake. Protein supplement for the cows in winter. Soybean meal and corn and molasses pressed into blocks or poured into troughs. The soybean price is tangled in something he doesn’t follow, something about China buying from Brazil now. He doesn’t get it. If there are more soybeans here, shouldn’t the price go down? And the cake is up twelve percent. The cows don’t eat less because Washington has some trade policy thing going on.Salt and mineral. Up, but not much. Vet supplies. Up. The squeeze chute he’d been pricing, the old one is twenty years old and the headgate sticks. The base model went from eighty-five to ninety-eight hundred between March and September. The better ones double that. He didn’t buy it. He’ll fix the headgate again.He adds the column. Adds it again. He’s careful. The number is right. He just doesn’t like it.He moves on.The calves brought good money. Nearly four ten a hundredweight, last year they only brought three twenty. The expenses ate the money the calves brought. Not all of it. He’s not broke. But wire is one-twelve, and the hydraulic chute is twenty grand. The space between what came in and what went out, where the bull purchase is possible, where a good squeeze chute is possible…the margin got thinner. And he doesn’t know why. If live weight cattle prices are near record highs, and he’s a cattle rancher, his margins should be good. That’s not true. He knows why. Everything cost more. He just doesn’t know why everything cost more.He’s heard the word tariff. He’s not sure how it connects to fencing wire in Wyoming. The president says the tariffs are on China, on Europe, on countries that have been ripping America off for decades. That sounds right to him. He voted for the man, and he’d vote for him again, and he’s not the kind to second-guess a thing just because it costs him. Everything worth doing costs something.But he’s looking at the numbers. One-hundred-twelve dollars for a roll of wire that was eighty-two dollars a year ago. He didn’t buy the wire from China. He bought it at the ranch supply in town. Same place he always buys it. Same wire. Same clerk. Different price.He pulls the form toward him.He knows taxes. He’s paid them his whole life. Income tax, line by line. Property tax on the ranch. Self-employment tax, which he doesn’t love but understands. Sales tax on everything he buys in town. These are visible. They have names. They have lines on the form. He can argue about them if he wants to. He can vote for people who promise to lower them. He knows what he pays and who he pays it to.He looks at the form. There should be a line for what he paid this year that he didn’t pay last year. The wire. The fertilizer. The diesel. The cake. Somewhere between the ranch supply store and the US Treasury, someone added a cost to everything he buys, and he’d like to know where to put it.There is no line.He looks again. Schedule F. Farm income and expenses. He can deduct the wire and the fertilizer as business expenses, sure. He always does. But that’s not what he’s looking for. He’s looking for the tariff tax. The one built into the price of the wire. The one that made one-twelve out of eighty-two for the wire.It isn’t there. There is no line. No box. No schedule. He paid it. He has the receipt, but according to the United States government, the tax does not exist.The president says foreign countries are paying. The rancher doesn’t know what schools say. He knows what the ranch supply store says. The receipt is in his hand.He suspects he paid the taxes and not some merchant in China. If someone in China paid it, why are all his expenses up so much? He could write a letter. To the IRS. To his congressman. To the president. He could ask: if I didn’t pay this tax, who did? And if I did pay it, where do I file for the refund?He won’t write the letter. He knows what would happen. The same thing that happens when he calls the Forest Service about his grazing allotment or the BLM about the lease. Nothing. A recording. A form letter. Silence.He shipped seventy-eight steer calves in October. Around six weight and slick. They had had good feed. The check was north of one hundred and ninety thousand. It was yellow. He left it on the dashboard of the truck for three days before he could get to the bank. For someone who lived in town, it was a lot of money. A winning lottery ticket, enough to buy a life. But the ranch is not a savings account; the ranch is a mouth.He paid the bank. He paid for the diesel and the fertilizer. Then he paid for the wire. When he finished writing the checks, the money was nearly gone.He went out to the barn. The squeeze chute was there in the shadow. It was the old manual one. Same chute his dad ran. He wanted the hydraulic chute, but didn’t buy it. His shoulder hurts when he works this manual one. Sharp pain that did not go away. He would pull the handle anyway. The wire was tight on the posts out in the wind. The cattle in the fields. The work remained.He puts the receipts back in the folder. Closes the form. The books are done. The numbers are the numbers. He’ll file the form and write the check. Get back to the work.He opens the bull catalog again. Lot 42. The Simmental. His wife will say Hereford. She’s probably right. But he’s never tried Simmental, and a man ought to try a thing before he decides against it. Maybe he should wait until next year, though. Outside, the flags pull at the chain links along the fence line. The Stars and Stripes, frayed at the edge. And the other. The wind is stronger now. It’s always stronger by afternoon.Neither one comes down.Act II. The Check A few weeks later, a letter. USDA.He doesn’t get much mail from Washington. The Forest Service, sometimes, about the grazing allotment. The BLM about the lease. Forms and fees and notices that say nothing and require a signature anyway.This one is different. It says he’s eligible for a payment. One-time relief. He reads it twice. Trade disruptions. The letter doesn’t use simple language. Retaliatory tariffs from foreign nations disrupted commodity markets. American farmers and ranchers carried a disproportionate burden. The administration recognizes the sacrifice and intends this bridge assistance to ensure the continued viability of American agriculture.There’s a number at the bottom. Calculated from the crop acreage he reported for the drought assessment in August. What they’ll send if he signs and returns the form.It’s not nothing. Seven thousand dollars. Enough to matter. Not enough to fix anything, but enough to notice. He sets the letter on the table. Walks outside. The wind is up. The flags pull at the chain links. He stands there a while. The tall sage quivers.He wasn’t raised to take government money. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay him to ranch.His father never did. His grandfather never did. They made it or they didn’t, and when they didn’t, they sold cattle or sold land or borrowed from the bank and paid it back with interest. The bank was clean. You signed a paper. Shook a hand. Paid it back or you lost the land, and either way you settled the deal.Some people say the government has money, but that isn’t true. It comes from somewhere. From people who worked for it, people who paid taxes, people in Ohio and California and Georgia who never agreed to send a check to a rancher in Wyoming they’d never meet. There was no paper to sign. No hand to shake. No way to pay it back. You couldn’t look those people in the eye. You’d never know their names. A teacher. A mechanic. A nurse. They worked, and some part of what they earned ended up in your mailbox, and there was no line on any form where you could make it right.Spending other people’s money. The debt you couldn’t settle.The government wasn’t a partner. Wasn’t a friend. It was the maze that made you fill out forms and pay taxes and stay off the land it claimed to manage. A thing you dealt with and worked around and endured.He knows the world is different now. Farmers take payments. Crop insurance. Conservation programs. Subsidies so old nobody remembers what the system looked like without them. He doesn’t judge a man for taking what’s offered. But he always thought of himself as someone who wouldn’t need it.Trade, not aid. He heard a farmer say that on the radio once. The man was from Iowa or Nebraska, one of those soybean states that got hit when China started buying from Brazil. He said: I don’t want a bailout. I want my customers back.That’s how he feels. He didn’t ask for a trade war. He didn’t ask to be a casualty. He didn’t ask for bridge assistance. He just wanted to sell his calves and buy his wire and do the work.He looks through the form. Name, address, operation type, bank account for direct deposit. And a signature line.He puts the form on the table next to the bull catalog. He looks at the two side by side. The future he wants to buy. The money that could buy it, if he signs.Seven thousand dollars. That’s a good chunk of a hydraulic squeeze chute. A great bull. That’s the margin the tariffs ate.He thinks about where the money comes from. Other people’s money.He can’t look those people in the eye. Can’t shake their hand. Can’t explain why he needs their money or promise to pay it back. If he signs the form, he becomes a man who took something he couldn’t return from people he’ll never know.The president is on television.He doesn’t watch much television, but his wife had it on, and he stopped in the doorway to listen. The president is talking about the tariffs. He’s saying they’re working. Foreign countries are paying. The trade deficit is down, factories are coming back, and America is winning again.The president says foreign producers and middlemen pay the tariffs. Not Americans. The president waves his hand. The prices Americans pay, that’s not the tariffs. That’s other things. Supply chain. Inflation from the previous administration. Corporate greed, maybe. But not the tariffs. China pays the tariffs. Europe. Countries that have been ripping us off for decades.He watches the president’s face. The president believes what he’s saying. Or he at least acts like he believes, and the performance is the thing.The president says he didn’t pay. China did. If that’s true, why did prices go up so much?The receipts say he paid the tariffs at the ranch supply store. If that’s true, where can he put the figure on his taxes?They can’t both be right.His wife is at the desk in the corner of the living room. She’s been there most evenings this winter, working. Pen and paper, reading glasses on. She doesn’t talk about it much. She loves her work, and he doesn’t get in the way. She looks up. Sees him in the doorway.You’re not watching this, she says. Not a question.He shakes his head. Walks back to the sun room. The form is still there. Unsigned. The bull catalog next to it. The television noise fading behind him.He sits down. Looks at the signature line. The pen is right there.The margin is thin. The wire is one-twelve. The bull can wait, but maybe not another year. His shoulder hurts when he works the manual chute, and the hydraulic one costs twenty thousand dollars, and the yellow check is already gone.He could sign it. Cash the check. Use it for the bull, or the chute, or the wire next spring. Tell himself it’s just money the government took from him through the tariffs, coming back. A refund, not a gift.But he knows that’s not true. The tariff money went to the Treasury. This money comes from the Treasury. They’re connected somewhere, but not in a way that makes it his. It’s still other people’s money. He doesn’t sign it.Later, in bed, the wind hums against the windows. She’s not reading. She’s writing. Her notebook propped against her knees, hand moving in the small light. He can see the page from where he lies but not the words. Just her handwriting, which he has known longer than he has known the shape of his own.She stops. Reads something back to herself. Crosses out a line. Writes it again.He doesn’t ask what it says. But he saw the word calves, and he saw the word light, and he thinks she is writing about a morning he remembers but couldn’t describe.She never worries about the money. That’s not what she’s for.He closes his eyes. The wind hums. He sleeps. Dreams about wire, and bulls, and flags dancing.Act III. The FlagsMorning again. Coffee in the sun room. The light on the Bighorns, snow deep on the peaks, the valley starting to think about spring.He looks out across the south pasture. The sage. The wind. The flags on the fence line, pulling at the chain links. The form is still on the kitchen table. Two weeks now. Unsigned.He’s thought about it every day. Picked up the pen twice. Put it down twice. The signature line sits there, waiting. Seven thousand dollars somewhere in Washington, waiting. The teacher and the mechanic and the nurse go about their lives, not knowing their money is addressed to him, waiting. It’s not the money that bothers him. There will always be more money. It’s the principle.He believes in the Republic. Not just a democracy. He knows the difference. Power needs spread out. States matter. Wyoming matters, even with half a million people and three electoral votes. His voice is small, but it’s supposed to count.He’s heard the arguments. After the war, America let other countries protect their own factories. Helped them rebuild. Let them sell into our markets while they charged us to sell into theirs. That was the deal. Generous. Strategic.It was supposed to be temporary.Temporary was a long time ago. Germany rebuilt. Japan rebuilt. China went from nothing to everything. At some point you have to say the deal is done. Everyone plays by the same rules.Maybe the tariffs are that point. Maybe the president is right that America got taken advantage of and somebody finally had to stop it.He doesn’t know. He’s not an economist. He’s a rancher who knows what wire costs.But he knows that when one man can set a tax by emergency order, Wyoming doesn’t count. Congress doesn’t count. The people he can call and vote against don’t count. One man in Washington signs a paper and the price of wire goes up at the ranch store in Buffalo.And nobody he voted for stops it.That’s not the republic. That’s something else. Something with a name he doesn’t say out loud.He voted for less Washington, not more. For a government that did its job and left him alone. And his representatives let the man he voted for reach past them and set a tax no one voted on, then tell him it wasn’t a tax at all.He won’t take the flag down like some of his neighbors. The flag is the thing he believes in, even if the man behind it broke what he believes.The other side never believed in it at all. They’d pull power into Washington just as fast, just in different buildings. Agencies. Bureaus. Programs. Rules about his water. His land. His cattle. The wolf they brought back that kills his calves. The Forest Service kid who tells him how to manage grass his grandfather cleared.One side reaches past the republic with a pen. The other reaches past it with paperwork. Neither side offers what he actually wants.A government that does its job and leaves him alone.Set the conditions. Let the system work. Stay out of the news.He flies the flag for the principle, not the man. He’s betting the principle survives the men who use it.What he knows is this. The president said foreign countries would pay. The receipts say he paid. The president said there’d be no cost to Americans. The form on the table is the cost.Maybe the tariffs are right for the country. Maybe in ten years the factories will be back and his grandkids will say this was the moment somebody finally did what had to be done.Maybe.But right now the wire is one twelve. The president says he didn’t pay. The form is other people’s money. And whatever the tariffs are doing for the country, they’re making him choose between signing a thing he doesn’t believe in and watching the margin disappear.That’s not a policy debate. That’s his life.His wife sits down across from him. She picks up the bull catalog. Flips to the page she’s already marked. A Hereford bull. Red body, white face. Good EPDs. Small calves. Good growth. Calm temperament.They’re calm, she says. We don’t need any more high strung on this place.She’s talking about the bulls. She’s also not talking about the bulls.He almost smiles. The first time in weeks.She puts something on the table. A check. I wrote another book, she says. About the ranch. Us. The life. Poems. She shrugs. Someone wanted to read it.He looks at the check. Looks at the number.Ten thousand, she says.He looks at the form. Unsigned. Seven thousand dollars from the government, from the teacher and the mechanic and the nurse. Ten thousand from his wife’s words about the Bighorns and the light and the calves and the wind.I want a Hereford, she says. And that can go back. That’s other people’s money.She means the form.He picks it up. Folds it. Puts it back in the envelope. Unsigned.She watches him. Doesn’t say anything. They’ve been married long enough.After a while, she says: Spring’s coming.He nods. Calves will start dropping soon.You ready? He looks at her. The woman who turned their life into words. She solved the problem he couldn’t. Together thirty years and hopefully thirty more, God willing. The ranch is where she finds the stories, not the other way around.Hereford, he says.She smiles. Hereford.They sit there a while. The catalog between them. The form in its envelope, going back. The check on the table.The calves will come, the grass will grow.Outside, the wind picks up. The Stars and Stripes, frayed at the edge. And the other. The flags pull at the chain links along the fence line. Both fly. MusicArtist: Peter CrosbySong: Love Sick Information Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
