It’s too bad life can’t be like an old John Deere tractor.  They're simple to operate,  built never to be obsolete, and are able to adjust to conditions years after they left the factory.

These honest, two-cylinder machines have operated on everything from coal oil to white lightning. 

My granddad had one of these tractors and he would drain out all the oil during the cold winter months, bring it into the house and set the oil next to the pot belly stove to warm it so the old tractor would start later that day. The tractor had steel wheels so he didn’t have flat tires and he started it by turning the flywheel so a battery wasn’t needed either.

Every day we hear more disturbing financial news.  Just how large is the menu going to be at the Treasury Department’s eat-all-you-want bailout café?  First we blow 85 billion in AIG - sorry for my gaffe, it was plus 27 billion - err no, that’s not quite enough, let’s take a mulligan, re-spot the ball and make it an even 150 billion! "We're sorry about all those bonuses, fancy trips and spa visits we took," say the boys at AIG. "It's just that’s the way we love to do business with our money." 

American Express wants some of the good life too, but they aren’t eligible for the bailout money since it is only supposed to be available to banks.  No problem. Take out the magic wand and walla! Overnight, AmEx is a bank. Wow, it would take me months to get through all the paper work to get regulatory approval to open a branch in a low-income neighborhood! 

Then again, Kansas is truly in the middle of the flyover zone which makes it hard to gain the access to the financial power brokers on the East coast. 

In an earlier article, I said this was not a $700 billion-bailout but rather a trillion-dollar one.  Was I wrong.  We are now approaching $2 trillion with no end in sight.  The not-so-funny thing is that we, the public, can’t even find out who received all these golden eggs.  That must be some special breed of goose cranking them out.

Just a couple of little tidbits of information: the money we gave to just two of the big banks is more than the balance of the entire FDIC insurance fund, and the AIG “let’s party with your money” bailout is triple the FDIC insurance fund. 

Community bankers are understandably upset about this one-sided treatment favoring the mega-players of financial industry. 

For those following the proposed regulation of talk radio, the analogy in the financial sector is that we currently have a financial “fairness doctrine” in place.  It's seen as fair if you are a huge bank, insurance company, or “investment” firm, but if you are a community banker who has avoided all the pitfalls, followed all the rules and been a good corporate citizen helping people of all means, the word "fair" is a joke. 

What happened to all the hype about helping “Main Street”?   For anyone thinking this mess can be blamed on one political party over the other, I offer a little bipartisan history lesson: Congress can debate for days about protecting the habitat of something like the left handed, yellow belly spotted grass flea, which no one has ever seen. The congressional people call each other names, hold press conferences and hit every talk show.  But when we have something as unbelievably important for our future as fixing this current financial mess, hardly a peep from any of them.  Why, the old adage of follow the money seems to ring as true today as it has throughout history. I apologize if you detect a little more than normal sarcasm in this opinion. 

So. Back to tractors.

If we just used a little common sense we could fix this problem in our financial markets.  Eighty years ago we had hundreds of companies making tractors and farm equipment. 

Over the years most of those companies are gone either from outright failure or consolidation. I’ve owned several makes of tractors and the companies still in business today probably didn’t make the best equipment back then, but the management of the surviving companies was the key to their future success. 

Everyone can recognize an old red tractor as being an International Farmall, but today a red tractor is a Case IH. Even though the IH brand and equipment were strong, the management team wasn’t. (I want to give equal time to my Case friends who know that I play with the green tractors but I do my farm work using the red ones.) 

The old John Deere tractors were simple, easy to fix, cheap to operate, technically behind the times, and not safe - but the company was supported by a strong dealer network and a management team that had great long term business plan.

Many of the companies getting  taxpayer bailouts should have been allowed to fail.  The stronger-managed companies would have survived and flourished. Rather than being faced with public debt we can not repay and keeping failed entities around that paid no price for their mismanagement, we could have ended up with a landscape made up of only the strong, well-managed, dependable institutions. 

That isn’t what happened, so now I can just think about how things could have been while I relax out in my shop listening to the trusty pop pop coming from the exhaust of an old tractor.

Kansas Liberty columnist Bill Wyckoff is president of Labette Bank, a community bank with locations throughout Southeast Kansas. He lives on a farm outside Altamont, Kansas. A graduate of Kansas State University with an MBA from Southern Illinois University, he enjoys collecting antique John Deere tractors and driving his hemi orange Dodge Challenger. Email bwyckoff@labettebank.com

The week in Review