I've been thinking about why the drilling industry is having so much trouble attracting and retaining new help. Part of the reason is we are the last of the independents. The cowboys of the old West were made of this stock. They had different "clients" during the year. Sometimes they'd take a herd up the trail to market, sometimes they'd ride fence, and sometimes they'd hunker down for the winter. Drillers are the modern incarnation of these independent souls. Most of us are small operations, in limited geographic areas. We have no more security than our ability to satisfy our customers, one at a time. Our successes are ours alone and our failures can be crushing. To me, this is the good part. Benjamin Franklin once said, "I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work." Our society, and more importantly, our government has fostered an attitude among our youth of total dependence. Professions are more and more isolated from failure. If we took our present way of thinking back 100 years, we would tax the automobile to provide relief for the poor buggy whip manufacturer. Most of this can be traced to the way government spends money.
Economists, Milton and Rose Friedman, in their 1980 book, Free To Choose, explained the four ways of spending money: