Economic upheavals come at a rapid rate. A quick guide to economics involves a fast look at the long-gone Pennsylvania boom-town of Pithole. That puts us ahead in understanding. A forest of new oil wells had been drilled. Teamsters’ horses and wagons carried huge barrels of oil from the wells to the Allegheny River. There, it was put on barges, and shipped downstream to Pittsburgh.
A small group saw an opportunity for profit. They obtained financing and built a pipeline to take the oil downhill to the river. A week after the pipeline opened, most of the teamsters, horses, wagons, stable-hands, wheel-wrights, and blacksmiths had left Pithole. The stores who sold them food and goods, the restaurants who served their meals, the bars who supplied liquor after hard days on the road, the hotels, and the rooming houses all disappeared as work disappeared.
Soon, the shallow wells began to run dry. The whole town disappeared. Now, Pithole is marked by a small, out-of-the-way museum, staffed by a couple of state employees with enough political connections to get the only two jobs within miles of Pithole. A handful of isolated, and nearly invisible, oil wells, largely automated, pump whatever oil continues to seep up from below into a few storage tanks.
Who benefited from the technology introduced at Pithole? Americans who liked to read at night. Oil for oil lamps prices dropped from the several dollars that a gallon that whale oil cost to a few dimes. More people could work at night, reading, learning and getting ahead.
The short history of Pithole helps us understand pipelines. Pithole, pipelines, and profit. Pipelines come in many forms. Those who utilize newer pipelines get ahead. The internet, like the Pithole pipeline, carries information to and from end-users faster than ever. This new pipeline of electrons replaces newspapers and magazines, that, much like the teamsters and their wagons, become less necessary with each passing day.
Retailers are being replaced with on-line purchasing pipelines. Vast brick and mortar establishments, from Main Streets to malls, are losing customers to new, more efficient, distribution systems. Ever newer pipelines carry more goods to consumers at ever lower costs.
Pithole, pipelines, and profit. And, progress.
We understand, and take advantage, of many things by simply thinking about what happened in the boom-town of Pithole when the pipeline was built. Some may compare that tiny happening in history to The Only Church Jesus Founded.
The Catholic Church is, after all, a “pipeline to God”. The Church allows our prayers to be carried up to God and His Sacraments to be sent to us. As always, the middle-men who are eliminated in the process are against it.
