PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and Tucker Carlson's monologue on problems in rural America.

While I agree with much of what Carlson and Mirengoff have to say, I do think that Mirengoff is off-base with this:

Carlson notes that job opportunities in traditionally male jobs are shrinking in rural America, while jobs in traditionally female jobs are holding steady. But is that the entire story? Men are not barred from jobs in schools and hospitals. Nor are they barred from learning skills that will help them land jobs in other flourishing sectors (italics added).

The italicized part is exactly the problem. Remember Hillary's admonishment that out-of-work coal miners could 'learn to code'? Progressive dogma to the contrary, coal miners can 'learn to code', but there are few such jobs requiring those skills in coal country - and the people who live there don't want to leave. Kevin Williamson of National Review had a similar lament about problems in his childhood home of Odessa, Texas a few years back. Traditionally male jobs in the oil fields were drying up (pun unintended) and the men, and their families, didn't want to leave.

Another example, this one personal. I'm a highly skilled engineer (PhD level) who could - even at my age - relatively easily find professional employment in almost any major city in America. But in rural north Georgia where I now live, I'm (professionally) unemployable - there are no employers. I'm retired, so it's no matter. Sure, I'd like to have a part-time consulting gig, to keep my skills up, but to do that I'd have to move back to the city - which I'm loathe to do.

So perhaps the solution, at least in part, is for employers to move more of those (traditionally male) jobs to where the potential employees are. And for the know-it-all government agencies to pull their collective heads from their collective asses and facilitate the transfer.