Bob Spaulding was 42 years old and teaching economics at San Diego State University when he decided to spend a summer bicycling across the country. It took 18 days; he averaged 100 miles per day.
BOB:
It was mainly an endurance thing.
The hardest part of the trip was going from Mesquite, Nevada, through St. George into Cedar City, Utah.
BOB:
The maps show you the distance, but they don’t tell you the elevation change. There were steep hills going from an elevation of about 2,000 feet to 6,000 feet, which really wiped me out!
That was back when people biked across country. They just don’t do it anymore. There’s no sense of adventure. I think we’ve really lost our ambition, the youth today.
Bob is 81 now. For about 25 years he was an adjunct professor in San Diego (mostly at San Diego State), teaching introductory economics to freshmen while developing real estate and managing rental properties. (Real estate was more profitable than adjunct teaching.)
When Bob was in college in the 1960s, he, like most of his peers, held progressive beliefs. But as he learned about economics and started teaching, he became more conservative.
BOB:
Econ tends to do that to somebody. You become aware of the inefficiencies of government. You’re aware of how free enterprise creates wealth, not just for the upper echelons but for the poor. The poor people in capitalist countries are far better off than in other systems.
Have you heard of the essay “I, Pencil”?
PLF:
Of course! I love “I, Pencil.”
BOB:
That really nailed it on the head. It shows how capitalism responds to consumer needs, consumer demands.
Being a landlord also changed Bob’s outlook.
BOB:
You live by your wits. You need an ability to judge people. You have to use the law sometimes to get rid of bad actors. You must take care of your property. Every property I’ve owned, I’ve improved in one way or another. Pretty proud of that. I rather enjoyed making the improvements and keeping the tenants happy. That’s a big part of our philosophy.
It’s hard to be popular if somebody has to write you a check every month. Renters tend to demonize landlords, and there are some bad landlords. But it’s stupid to be a bad landlord. You want to attract good people and you want to hold onto them. Nothing is more costly than having a vacancy, or having a tenant that trashes your place and you have to kick them out. You’ve got to be careful whom you pick. And you have to demand the rent on time and charge a late fee if it’s late.
Landlords are never going to be popular, but I think it’d be a great revelation for a tenant if he suddenly became a landlord. That would quickly change his point of view.
Bob invested in both residential and commercial properties. For a while, he bought in an up-and-coming neighborhood called Golden Hill, about a mile from Downtown San Diego. Each building he bought, he improved—sometimes gutting and rebuilding it—which increased the value of the whole neighborhood.
BOB:
I owned a half block of commercial properties. As things went up in value, I would refinance and pull money out and buy more property.
Bob isn’t in California anymore. He and his wife, Carol—a retired librarian—left San Diego three and a half years ago. They now live in Southwestern Utah, near the Arizona border, only 20 minutes from their son and his family.
BOB:
We really wanted to get out of California. We could see the direction it was going. We had moved there in ’75, and Pete Wilson, the Republican, was the mayor of San Diego. He later became governor. It was the golden state in those days. And everybody aspired to go there.
Now California’s policies are driving out good people. Here in Utah we get a lot of what I call refugees from California.
It’s really sad, because California is a beautiful place. But the government is worse and worse. I think they’re going to have a rude awakening at some point.
Bob and Carol are originally from Minnesota. Bob graduated college in the middle of the Vietnam War.
BOB:
I knew I was going to be drafted, so I volunteered for the Army. I went and served in Germany. Never went to Vietnam, but it was always kind of hanging over my head. Would my unit ever be sent to Vietnam? We never knew.
He met Carol a few weeks after getting out of the Army and fell in love. Before moving to California in 1975, the couple lived in St. Joseph, Missouri—a town that, ironically, is tied up in California history. St. Joseph was the starting point of the Pony Express, the 1860 mail route that, for the first time, allowed the rest of the country to regularly communicate with the booming population in California. It took 10 days for 80 riders to bring mail on the backs of 400 horses from St. Joseph to Sacramento. The Civil War and the transcontinental telegram killed the route not long after it began; but for a brief time, when California was still the Wild West, the Pony Express was what connected California to the rest of America. It’s baked into California lore about the early, hardscrabble days of the state, and there’s still a Pony Express National Museum in St. Joseph.
When Bob was in St. Joseph, he taught upper-level economics classes. But after moving to California, he switched to introductory economics, which he liked: It meant he was talking to students from different disciplines, some of whom knew absolutely nothing about economics.
BOB:
Economics scares people and it shouldn’t. I had a lot of non-majors: In other words, they were perhaps in journalism or education or engineering. They were required to take a social science course, and many chose principles of economics. They came in with preconceived ideas. I could give them a better understanding and appreciation of how the economy works and how capitalism rewards people, including the poor. And that was a surprise to them.
By the way, my weakest students were often journalism majors. My best students were in engineering. The journalism majors couldn’t write worth a darn, and the engineers were always precise and gave backup data.
PLF:
If there was one economic lesson that you could make everyone in the country understand, what would it be?
BOB:
TANSTAAFL. You know where I’m going?
PLF:
Oh! I know it from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” right?
BOB:
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In other words: Opportunity costs. When you make a decision, you may be gaining something, but you also may be giving up something.
PLF:
Is there anything the government’s done recently—maybe student loan forgiveness—that made you think, “Wow, they really don’t understand opportunity costs”?
BOB:
You just mentioned it. Forgiving student loans is an abomination. You’re giving free money. You’re buying votes of indebted college students and you’re paying their debts. Meanwhile there are people who never went to college, or people who struggled to get through college on their own income and had to work through college. You couldn’t find a more idiotic policy.
I hope people see through the blatant hypocrisy of it all.
Bob and Carol are happy in Utah. They get to babysit their grandkids, for one. But they also love the area.
BOB:
People really take care of their property here, no matter how modest it may be. The mountains are beautiful. Kevin Costner has done some movies in the area.
Bob isn’t teaching economics anymore. But he still sees the country—and the government’s mistakes—through the eyes of an economics professor.
BOB:
There’s so much the government does that is counterproductive and hurts the very people that seek to help. Government takes so much of our income and does so many stupid things, and we suffer for that. But I think people are becoming more aware of the value of entrepreneurship, and how dangerous rogue government policies can be.
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