California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.
Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company. Home Depot’s vendors, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.
Another Big Myth: because all that is good in our social and economic relations is made possible by the state, each of us is deeply and forever in debt to the state. The state is supposed to be owed by each of us everlasting thanks and offerings.
Moral and social consensus is breaking down in Western countries; and to whatever extent it is still present, it is being increasingly imposed from above. Present trends toward intrusive bureaucratic government providing “democratic” socialization will not likely be reversed in the near future.
Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics
The most important thing to understand about these policy prescriptions is that one’s economic security or general well-being has absolutely nothing to do with one’s “freedom,” and it never has. A government benefactor, in the form of a redistributive government politburo, is not some great advancement of individual “freedom.”
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom defended the individual—the only ultimate locus of choice, responsibility and morality—as the appropriate focus of efforts toward human improvement, at a time when failing to keep that focus threatened the entire world. That is a lesson we need to remember now as well.
Yet when a company adopts a new technology, it can’t set it and forget it. Staying ahead requires new features and constant upgrades. Hopper described a “technology treadmill” and said “companies will either master and re-master the technology or die.”
American history has vindicated the Founders’ faith that all human beings share the same basic desire for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This universalism makes it a challenge to draw the circle of mutual loyalty among citizens in the way that most nations do. Americans are loyal to the morality and values of the Declaration Of Independence, not to common ancestors or geography.
The innovation they came up with was Dematerialization. McAfee defines this term to mean the phenomenon of consuming more and more while taking less and less from the planet. The intense competitive improvement mechanism of capitalism caused more and more companies to seize the opportunity.
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