Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Don’t Go Left, Don’t Go Right, Go Entrepreneurial.

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This post is a couple of years old, but we dug it out as part of our project for “100% Economics, 0% Politics”. There’s a much better way than the political way, and that’s the entrepreneurial way. It’s the way to empower everyone, and elevate all lives, through economic activism.

Everything has become politicized. Family, sex, gender, education, sport, economics, art, transportation, religion, climate, water, energy – there’s no part of everyday life that politicians have not sullied and made an issue for identity politics, class politics and party politics. They’ll attach the description “racist” or “sexist” or “partisan” to any subject whatsoever.

The left is as bad as the right, and vice versa. Often, it’s hard to discern where one side starts and the other one ends. The mainstream media, exploiting the one-way structure of their communications model (they talk, we are supposed to listen) cheers on this politicization without debating it. In the end, they become confused. Every day I read the Wall Street Journal. The Front Page, US News and World News sections appear to be written by young reporters with little knowledge of grammar and proper sentence structure, but with an infinite repertoire of anti-Trump diatribes that they seem willing to insert in any paragraph, often at the most inappropriate times. The Opinion section appears to be written by aging neo-cons, eager to invade foreign countries, beef up the US Military with taxpayer dollars, and enlarge government scope in all directions. The combination is confusion between the memes of left and right, and the ability to approve of both positions, but not of any alternative position.

For example, William Galston, a WSJ Opinion Section columnist, identifies those of us who do not identify with Republican and Democratic ideologies as “populists” who “undermine freedom the press, weaken constitutional courts, concentrate power in the executive” (Galston is vociferously anti-Trump), and “marginalize groups of citizens based on ethnicity, religion or national origin”. (WSJ online March 17, 2018.)

In other words, you must be left or right, but you mustn’t be anything else, or take any other positions.

There is a different point of view that’s available. Ignore both left and right, and politics in general. Don’t engage in virtue signaling. If you want to achieve a moral goal, if you want to save the world, if you want to achieve something meaningful, be an entrepreneur. Start a business. Use your powers of empathy to figure out how to help others through a commercial offer that brings them a new and better product or service – a better education, better transportation, better cleaning, better grooming, better content to read and watch. Don’t attempt social engineering or global climate engineering or political revolution or institutional reform.

We need people who can imagine a better future in entrepreneurial terms, not political terms. People who can identify how to serve their customers in a better way, and claim the reward of a financial profit for improving their customers’ lives. We need people who take personal, entrepreneurial and commercial risk because they see opportunity and they believe that they can seize it. We need people who will sacrifice in the present, by saving and investing and building a business, in order to succeed in the future. We need people who accept the verdict of the market, and who thrive on the feedback of those who try their services and provide commentary, positive or negative, that can be used in the responsive process of making improvements and doing better and trying harder.

We do not need politicians and bureaucrats who posture and lie about “public service”. They serve no-one but themselves. They are the ones who politicize everything. Entrepreneurs try their best to see what they can achieve. Politicians try their worst to see what they can get away with. We need people who embrace the economic way, and discard the political way.

Unsure Of Your Direction In These Turbulent Times? Entrepreneurship Can Provide All The Answers You Need.

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2020 has been a strange year. My friend Ben always asks me, “Is the world crazy enough for you today?”  He knows I nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and he likes to challenge me: there’s too much uncertainty in 2020 even for those who typically embrace it, which is a good definition of entrepreneurs.

But, in fact, entrepreneurship is the answer in crazy times. Here are several reasons why.

Entrepreneurs are independent.

In times of turbulence, whether economic or political, global, national or local, many people can get confused. They’re not sure what to think, and they find it difficult to sort through competing claims or conflicting evidence. They look for the reassurance of someone else’s opinion to latch onto.

That’s not the case with entrepreneurs. They are independent thinkers. They rigorously seek cause-and-effect where it can be found, but they are also keenly aware that complex systems – when shocked with a pandemic, a disputed election, civil unrest, zero and even negative interest rates, significant changes in shopping and travel habits – can exhibit unpredictable and unstable emergent properties.

Entrepreneurs apply their own judgment based on the information that’s available to them and the insight that’s unique to them; they make a decision; and then they test it against reality by implementing it and adapting based on the results that come back. Independent thinkers are society’s best resource amidst turmoil.

Entrepreneurs are non-ideological.

It sometimes appears that we are suffering through a clash of ideologies, whether social or political or economic. Ideologies tend to be rigid and unrelenting, and those who hold one see opponents in anyone who holds another. Ideologies are not useful to entrepreneurs, and so they don’t include them in their assembly of resources. Ideological rigidity doesn’t mix with the pragmatism and adaptiveness that are keys to entrepreneurial thriving.

A non-ideological world sounds very attractive right now.

Entrepreneurs have no time for identity politics and political correctness.

Entrepreneurs are typically pursuing a finite goal with a finite amount of resources. They need the best people they can recruit to join their team, they need clarity of communication and a shared mission. The last thing in the world they have any time for is worrying about the political correctness of a choice or of a statement. They’ll listen to legitimate market preferences of course, but they won’t be distracted by meaningless noise. entrepreneurs don’t lie bout equality or unity. They assemble diverse teams – where the diversity comes from complementary competencies, not divisive demographic distinctions – and they judge on passion for the task, performance, and results.

Entrepreneurs are non-compliant.

A consequence of the pandemic is that a portion of the population has been beaten down into a state of compliance by authorities wielding mandates. Compliance is undesirable behavior when it is viewed through the entrepreneurial lens of innovation, betterment and economic growth.

We’re all better off when there is non-compliance: when Uber refuses to comply with the mandates n favor of taxis, or when AirBnB refuses to comply with pro-hotel mandates, or when medical researchers defy those who want to constrain experimentation and progress. Non-compliance is the right stance for society, and entrepreneurs can be counted upon to take it.

Entrepreneurs hold to the ethic of service.

In our current conflicted world, capitalism is condemned by some as exploitative and even evil. Some critics see profits that they deem to be extreme and extractive of the value that workers create, others see pollution and environmental damage. They are totally wrong and completely misguided.

The ethic of entrepreneurial capitalism is to serve others. The entrepreneurial market works when producers identify unmet needs and wants among their fellow-citizens who seek betterment and improvement. Multiple entrepreneurs compete to be the one chosen by consumers to meet that need, rivaling each other to come up with the highest quality / lowest cost solution. The ethic of entrepreneurial service has raised living standards across the globe and lifted billions out of poverty.

Keeping entrepreneurs unleashed will generate more and faster improvements in the future.

Entrepreneurs believe in liberty and property.

Entrepreneurship thrives only in favorable market conditions, with the right supportive institutions. The most important of the institutions is the legal framework to make it easy to start new ventures, favors innovation (Professor Michael Munger of Duke University calls the framework permissionless innovation), and imposes as few stifling regulations as possible, so that otherwise unrealized innovation is set free. Overall, we can think of the institutions of entrepreneurship as liberty – freeing creative minds and brilliant engineers and operators to follow their purpose to wherever it takes them in the pursuit of the profit that comes from consumer approval.

The second major institution of entrepreneurship is property. Entrepreneurs stake their own property in a bet that their business can succeed and grow. They take risks with their own property – and therefore need to operate in a framework that respects private property and their right to do with it whatever they will. When private property is restricted, limited, over-taxed, over-regulated or confiscated, entrepreneurship can’t thrive.

Liberty and property together are the institutions of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Yields Meaning And Purpose.

At the bottom line, we all seek meaning and purpose in life. Meaning refers to our framing of the difference an individual wants to make in the world, the feeling that one’s endeavors are worthwhile. Purpose refers to the specific goal the individual pursues as in making that difference.

Researchers John Bitzan and Clay Routledge of The Challey Institute have documented, based on deep research, how individuals’ belief in the free working of the entrepreneurial marketplace provides them with the sense of meaning and purpose they seek. Bitzan and Routledge call this feeling “individual agency” – the feeling of being free to act and capable of meaningful achievement in the institutional context of capitalism and free markets. Individual agency is the central idea of entrepreneurship.

Morality, What Is It? America’s Revolutionary Minds Wanted to Know. Some Still Do.

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“A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It” is the subtitle for C. Bradley Thompson’s 2019 book, America’s Revolutionary Mind. However, the concept of morality is a high-level abstract idea. Unfortunately, in a country whose education, media, and political institutions wallow in moral subjectivism, it means different things to different people. Today, America’s dominant philosophy can be summed as: There are no absolutes. Just be a nice person. Love is the answer.

This 1960’s Age of Absurdity nonsense is anchored by the ideas of 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who defined it as, “Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.” This ambiguity is supported by another German philosopher, Georg Hegel, who believed “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

This brings us to the most common view of moral questions, the difference between doing what is right and doing what is wrong. In the Christian tradition, pacifism is what is right: turn the other cheek, and St. Paul the Apostle, in his letter to the Galatians explains, “Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom.” Yet, both moral codes require humility and self-denial.

Its because the religious morality of the premodern world (ante Age of Enlightenment), and the secular morality of the postmodern world (post Age of Reason) are commonly accepted in 2020’s American culture, that the moral principles of America’s founding are virtually unknown. In an effort to solve this false dilemma, Center for Individualism has created a Facebook group whose purpose is to study each chapter of America’s Revolutionary Mind.

Our modest goal is to help members of our group and readers of this column answer the question below; one posed by Irina Dunaev in Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living. After being sentenced to ten years in a Soviet gulag (a slow, horrific death sentence) because her brother was a snitch for the socialist criminal gang (like there’s any other kind), she asked her cousin Kira Argounova,

There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that its something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now its over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone. But there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?

In order to understand the moral code that created the most tolerant and prosperous society the world has ever known, we will begin reading and discussing Thompson’s book the week of November 30th, and cover one chapter each week through the week of February 22, 2021. To keep the conversation robust, ice breaker questions will be offered and examples that relate to current events will be encouraged. This is an open group, and it can be easily found searching the group name: Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind.

Membership is automatic once three simple questions have been answered to confirm your participation, which simply means – have an active mind. The foundational precept of human beings with an active mind is: Existence exists. The universe is all there is, and Its a Wonderful Life. The only thing that can go out of existence is that which is living. Therefore, it is imperative that morality, at its core, promotes life at its most robust.

To quote the Buffalo football fan whose sign was caught on national TV after the Bills won a fourth consecutive American Conference championship in 1993, “Deal With It America!”  Americans of any nationality routinely do this. It, being reality.

Left – Right Is No Longer The Division. It’s Now The Ruling Class Versus The People.

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By its campaign and conduct of the 2020 election, the ruling class ceased pretending to be part of a constitutional republic. By treating fellow Americans as inferiors through word and deed, its members renounced their common citizenship with us. Eschewing persuasion, they set about compelling obedience to an openly manipulated election.

Thus did they burn their bridges to the rest of America as surely as did Hernán Cortéz when he burned the ships that had carried his troops to conquer the Aztec empire. Henceforth, they must rule or ruin as the oligarchy they have become.

For four decades beginning in the mid-1960s, a class of rulers grew in America. They became ever more uniform socially and intellectually, ever more opposed to the rest of Americans, and ever more powerful. This happened as government took upon itself the tasks of eliminating poverty and harmonizing the races, and as it controlled ever greater shares of the national income.

Increasingly, their powers were based on claims of expertise coming from the universities. These underwent a fourfold increase in size (from 9 percent of Americans with four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015). Their connection with government conferred both wealth and additional prestige. Few paid attention to President Eisenhower’s warning about the connection between government and academic elites.

Elsewhere, I have discussed how inherently pregnant with peril the existence of such a class was for constitutional life. Suffice it to say, by the beginning of the Obama Administration in 2009, the rest of Americans had sensed that American public life had ceased to revolve around the struggle between Democrats and Republicans, and was more between those who lived by the ruling class’ privileges, and those who did not—between the “ins” and the “outs,” between the ruling class and what had been known in English history as the country class.

During the Obama years, the American country class’ budding resistance spurred the ruling class further to become conscious of itself, to increase its own privileges, its cohesion, and above all its contempt for and demands on those below them. Political correctness ceased to be bemusing for the country class and came to be seen as the threat to freedom that it is. Corporate America became indistinguishable from government in its demands for compliance. That is why the 2016 presidential primaries and election revealed a substantial anti-ruling class majority among Americans, though it was split between opposite ends of the political spectrum.

In short, during the Obama years the ruling class was becoming an oligarchy that ruled by exercising the powers of government and of incumbency in corporations as well as all manner of social institutions. Private institutions, allied with government and inspired by government-supported universities, increasingly exercised arbitrary powers.

But by November 2016 this oligarchy had yet to articulate itself into something capable of acting for a common purpose. That is why the 2016 election may prove to have been the last more-or-less bona fide free election in America’s history.

Donald Trump’s surprising victory proved to be the catalyst for this oligarchy to articulate itself into something that was able to transcend our constitutional republic altogether, to dispense with and even to penalize the habits and institutions that had held it together. Ours is now a socio-political system wholly different from that constitutional republic of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is mandating a way of life that few in America could have imagined.

It is unlikely that in November 2016 the Democratic Party’s leaders who continued to blame “the Russians” for Hillary Clinton’s defeat meant more than to salve a bit their defeat. They probably did not mean for their “resistance” to be more than a traditional mobilization of defeated forces. But the “resistance” took on a life of its own, fed from on high by such as the CIA’s John Brennan and FBI’s James Comey, and the host of their politicized subordinates, as well as from below by violent “intersectional” groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

This resistance was powerfully sustained in the middle by countless corporate executives, government employees, editors, and reporters. The convergence of so many like-minded people quickly and decisively transmuted a political tactic into the replacement of a republic with an oligarchy. It replaced government by consent with rule by force.

Because this revolution involved subordinating truth itself to political power, it effected negation of civilization itself.

This is how it happened. It had been clear to that class that Trump was dangerous only because he represented his “deplorable” supporters. The ruling class sought to resist them by dispiriting them and discrediting them in their own and others’ eyes. Demonizing Trump was the means by which they sought to do this.

Arguably the American country class’ principal mistake between 2016 and 2020 was to suppose that the Left was actually after Trump, rather than set about crushing them and killing the American regime.

When those at the top of American communications’ food chain, the folks at the New York Times, said openly that they would put truth aside during the noble fight against Trumpism, when the news industry shamelessly purveyed obviously incredible stories about Trump’s alleged Russia collusion; when they shamelessly purveyed obviously unsourced rumor as truth; when they seconded officials’ using classified information as a shield and sword against conservatives; when corporations and even government agencies began to require that employees attend brainwashing sessions; when communications companies—especially Google, Facebook, and Twitter—began mathematically to discriminate against conservative communications; when the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives’ proposed legislation would have mandated voting by mail and ballot harvesting—severing the link between any ballot and the voter’s will or even existence—conservatives imagined that this was mere hardball politics within a republican context. Not so.

When the coronavirus hit, Americans did not realize how thoroughly their ruling class had already jelled into an oligarchy with the intention above all to crush them. Neither did they comprehend how assuredly it would not waste this opportunity to do so. Tragically led astray by Donald Trump’s misplaced faith in the objectivity of “the experts,” personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci, conservatives were persuaded to respond to an epidemic with an infection/fatality rate comparable to the average flu as if it were the plague.

But even plagues, once endemic, follow ineluctable courses through populations. Thus, by following the ignorant promise of safety through masks, etc. did conservatives at first agree to suspend face-to-face relationships. They suffered to disarticulate social life even more than economic life, to put aside one’s friends and God. They agreed to restrict their understanding of things to what the mass media would allow them to hear. They did all of this even as evidence mounted that the “experts” were nothing but agents of the oligarchy.

And then Election Night. As predicted, election officials in places controlled by the Left stopped counting until it was clear how many ballots it would take for Trump to be defeated. The requisite number came, filled out by no one knows who. And then . . . who wouldn’t have predicted it? The call came from all of society’s commanding heights: Trump’s defeat had been declared. By whom? By the folks on these varied heights—certainly not by the authorities designated by the Constitution to decide who wins and loses.

But the more instances of fraud the Trump campaign sought to investigate, the louder and from more sources sounded the judgment that there was nothing to investigate. It had been decided. You peons shut up and obey.

That is how oligarchies work.

What may be done about this is another story. But the story’s premise is that it must begin with the realization that the conservative more-or-less half of American life is living under an alien regime that means to continue harming us socially and morally just as much as economically. Plainly, we find ourselves in a (mostly not yet violent) state of war. The beginning of such safety as we may work out for ourselves is to regard our rulers as they regard us.

 

Angelo M. Codevilla is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).

Soft Totalitarianism, Hard Truth: A Roadmap To Fearlessness.

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The word “totalitarian,” like all alarming political terms, is much abused in the present-day United States. Along with “fascistic,” “dictatorial,” and “tyrannical,” “totalitarian” is now tossed about regularly as a means of insulting another’s politics. But the misuse of the term doesn’t render it illegitimate in all contexts. It just makes it harder to recall what the word actually means.

In Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher makes an excellent case that totalitarianism has just about arrived in the U.S., and he argues that there is vital wisdom to be gleaned in the lives of Christian anti-Communists who not only helped bring down the Soviet Union but also preserved their faith throughout their long, dark nightmare. Dreher, a Christian Orthodox writer and senior editor at the American Conservative, interviews several such dissidents or their families and distills their efforts into a few timely lessons: Preserve the memory of what is under attack; take religion as the basis of resistance; consider the family the primary fighting brigade; show solidarity with other dissidents; see the good in suffering; and, above all, “value nothing more than truth.”

Lies are the lifeblood of totalitarianism; to resist, therefore, is to hold fast to truth. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whom Dreher gets his book’s title, “One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.” The quote is, interestingly, absent from the book. Perhaps this is because the work of the Christian dissidents profiled by Dreher seems actually to refute the point. To topple a tyranny, you need to foster a network or a culture of truth, requiring the commitment of families, friends, and fellow resisters.

Dreher is clear that what we face now is not the deadly totalitarianism of 20th-century monster regimes. It’s the “soft totalitarianism” of cultural institutions, universities, workplace bureaucracies, and big-tech behemoths that will drive you from the public square if you dissent from the prevailing radicalism. A totalitarian society, after all, is not defined by the looming threat of death. Rather, as Dreher writes, “it is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology.” He goes on: “A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.”

Anyone who’s ever been admonished for asserting that, say, only women have periods or that looting and arson do not a peaceful protest make, can attest to the efforts of our radical reality tinkerers. And precisely because the new totalitarianism is so different in appearance from that of the Soviet Union, it goes unrecognized by most Americans, including conservative people of faith. What’s more, the soft totalitarianism Dreher describes is less overtly intimidating than it is therapeutic. “It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing,” Dreher writes. “In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish.”

This sought-after happiness is a strictly individual and material matter. No longer do we see the good in pursuit of a common and transcendent purpose. In this way, Dreher argues, soft totalitarianism presents a greater challenge than the bloodthirsty variety. At least Communism sought to mold its victims to achieve a shared (but grossly mistaken) good. The unbridled autonomy of therapeutic culture presents a more radical break with the history of civilization than even the advent of socialism.

Soft totalitarianism thrives without opposition because we’ve been drugged into complacency by the high-tech comforts and hedonistic pleasures of the market state. This is also why, Dreher believes, we have welcomed into our lives the most extensive surveillance apparatus ever known, in the form of big data. The Christian dissidents with whom he speaks, men and women who risked their lives to evade the eyes and ears of the state, are flabbergasted at how we’ve signed up for the privilege of allowing Big Brother into our homes.

The present danger here—aside from the end of any quaint notions of privacy—is that big data functions as a propaganda arm for soft totalitarianism, excising the wrong messages from your user experience and funneling the right ones to you, all day every day. The danger coming down the pike is that it increasingly resembles an enforcement arm as well. Dreher notes that Twitter already considers the “misgendering” of trans people grounds for being booted from the platform, and PayPal consults the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s guidance in determining which organizations are so extreme that they should be denied service. “Consider how it would affect everyday communications,” he writes, “if social media and other online channels that most people have come to depend on—Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and others—were to decide to cut off users whose religious or political views qualified them as bigots in the eyes of the digital commissars?”

For Dreher, much of our misfortune is the inexorable result of our free-market system. “These cultural revolutionaries found an ally in advanced capitalism,” he writes, “which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires.” This is the only misstep in Dreher’s incisive and ultimately heartening book. Capitalism makes an expansive variety of goods and services available to an ever-greater number of individuals. And, yes, Dreher is correct that consumerism rivals religious faith as a motivating principle around which we organize our lives. But capitalism, advanced or not, doesn’t “teach” anything. In offering up its bounty of possibility, capitalism merely re-creates the larger dilemmas facing moral man: how to choose good things over bad, how to refrain from overindulgence, how to prioritize what is meaningful, and how to separate truth from what is illusory.

This is where religion comes in. One need not be a Christian to see the extraordinary value in the lives and works of those who marshalled their faith against the totalitarianism of the past. Those with whom Dreher speaks organized secret prayer groups and samizdat networks. They counseled the persecuted and contested the lies of the state by clinging to the transcendent truths of their faith. This was the best they could do while living under the boot—and it was magnificent.

It’s Dreher’s hope that Christians today—and people of faith more generally—model their lives on those of these brave men, women, and children and take a stand for truth against soft totalitarianism. He writes: “For many of us it will mean having to unlearn political myths that we have uncritically absorbed in a culture that until fairly recently thought and reasoned in broad Christian categories.” This is true. But to unlearn something is to learn or relearn something else. And relearning faith in the 21st century, while necessary in all the ways Dreher describes, might be the toughest challenge of all.

Karl Marx, as usual, was perfectly wrong when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Religion is a deep form of truth. And it is far more difficult to face the truth than it is to embrace lies. Lies are crafted to flatter and persuade. Living in truth, on the other hand, requires courage. Will we find the courage we need to face down soft totalitarianism? One Slovak dissident sees the matter squarely and gives reason to hope:

“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did— your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things, like join the Candle Demonstration.”

The lessons in Live Not by Lies are ultimately a roadmap to fearlessness. Take a step toward living in faith, family, solidarity, and truth, and you’ll find that fear gradually dissipates. Live in falsehood, and you’ll remain a coward before the mob.

Rome Was Not Built Overnight, And Neither Was the Entrepreneur:What’s The Ideal Age To Be An Entrepreneur? Let Market Conditions Decide.

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This is the first article in an occasional series from Professor Raushan Gross on The Institutions Of Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a powerful pathway to innovation, growth, prosperity, and a better life for all. Its emergence and thriving are not automatic; it requires enabling institutions. Professor Gross will analyze and explain the institutional supports required for entrepreneurship to play its role in elevating society to the highest levels of achievement.

The condition of the market economy is the most critical aspect of entrepreneurs’ success, not the entrepreneur’s age. Yet, who say the opposite; that there is a Golden Age of entrepreneurial success, and it is 45. The combination of the age of the entrepreneur and the right mindset is said to be the perfect formula for market success.

While I agree that everything takes time, I am not convinced that age and mindset are essential for successful entrepreneurial endeavors in the long run. Although age and mindset have a role in success, we cannot disregard the requisite market conditions that are more likely to produce favorable or unfavorable results regardless of age and mindset. Entrepreneurs need a favorable market that rewards their risk-taking. If would-be entrepreneurs who are not in their Golden Age today are advised to wait to see success when they enter their 40’s even under unfavorable market conditions, we are in danger of eliminating one of the economy’s critical functions – entrepreneurship itself.

Conventional thinking about entrepreneurship is changing before our very eyes. For example, there have been significant declines in small business ownership and new startups, and fewer unicorns decade over decade. Why? Let us say that Rome was not built overnight, and neither was the entrepreneur. Products take time to produce; it takes time to develop a network of customers; it takes time for the entrepreneur to develop awareness, it takes time to find the market error that can be turned into an opportunity, and finally, it takes time for the market to adjust to changes in consumers’ tastes, preferences, and perceptions. Entrepreneurs do not acquire human capital in just one day, nor were economic systems created in one day.

Entrepreneurship is a social phenomenon that manifests itself through the passing of time, and application of human energy and capital, and favorable market conditions. No group of persons sat around one day and created our market economy; it took vast amounts of experiences and knowledge to come together, creating a space for the entrepreneurial function to operate for us. If the Golden Age is 45, and there have been declines in new entrepreneurial births, who will the newcomers follow? How will the ranks fill with those who can imitate the paths of successful entrepreneurs or small business owners?

The favorable conditions of a market economy are essential so that an individual at any age can find and pursue meaning in life. The benefit of favorable market conditions is to allow would-be entrepreneurs to find meaningful ways of applying their human capital to serve society’s most urgent needs, making conditions better for both others and themselves. The market provides a means by which one entrepreneur pursuing their own aims can enable someone else with whom they have no direct contact to pursue their own goals. In other words, productivity begets productivity.  Another benefit of a favorable market economy is that it brings forth visible adjustments, errors, new knowledge, and information, against which entrepreneurs can weigh their subjective opportunity costs in assessing the risk of pursuing a possible opportunity.1

In essence, individuals accumulate entrepreneurial skills and opportunity awareness, but they have to act to put them to practical use, and if they cannot, society pays the costs. The costs amount to a decrease in new entrepreneurship, innovations, and knowledge. People pursue endeavors when they are incentivized to do so, and if they are not it will leave a gap in one of the most critical market functions – entrepreneurship. Rome was built through the experiences and knowledge set in motion by many people over time. F. A. Hayek stated:

“the successful combination of knowledge and aptitude is not selected by common deliberation, by people seeking a solution to their problems through joint effort; it is the product of individuals imitating those who have been more successful and from their being guided by signs or symbols, such as prices offered for their products or expressions of moral or aesthetic esteem for their having observed standards of conduct –in short, of their using the results of the experiences of others.” 2

An open economic system, where individuals of all ages (younger, older, and in between) are encouraged to pursue their economic interest considering their subjective opportunity costs, ipso facto is likely to increase new entrepreneurial births. Therefore, the condition of the market economy is a necessary factor for entrepreneurs to maximize their range of choices and ideas, and to discover and innovate. A favorable economic system provides individuals in a society a way to use their human capital to achieve society’s needs, on behalf of people they will never know directly.

Certainly, age and experience play to the entrepreneur’s advantage, but what matters most is the market economy’s conditions.

How will people who are not at the Golden Age react to the current market conditions? They need a measurable market indicator – others’ success. Who will fill the shoes of the entrepreneurs and small business owners who have vanished? We must remember that Rome was not built overnight, and neither was the entrepreneur and the system in which they operate.

 

[1] Kirzner, I. M. (2015). Austrian Subjectivism & the Emergence of Entrepreneurship Theory. Liberty: Indianapolis, ID.

[2] Hayek, F. A. (2020). The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

 

Raushan Gross, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Business Management at Pfeiffer University.

The Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated On An Unsuspecting Public.

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Top pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson told government officials in Alberta during a zoom conference call that the current coronavirus crisis is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”

Hodkinson’s comments were made during a discussion involving the Community and Public Services Committee and the clip was subsequently uploaded to YouTube.

Noting that he was also an expert in virology, Hodkinson pointed out that his role as CEO of a biotech company that manufactures COVID tests means, “I might know a little bit about all this.”

“There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians, it’s outrageous, this is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public,” said Hodkinson.

The doctor said that nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus besides protecting older more vulnerable people and that the whole situation represented “politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.”

See how long YT allows this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEo3rnU12jw&feature=emb_logo

Hodkinson remarked that “social distancing is useless because COVID is spread by aerosols which travel 30 meters or so before landing,” as he called for society to be re-opened immediately to prevent the debilitating damage being caused by lockdowns.

Hodkinson also slammed mandatory mask mandates as completely pointless.

“Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever,” he said.

“Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling. They’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous. Seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people – I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.”

The doctor also slammed the unreliability of PCR tests, noting that “positive test results do not, underlined in neon, mean a clinical infection,” and that all testing should stop because the false numbers are “driving public hysteria.”

Hodkinson said that the risk of death in the province of Alberta for people under the age of 65 was “one in three hundred thousand,” and that it was simply “outrageous” to shut down society for what the doctor said “was just another bad flu.”

“I’m absolutely outraged that this has reached this level, it should all stop tomorrow,” concluded Dr. Hodkinson.

Hodkinson’s credentials are beyond question, with the MedMalDoctors website affirming his credibility.

“He received his general medical degrees from Cambridge University in the UK (M.A., M.B., B. Chir.) where he was a scholar at Corpus Christi College. Following a residency at the University of British Columbia he became a Royal College certified general pathologist (FRCPC) and also a Fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP).”

“He is in good Standing with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and has been recognized by the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta as an expert in pathology.”

In case the above video gets deleted by YouTube, a backup via Bitchute is available here.

 

The Creeping Collectivizaton Of Our Consciousness.

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Many people ask how we got to this point in our country, where everything now hangs in the balance, and the socialist takeover is quite real.  The answer to this question is twofold.

First, neither ordinary people nor public opinion leaders understand what socialism is, although there is a lot of literature on this topic.  However, there are very few academics whose works correctly describe the essence of socialism.  Their lonely voices drown in the stream of misconceptions about the subject.

The first misapprehension is that socialism is solely equated with Marxism and Marx’s materialist philosophical concepts.  The materialist definition of socialism posits communal ownership of the means of production, collective management, and distribution of wealth.  However, socialism is a generic notion, and Marxism is a theory of communism, the particular and extreme current of socialism.  Therefore, Marxism is undoubtedly socialistic, but it does not encompass the whole of socialism.  The materialist understanding of socialism missed a significant subject of collectivization: the individual himself.  Since the time of Plato, it has been known that socialism presupposes the subordination of the individual to the collective, which means the construction of a hierarchical society in which the elites rule the state and the commoners obey meekly.

History shows that the collectivization of consciousness is even more critical than the socialization of property.  It is no wonder that such socialist trends as fascism, national socialism, and reformism used the collectivization of consciousness as the main path to socialism.  But even the theory of communism proposed the dictatorship of the proletariat, first for the violent expropriation of private property into the collective and then for the subordination of the entire population to communist ideology.  Therefore, the definition of socialism must surpass the boundary of its materialist understanding and include ideas and practices of anti-materialist, anti-positivist flavors of collectivist ideology.  Socialism must be understood as a set of artificial socioeconomic systems characterized by varying degrees of socialization of property, the subjugation of individual consciousness, and a scale of wealth redistribution imposed on society by revolutionary or ruling elites without majority consent.

This definition united the collectivist ideology into one, identifying three main paths to socialism and pointing out its unnatural essence and cunning way of implementation.  If we apply this formulation to the United States, it becomes clear that socialist traits have long and firm roots in our society.  The United States successfully fought world communism but overlooked evolutionary socialism at home because it focused on features similar to communism and ignored other socialism qualities.

Evolutionary socialism, AKA reformism, AKA social democracy, AKA democratic socialism, used the same main paths to socialism as fascism and national socialism: the collectivization of consciousness and wealth redistribution.  Note that neither of these doctrines called for outright expropriation of private property on the means of production.  The only difference is that fascism and national socialism used bold revolutionary steps in the societal transformation.  In contrast, evolutionary socialism, as the name implies, chose the gradual evolutionary path.  Evolutionary socialism was designed to be invisible and gradually worked within the framework of democratic institutions.  Not surprisingly, the Fabian Society logo, which organization, together with Bernstein, was the founder of evolutionary socialism, featured a turtle, symbolizing the slow transition to socialism.  Their original coat of arms was the wolf in sheep’s clothing, representing the preferred method of achieving a goal.

The poison of socialism has been injected continuously into the healthy body of American capitalism since the first part of the 20th century.  You may be surprised, but the obligatory minimum wage rate is socialism; the proportional taxation system is socialism; rampant unionization including law enforcement and government employees is socialism; even mandatory car insurance is socialism.  The list can go on for several pages.  Evolutionary socialism has been overlooked and has now penetrated all spheres of life.  Now we vividly see the dramatic changes in the educational system, which became the indoctrination machine; in media, which became a socialist propaganda wing; and in Hollywood, which became an adherent of Soviet socialist realism.

Evolutionary socialism eventually became the prevailing trend among the American left, as anarchism and communism are relatively marginal forces.  Democrats used them as a paramilitary wing to promote socialist ideas on their behalf using intimidation, protests, and riots.  Thus, Antifa bases its violent actions on the myth that fascism and Nazism are right-wing political philosophies closely associated with capitalism.  Black Lives Matter (BLM) uses a narrative of state racism and targeted police brutality against blacks as the moral justification for its frantic protests.

At a specific moment, the evolutionary socialist transformations, both in people’s minds and in the economy, can no longer be hidden behind beautiful phrases about empathy, equality, brotherhood, and internationalism, and the wolf will throw off the sheepskin before taking its decisive leap.  The leftists feel they have enough support in society to make a last-ditch effort to seize power forever.  They no longer hesitate to commit voter fraud, introduce censorship, conceal information, and physically attack dissidents.

The hidden evolutionary path is coming to an end, and Democrats have shown their real intentions.  Either the left is establishing socialism, or the American people will finally defeat them.  But here is the problem that brings us to the second explanation of the current struggle.  Socialists were able to bring in pieces of socialism and reform the country’s laws because the U.S. has lacked a robust right-wing party.  It could be argued that the Republican Party is the right, but their position on the right is simply relative to that of the Democrats.  Across the political spectrum, Republicans are center-left at best.  They could neither recognize nor roll back the socialist transformation in American society.  If they were genuinely right, we would not be fighting socialism in the early 21st century.

The actual right party is a party that advocates for individual and economic freedom, supports the American constitution, and recognizes American exceptionalism.  Perhaps the American people still hold to these ideas, but the Republican Party does not reflect them in their deeds.  Moreover, leaders’ recent statements are astonishing.  Rubio said to Fox News’s Hannity, “I think the future of the Republican Party is as a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class party.”  Did he mean that the Republicans are racist, as the left claims?  Where does he get this leftist terminology: the working class, the proletariat?  It was Marx who divided society according to the place that people occupy in production.  His classification is meaningless outside his erroneous theory.  Yet GOP officials continue to use left-wing jargon instead of opposing the Democratic position and firmly defending individual and economic freedoms.

Thus, we have come to this point in American history because evolutionary socialism was overlooked, and there was no strong right-wing party that could recognize and reject socialist tendencies.  Since most Republican elites are not trustworthy right, but center-left, even if the Democrats lose this time, they will eventually get their way, as our bipartisan system has a predominantly left-wing gradient.  To stop socialist inclinations, the Republican Party must be transformed into at least a center-right party, or there should be a brand-new right-wing party.

Everyone should understand that if the socialist current of any flavor is given sufficient run time, all means of production will inevitably be socialized, and the individual will be coercively subjugated to the collective.  That is why democratic socialism is as dangerous as fascism or communism.

Individuals Beware! The Tech Collectivism Of The Great Reset Aims At Your Extinction.

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If one takes the publications of the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an indication of how the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will change society, the world is facing a massive onslaught against individual liberty and private property. A new kind of collectivism is about to emerge. Like the communism of the past, the new project appeals to the public with the assurance of technological advancement and social inclusion. Additionally, ecological sustainability and the promise of longevity or even immortality are used to entice the public. In reality, however, these promises are deeply dystopian.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and current executive chairman of the WEF, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2016) represents a new stage of the disruptive technological advances that began toward the end of the eighteenth century with the textile industry and the use of steam power. The Second Industrial Revolution took place in the decades before and after 1900. It created a plethora of new consumer goods and production technologies that allowed mass production. The third Industrial Revolution began around 1950 with the breakthroughs in digital technologies. Now, according to Klaus Schwab, the fourth Industrial Revolution means that the world is moving toward “a true global civilization.”

The fourth Industrial Revolution provides the potential “to robotize humanity, and thus compromise our traditional sources of meaning—work, community, family, identity.” Schwab predicts that the fourth Industrial Revolution will “lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness.”

Transhumanism is part of the transformation that comes with the fourth Industrial Revolution, as artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass even the best human performances at specific tasks. The new technologies “will not stop at becoming part of the physical world around us—they will become part of us, Schwab declares.

In the foreword to Schwab’s latest book, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018), the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, states that the evolution of the new technologies “is entirely within our power.” Microsoft and the other high-tech companies “are betting on the convergence of several important technology shifts—mixed reality, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.”

Satya Nadella informs readers that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM will cooperate in an AI partnership that will work to develop and test the technology in fields such as “automobiles and healthcare, human-AI collaboration, economic displacement, and how AI can be used for social good.”

All-Embracing Transformation

In the preface to his latest book, Klaus Schwab predicts that the fourth Industrial Revolution will “upend the existing ways of sensing, calculating, organizing, acting and delivering.” He states that “the negative externalities” of the present global economy harm “the natural environment and vulnerable populations.”

The changes that come with the new technologies will be comprehensive and will topple “the way we produce and transport goods and services.” The revolution will upset how “we communicate, the way we collaborate, and the way we experience the world around us.” The change will be so profound that the advances in neurotechnologies and biotechnologies “are forcing us to question what it means to be human.”

Like Satya Nadella’s foreword, Schwab’s text reiterates several times the claim that the “evolution of the fourth Industrial Revolution” is “entirely within our power” when “we” use the “window of opportunity” and drive for “empowerment.” The “we” that both authors speak of is the global technocratic elite that calls for central control and state interventionism (called “shaping the future”) in a new system that is characterized by intimate cooperation between business and government, or, more specifically between high tech and a handful of key states.

The World Economic Forum’s webpage about the “Great Reset” proclaims that “the Covid-19 crisis” presents “a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery.” At the present “historic crossroads,” the world leaders must address “the inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions” ranging from healthcare and education to finance and energy. The forum defines “sustainable development” as the central aim of the global management activities.

The “Great Reset” calls for global cooperation to attain goals such as “harnessing the fourth Industrial Revolution,” “restoring the health of the environment,“ “redesigning social contracts, skills, and jobs,” and “shaping the economic recovery.” As thematized at the October 20–23, 2020, “Jobs Reset Summit,” a “green recovery” from the covid-19 crisis promises a “green horizon.” The WEF summit in January 2021 will specifically address the transformations that are to come. The main topics include “stable climate,” “sustainable development,” a “zero carbon” economy, and agricultural production that would reduce cattle farming in tune with the global reduction of meat consumption.

The Alternative

The rise of living standards together with the growth of the world population became possible because of the Industrial Revolution. Those who want to bring down capitalist society and the economy must necessarily opt for declining living standards and depopulation. The promoters of the plans to bring about a new world order with the force of the state negate that radical capitalism could much better provide the means to move to a better world, as has been the case since the inception of the First Industrial Revolution.

What brought about the industrial revolutions of the past were free markets and individual choice. As Mises explains, it was the laissez-faire ideology that produced the First Industrial Revolution. There was a spiritual revolution first that brought an end to “the social order in which a constantly increasing number of people were doomed to abject need and destitution” and where the manufacturing activity “had almost exclusively catered to the wants of the well-to-do” and their “expansion was limited by the amount of luxuries the wealthier strata of the population could afford.”

The ideology of the World Economic Forum is that of the preindustrial era. While the website of the forum (WEF) teems with terms like “power,” “organization,” and managed “sustainable development,” concepts like “freedom,” “market coordination,” and “individual choice” are blatantly absent. The forum hides the fact that instead of human progress, impoverishment and suppression is the future of humankind. The implicit consequence of the planned “ecological economy” is the drastic reduction of the world population.

With the abolishment of markets and the suppression of individual choice, which the collectivist plans of the WEF propound, a new dark age would come. Different from what the planners presume, technological progress itself would come to a standstill. Without the human creativity that springs from the mindset of individualism, no economic progress has ever been possible.

Conclusion

The new technologies that come with the fourth Industrial Revolution can be of immense benefit to humankind. The technologies per se are not the problem but how they are used. A dystopian future awaits us if the global elite of the World Economic Forum has its say. The result would be a technocratic terror regime masked as a benevolent world government. Yet there is an alternative. As widely proven over the past two hundred years, free markets and individual choice are the sources of technological advancement, human progress, and economic prosperity. There are no rational reasons to presume that the fourth Industrial Revolution would require collectivism. Free markets are the best way to cope with the challenges that come with new technologies. Not less but more capitalism is the answer.

Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil.

How Do We Heal A Divided Country? Entrepreneurship.

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The results of the 2020 presidential election suggest that the U.S. has never been more divided politically. The major party presidential candidates received more than 70 million votes each. The distribution of votes clearly indicates the country is almost evenly divided between support for Republican incumbent President Donald Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden. Unfortunately, the close election has led to a legal fight that is creating a more intense and sustainable divide in the country.

This divide is particularly dangerous for our democracy because it has resulted in widespread mistrust in the ability of the U.S. to come together as it has so many times in the past. The most disturbing thing about this divide is that it goes much deeper than the support of the two candidates. The citizens of this country are split on the way to handle critical issues like health care, poverty, education, the environment, the economy, climate change, Supreme Court appointments, abortion and the handling of the pandemic. There is a disbelief in the ability of the leaders of the “other” party to effectively address these issues. The good news is that entrepreneurship policy has the potential to cross the political divide and effectively address many of the most critical issues facing society.

Supporters of both campaigns agree that small business entrepreneurship is one of the reasons the U.S. has become the richest country in the history of the world. The small businesses that hire local residents have been the backbone of local economies in large cities, small suburbs and rural farms. These mom-and-pop family businesses provide many of the jobs in America and enable people to feed their families. Unfortunately, the pandemic has devastated small businesses in both Democratic and Republican communities. The Main Street businesses in suburbs have been hurt as badly as the small businesses in urban communities and the family farms in rural communities.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U-6 measure of employment, there are more than 11 million people currently unemployed. The closing of small businesses because of the pandemic has led to a 47% increase in U-6 unemployment from the same period in 2019. The next president has to focus on increasing employment by making the support, revitalization and sustainable success of small local businesses a major focus of his public policy. When communities have a thriving small business economy, there are more middle class jobs. Research suggests that these jobs ultimately lead to higher quality health care, better housing, a cleaner environment and even higher student achievement.

Urban, suburban and rural communities that have sustainable small business jobs have lower rates of crime, homelessness, poverty and a cleaner environment. Many large businesses have increased their profitability because they were allowed to remain open during the COVID crisis while small businesses have been closed. Major technology businesses have also grown exponentially because of the increased online sales. The success of many large businesses and struggles of small businesses has resulted in a growing income divide between the wealthiest 5% of Americans and the bottom 50%. The wealth of people who are shareholders in large corporations has grown exponentially, while the income of entrepreneurs and small business employees has dropped significantly during the pandemic.

The most impactful way to address this disparity (in a manner that appeals to both Trump and Biden supporters) is to provide tax incentives (such as a reduced capital gains tax and immediate depreciation of capital investment) to wealthy individuals and organizations willing to invest in small businesses in geographic areas currently designated as Opportunity Zones. I call this the “Entrepreneur Zone Program” or “EZP.” In this program, individuals or organizations that invest in or provide low-cost loans to small urban, Main Street and farm businesses in these zones will receive significant tax breaks to compensate them for taking the risk of supporting these businesses.

To accelerate small business employment, the government could provide entrepreneur grants and issue small business bonds through the Small Business Administration specifically for the businesses in federally approved entrepreneur zones. These programs would not be a burden on taxpayers and potentially lead to an injection of billions of dollars into businesses (in both conservative and liberal communities) that desperately need a lifeline to survive. This lifeline would result in more middle class jobs throughout America.

We are in the midst of a crisis in this country that we have never experienced before. Establishing bipartisan public policies supporting small businesses in Democratic and Republican communities is one of the most effective ways to get the U.S. to become more united and survive this exceedingly difficult period in our history.

Dale G. Caldwell is a professor and the executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Rothman Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

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