Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Leftist Legislation Has Turned The Traditional US Corporation Into A Vehicle For Socialism. Time For New Organizational Innovations.

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Socialists would rather the traditional American firm did not exist. Animosity towards the capitalist boss for reaping all the rewards of his employees’ labor, or (perhaps worse) towards the joint-stock corporation, where workers don’t even know who they’re being exploited by, is a staple of socialist rhetoric. Ideally, corporations would be replaced by worker-owned cooperatives or nationalized sectoral industries, but if not, they’ll be strictly controlled through regulation, and their owners and stockholders taxed to oblivion.

Margaret Thatcher called this “the politics of envy.” Her message that it was sinful successfully countered the idea that profit is about greed and turned the British Labour Party from a democratic-socialist party to a social-democracy party for over two decades.

But now the politics of envy is back in a big way. Not only are corporations accused of greed, they are alleged to be destroying the planet. New-style businesses such as Uber are accused of not just exploiting workers but outright cheating them. Yet increasingly socialists, realizing the political impossibility of getting rid of the corporations, are turning to co-opting them instead.

Corporations grow up because entrepreneurs need to find investors to help finance their businesses. In addition, to keep transaction costs low, they need to hire employees rather than contract for each individual routine transaction. That’s the foundation of the corporate structure of owners, management, and workers.

Governments, Major Media Outlets, And Major Institutions Actively Sabotage Innovation And Iconoclastic Entrepreneurship.

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There’s a famous story of a Canadian inventor who developed an inexplicably fuel-efficient carburetor. Men from the oil industry reached out to him. The inventor soon disappeared and he and his carburetor were ultimately never seen or heard from again.

The story is of course patently bogus. Countless variations of it have been told since the early 20th century. The only remarkable part of the story is that it is inspired by a real Canadian inventor, Charles Nelson Pogue, who developed some patents that in no way shape or form paved the way for miraculous gains in fuel efficiency.

Still, it’s highly instructive that this has become an enduring urban legend. After all, an erudite lecture from the late Harvard professor Calestous Juma on “innovation and its enemies” is going to demand a lot more cognitive load. In lieu of that lecture, the urban legend of the miracle carburetor gets the same point across just fine; powerful interests do not always profit from technology getting better and faster.

In professor Juma’s 2016 tour de force historical overview of the various factions and socio-economic forces that impede innovation, he exposes the unholy alliance that often forms between “incumbent” firms on the one hand, and governments and reigning legacy institutions on the other. Juma provides a simple and obvious reason for this alliance: Governments, major media outlets, and other leading institutions obtain the lion’s share of their revenue from monopolistic incumbent firms. Hence, those institutions use regulations, propaganda, and other choice strategies to support incumbent firms, and sabotage iconoclastic entrepreneurs.

The illiberal anti-free expression philosophy that has taken hold across major American institutions is almost certainly a manifestation of those institutions underlying incentives to control innovation. Trying to crush innovative efforts on an ad-hoc, case-by-case basis is tiresome stuff. The US government hasn’t had much luck trying to shut down bitcoin. It’s far more effective to foster an environment with salient cultural restrictions on creativity and inquiry. That way, with a bit of luck, tyrants needn’t worry about blockchain coming into existence in the first place.

The authoritarian excesses of cancel culture cannot be divorced from the deep incentives felt by status quo industries and institutions. The idea that American institutions have been taken over by a principled left-wing ideology, championed by a mob of ideologues, is a misread of the actual situation. Indeed, there is rigorous documentation that American universities as prestigious as Yale are sacking professors who’ve voiced opinions (in jest) that raised the ire of conservatives.

A thorough review of the data on professors who were fired and demoted, over things that they said, confirms that many of them strayed too far to the left of the status quo. The reality of cancel culture is that anyone who offends enough people, or powerful enough people, is putting their career in jeopardy. Certainly, public outrage is a key component of cancel culture. With that said, the leaders of contemporary industries and institutions bear no undue burden on account of rank-and-file folks enabling their unforgiving despotism.

Principled ideology does not underlie the illiberal dysfunction in contemporary institutions. The underlying reasons are far crasser. Major institutions, and the oligopolies that fund them, have a vested interest in keeping a lid on free thought and free expression, simply to preserve the status quo. The highest ranking members of these organizations feel insecure in the face of technical and scientific change. Our current leaders don’t want to find themselves departing for anachronism and obscurity like the Catholic Church and European Nobility two centuries ago.

Authorities like Oxford Martin and the International Monetary Fund have raised concerns about the current ability of monopolistic firms to suppress innovation. Top firms have achieved unprecedented market power in recent decades. Such firms can erect barriers to entry and horde assets like intellectual property, in order to thwart their emerging competitors. The Atlantic and The Verge have brought these concerns before a popular audience.

Lobbying for regulations that block disruptive entrepreneurs is an effective strategy favored by incumbent firms. In the late 19th century, American butter manufacturers successfully lobbied for anti-margarine laws. Cell phones would have been rolled out decades earlier if not for the radio spectrum being restricted, thanks to the lobbying efforts of broadcasters and radio common carriers. Tobacco interests have successfully lobbied against e-cigarettes. Academic research shows that top firms have obtained a healthy return on investment from lobbying and regulations, especially since the 2000s.

Another preferred method for fighting innovation is the use of propaganda. American Express has promoted an outlandish claim that cryptocurrencies are particularly bad for the environment. Thomas Edison famously went to extravagant lengths to make alternating current look dangerous and impractical since he was invested in direct current. Edison’s propaganda campaign included such macabre aspects as electrocuting dogs with alternating current and promoting its use for capital punishment.

It’s ironic because years earlier Edison had to jump through untold political hoops to introduce electric lighting to New York City and overthrow the incumbent—and less efficient—gas lighting industry. However, Edison’s hypocritical actions later in life are consistent with a rational decision-maker following the profit motive. The truth is that innovation is an industry’s double-edged sword; it’s good when it helps your bottom line and bad when it replaces your product line.

Thomas Edison’s meta-strategy is still being employed by Sir James Dyson. Dyson fought a five year legal battle against the EU because Europe’s mandatory energy efficiency tests were set up to make Dyson vacuums look less efficient than the competition. The competition—established German vacuum manufacturers—had lobbied for tests that were essentially rigged in their favor. Aside from those heroics, Dyson has funded credulous research that suited his company’s interests. This was in the context of an ongoing cutthroat PR war between Dyson and the respective manufacturers of paper towels and standard hot-air dryers.

Naturally, Dyson has promoted the company’s patented jet air dryer as the most hygienic and environmentally friendly way for a person to clean their hands. The other two factions responded in kind by promoting their own self-serving narratives. All three factions have funded scientific studies with a suspicious tendency to return results that suit the best interest of the funder. One major study with bona fide independent funding determined that paper towel was the most hygienic hand drying method. Of course, Dyson has funded research that promoted its jet air dryer.

Incumbent firms may not even be especially keen to test the limits of their own innovative prowess. Bell Labs suppressed the recording technology that they developed in the early 1930s. Senior management correctly assumed that such technology would have profound ramifications for society. However, they were being quite paranoid in thinking that people would stop using telephones because of it. These days, firms purposely design technology so that it stops working or at least loses some functionality by a predetermined date. This practice of planned obsolescence is considered a best practice.

The upshot is that monopolistic firms have a vested interest in controlling the wild world of pure research. There’s literally no telling what curiosity-driven research will produce next; it could just as easily bless or smite a given corporation. Industries are compelled to exercise control over the double-edged sword that is innovation.

Innovation is the raison d’être for universities. But not unlike Bell Labs—the birthplace of C++, the transistor, and Unix—universities can’t be expected to be entirely gung-ho about innovation. The university’s shift to authoritarianism stems from fear of a world turned upside down by tech start-ups that don’t care about traditional higher education, and enumerable manifestations of open source. This existential uncertainty strengthens the natural partnership between universities and incumbent oligopolies.

It’s very important to note that the oligarch-institutions alliance will not benefit from a zero growth, zero innovation regime. Unlike ancient kings and priests, their power isn’t predicated upon simply maintaining peace and order. Their success hinges on innovation and growth, and yet, they need growth that they can control.

That’s not to say that the struggling masses would benefit from uncontrolled innovation. The atomic bomb, climate change, mass surveillance, and unclean air all came out of innovation. Innovation is a double-edged sword no matter who wields it, and so whoever takes up that blade must do so with a sense of control and skill. Does this mean that the oligarch-institutions alliance is simply serving its purpose in a functionalist sense?

The age of COVID-19 rips that pretense apart. Humanity cannot afford the sort of antics Dyson engaged in, commissioning research that purposely distracts from the public health risk of blasting aerosolized pathogens all over a washroom. Humanity cannot afford health organizations that dodge important questions, nor ones that give incorrect advice only to retract it after the damage is done. It’s important to note, the symbiotic relationship between powerful corporations that may have a conflict of interest with the facts, and institutions that do a poor job of finding and conveying the facts.

Miraculously, there is hope for innovation. The internet has allowed for the creation of a new intellectual ecosystem that champions innovation. The internet provides a perfect space to leverage the wisdom of the crowd and hash out a solution. What is certain is that we need to fight for a free and open internet, and keep pushing for revolutionary technologies—like blockchain—that empower people.

 

William Tomos Edwards is a writer, philosopher, and the founder of Bright Tapestry Data. This article first appeared at fee.org.

Forced Face-Mask Wearing Is A Brutal Act That Finally Signifies Descent Into A De Facto Repressive State.

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Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon River in 49 BC in defiance of Roman law placed him and his army on a direct collision course with Rome, leading to the Civil War which established him as Roman dictator. It is a well-established metaphor for a point at which there is no going back and at which things will never be the same.

I predicted a few weeks ago that the UK Government would in the near future try to force everyone to wear facemasks in public. Leave aside the plethora of information that makes it clear face masks are of practically zero benefit in everyday circumstances, and may, in fact, be dangerous, the forced wearing of facemasks is a transgression so fundamental and of such significance that it is difficult to adequately express.

It implicitly hands your body over to state control, and renders one of your most basic existential freedoms subject to state interference. For the first time, the right to exercise a choice of whether you should inhibit your respiratory faculties and hide your face in public is taken out of your hands. If you doubt the significance of this, try to remember the public outcry that followed a debate regarding banning the wearing of burkhas and hijabs in the face of Islamic terrorism, and the connotations this had for civil liberties at the time.

Facemask wearing is the visible hallmark of Asian states perceived in the West as repressive and authoritarian. It is a badge of serfdom, akin to the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. There is no greater invasion of your person possible short of tattooing you with a number.

This astonishing about-turn in policy has not happened overnight or without preparation. It has been preceded by a cleverly-orchestrated media campaign which seeks to bizarrely turn established professional and scientific research on its head, making virologists, infection-control bodies and academics who have published papers for the medical profession into liars and charlatans.

This campaign has included editorials and blogs which talk in disapproving and accusatory tones of “mask-shirkers” and “mask-deniers” allegedly “refusing” to wear face masks. Leave aside the obvious fact that refusal cannot take place without a demand: in other words someone has to give you an instruction to which you reply, “No, thanks.”

Absent such a demand, you are not refusing anything, merely making a choice. And until now there has been no such demand. But those making this choice are now psychopaths and enemies of humanity without a shred of integrity, respect or regard for their fellow human beings. When I returned from Asia early this year the advice was clear: face masks do not protect you from infection and it is not advised that you wear them.

What is more, face mask wearing was actively discouraged because of limited supplies required for hospital environments, where infection control is king and every precaution makes sense. Above all the only situation in which it is appropriate to wear a facemask in public is if you are unwell and have a cough, in which case why not stay at home?

But this piece of simple logic has been covered by the mask-advocates whose logic runs like this: “You may have coronavirus without knowing it, and may infect others with your breath even at unlimited distances so you need to wear a mask.” This covers all bases despite the evidence for this being at best negligible and at worst manipulated and dishonest.

It is part of the greater logic that renders every societal value worthless unless it contributes to the impossible task of making sure that not one single individual anywhere, ever, is infected with Covid-19. None of this means I think we should do nothing about this pandemic. But there is now a growing awareness that the cure proposed is not indefinitely sustainable and may in fact be worse than the disease.

The virtue-signaling of face-mask advocates is easily refuted. Facemasks have been available for decades for use in industry and ideas generally considered good are taken up by the public. Nobody needed the government to tell them to go out and buy a car or a television set.

So if you’re so convinced face masks are a good idea why has it taken the State to tell you before you came to this Eureka moment?

And for how many years or decades have you been going around disrespectfully infecting your fellow human beings by going out without a mask when you had a cold or the flu?

However, apparently all the established research is now wrong and face mask wearing is essential. It is a vast game of “Simon Says,” in which we only do anything when Simon says. And it won’t stop there. Expect newspapers like the Guardian to run sanctimonious editorials demanding that face-mask wearing be extended to pubs and restaurants, and eventually to every departure from your home.

Following this such a move will become policy: indeed, the British public will do what they are already doing, gleefully embracing this perverse doctrine, boasting of buying colorful face masks for their children, and showering anyone who has a different point of view with disapproval.

I’m forced now to doubt that we, the British people value our freedom as much as we profess to. We take to the streets in droves to embrace new forms of repression, such as an anarchistic movement that seeks to rewrite history and dismantle our police forces, or an anti-human death cult that seeks to suppress all human activity by frightening us all into believing we are destroying the Earth by existing.

But in the face of mounting attacks on our liberty and our freedom, we are silent. We have had our liberty taken away from us. Our movements are monitored. Our discussions are censored via social media. We are no longer free even to make fundamental choices about our bodies. A public that will silently accept these things has learned nothing from history, will accept anything and deserves its fate if that is a dystopian world-state.

We are no longer entitled to lecture other nations about being repressive states. Their representatives, quite rightly in my view would laugh in our faces. There is a growing fear in the minds of many of us that Western lockdowns may be permanent. The specters of identity cards, martial law and forced vaccination now hover over us.

Dismissing this as “conspiracy theory” and accusing those who feel this way of an inhuman disregard for life is the rhetoric of fascism, a force that always thrives in the face of a perceived threat. I believe forced face-mask wearing in British streets is a brutal act that crosses the Rubicon, and finally signifies our descent into a de facto repressive state.

Mark Chapman is an artist and educator based in the UK. This article first appeared at off-guardian.org. You can read more of his work at his blog Humanism

To Deal With The Pandemic, Let Everyone Catch The Disease To Get Immunity. My Grandma Knew That.

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Murray Rothbard’s wonderful History of Economic Thought opens with a blast against what he called the Whig theory of intellectual history. It’s a variant of the Victorian-era idea that life is always getting better and better, no matter what. Apply it to the world of ideas, and the impression is that our current ideas are always better than ideas of the past. It rules out the possibility that there is lost knowledge in history, peculiar incidences when humanity knew something for sure and then that knowledge mysteriously went away and we had to discover it again.

I’m writing this under a five-month near-global lockdown for fear of a new virus. And just today, a major epidemiologist in the UK, Raj S. Bhopal, dared say precisely what my mother said at the outset of this disease: the way we must manage it is to develop natural immunities to it. Yes, he said the taboo thing: people who face no fatal threat need to get it. This is precisely what my mother told me back in February.

It’s a bit late but at least the subject is finally on the table. The idea of (badly named) herd immunity is consistent with how all societies have come to manage diseases. Protect the vulnerable while groups at no or low risk acquire the immunities. It is especially important to understand this if you want to preserve freedom rather than pointlessly impose a police state out of fear and ignorance.

It’s extremely odd that we woke up one day in the 21st century when such knowledge seemed almost to evaporate. When famed statistician and immunologist Knut Wittkowski went public with the basics of viruses, he created shock and scandal. YouTube even deleted his videos!

How did my mother know about immunities? Because her mother taught this to her, and hers before her. It was a major public-health priority after World War II in the United States to school each generation in this counterintuitive truth. It was taught in the schools: do not fear what we have evolved to fight but rather strengthen what nature has given you to deal with disease. Professor Bhopal dared say what few others have been willing to say but which seems obviously the case when you look at areas of the world where the virus is fully under control (New York and Sweden, for example).

My next question: why is herd immunity a taboo topic in the 21st century? Perhaps this is a case of Rothbardian-style lost knowledge, similar to how humanity once understood scurvy and then didn’t and then had to come to understand it again. Somehow in the 21st century, we find ourselves in the awkward position of having to relearn the basics of immunology that everyone from 1920 to 2000 or so seemed to understand before that knowledge somehow came to be marginalized and buried.

Yes, this is hugely embarrassing. The science never left the textbooks. It’s right there for anyone to discover. What seems to have gone missing is popular understanding, replaced with a premodern run-and-hide theory of disease avoidance. It’s so bad that even the imposition of police states around the country, including brutal shutdowns and house arrest, have not inspired anywhere near the level of public resistance that I would have expected. It’s like everyone gradually became ignorant on the whole topic and so they were caught off guard when politicians announced we had to get rid of human rights to fight a novel virus.

Here is Rothbard on this problem of lost knowledge and the Whig theory that such things do not happen:

The Whig theory, subscribed to by almost all historians of science, including economics, is that scientific thought progresses patiently, one year after another developing, sifting, and testing theories, so that science marches onward and upward, each year, decade or generation learning more and possessing ever more correct scientific theories.

On analogy with the Whig theory of history, coined in mid-nineteenth century England, which maintained that things are always getting (and therefore must get) better and better, the Whig historian of science, seemingly on firmer grounds than the regular Whig historian, implicitly or explicitly asserts that ‘later is always better’ in any particular scientific discipline.

The Whig historian (whether of science or of history proper) really maintains that, for any point of historical time, ‘whatever was, was right’, or at least better than ‘whatever was earlier’. The inevitable result is a complacent and infuriating Panglossian optimism. In the historiography of economic thought, the consequence is the firm if implicit position that every individual economist, or at least every school of economists, contributed their important mite to the inexorable upward march. There can, then, be no such thing as gross systemic error that deeply flawed, or even invalidated, an entire school of economic thought, much less sent the world of economics permanently astray.”

Rothbard’s entire book is an exercise in discovering lost knowledge. He was fascinated with how A.R.J. Turgot could have written with such clarity about value theory but the later writings of Adam Smith were murky on the topic. He was intrigued that the classical economists were lucid on the status of economic theory but later economists in the 20th century became so confused about it. You could observe the same about free trade doctrine: once it was understood almost universally such that everyone seemed to agree it had to be a priority to build peace and prosperity, and then, poof, that knowledge seems to have vanished in recent years.

On a personal note, I recall how passionate Murray felt about the issue of lost knowledge. He was also urging his students to find cases, document them, and explain how it happens. He always suspected that there were more cases that needed to be discovered and investigated. His writings on the history of ideas are a major effort to document as many cases as he could find.

Another intriguing feature: one might suppose that knowledge would be less likely to be lost in the information age in which we all carry in our pockets access to nearly all the world’s information. We can access it with just a few clicks. How did this not protect us against falling prey to a medieval-style theory of disease management? How did our fears and reliance of computer modeling so easily displace inherited wisdom of the past? Why did this new virus trigger brutal attacks on rights whereas nothing like this has happened in the previous century of new viruses?

George Washington’s troops scrapped off the scabs of the smallpox dead to inoculate themselves, but we cower in our homes in fear and obedience for a virus that is 99.6% non-fatal and is fatal mostly for people who lived four years longer than the average life span. Friends of mine who caught the virus and developed immunities are still treated like lepers even though there is not one single verified case of reinfection from C-19 in the world.

I can only say this. Murray Rothbard right now would be astonished at how medical ignorance, fake science, and the lust for power all combined so suddenly to create the greatest global crisis in modern history for the cause of liberty to which he devoted his life. If anything has demonstrated that Rothbard was correct about the fallacy of the Whig theory, and the capacity of humanity suddenly to act and total ignorance of what was once widely known, it is these last five months of folly.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. this article appeared at aier.org.

To Relive We The Living Is To Choose The Benevolent Universe Premise Of Our Childhood.

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America in 2020, along with a few other mostly Western countries, is the most free, tolerant, and prosperous society the world has ever known. In the annals of human history, it is a very recent phenomenon. The incredible technological advances we take for granted, especially the extraordinary computer in the palm of your hand right now, would be impossible without the personal liberty that preceded it.

From Ludwig van Beethoven’s “heroic” period in the early 19th century, to the cowardly murder of Prince Ferdinand (by a Bosnian Serb terrorist from The Black Hand) in the early 20th century, humanity experienced the greatest surge we had ever known. The 19th century’s self-creation was morally superior, its capitalism was socially and economically superior, and its Romantic art was ethically superior, yet the 19th century’s dominant philosophers paved the way for World War I and Stalin’s Great Terror.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that helps us comprehend and resolve this contradiction because it addresses man’s relationship with the rest of the natural world. According to the Ayn Rand Lexicon, metaphysics is,

That which pertains to reality, to existence. Any natural phenomenon – any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given. It could not have occurred differently or failed to occur.

The philosophers of the 19th century who influenced the events of the 20th century were, among others, Immanuel Kant (“From such a crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned”), Georg Hegel (“To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual”), and Karl Marx (“Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value”).

In other words, people are inherently evil, the reality of the world is subjective, and self-sacrifice is our highest calling. As asserted by journalist and filmmaker Peter Savodnik in Woke America is a Russian Novel,

The metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing. The parallels between them then and us now, political and social but mostly characterological, are becoming sharper, more unavoidable.

The literary characters he uses are from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Turgenev’s Father and Sons, and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done, and Savodnik cites them as far-reaching examples of the philosophical conditions that culminated in the Russian Revolution,

The moment, or series of moments, when the language of nihilism and death acquired a certain currency and the possibility of the end of the old order came into focus.

In 2020 America, the language of nihilism is politically correct speech, whose politics is multiculturalism, and its metaphysics is egalitarianism – the equality of everyone’s choices and character. All of this negates human volition, aka free will. It presupposes our values, choices, and fate are predetermined at birth, and assigned to us by our political identity group. As Savodnik continues,

The similarities between past and present are legion: The coarsening of culture, the opportunism and fecklessness of so-called elites, the corruption of institutions, the ease with which Bernie Sanders’ romanticizes political revolution.

In her 1936 novel We the Living, 20th century Russian novelist Ayn Rand bridges the gap, and creates a fictional scene depicting the Russian Revolution’s White army surrender to the Reds at Melitopol in 1920,

Comrades! Let me greet in you the awakening of class consciousness! Another step in the march of history toward Communism! Down with the damn bourgeois exploiters! Loot the looters, comrades!

Class consciousness is fealty to your political identity group, Communism is the negation of human volition, and the bourgeois exploiters are the manufacturers and merchants who produce every material need and desire for human prosperity. But when a culture’s dominant philosophy becomes malevolent, and motivated by envy and fear, force replaces reason and trade is conducted by blood instead of money. Here, Savodnik describes the mindset needed to survive this metaphysical death premise,

Only idiots worried about the truth. There was no truth. What was most important was to keep one’s head down and, if need be, accuse wantonly. Accuse! Accuse! Accuse! Or as Americans like to say, the best defense is a good offense. Until all that was left was the pathetic, bloodless corpse of a country dislodged from itself.

We the Living dramatizes the Benevolent Universe Premise, aka the life premise. In her non-fictional The New Left, Rand defines this as “a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some only hold in their youth. The conviction that ideas matter, that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters.” In his article Justice in a Benevolent Universe, philosopher Onkar Ghate expands on this theme,

You must have a clear and sacred devotion to your own mind and life and to the inexorable requirements of reality. Through the heroine Kira Argounova, Rand depicts the nature of this metaphysical conviction. And in an ending of astonishing beauty and power, the story shows what it looks like to remain untouched, to the end, by the evil of one’s surroundings.

To that end, we cordially invite you to consider the We the Living Study Group on Facebook, join a unique group of active minds in our online forum, and awaken the soul of your childhood. The conversations will begin the week of August 2nd and cover Chapters 1 – 3. The weekly calendar for reading, questions, and commentary is posted in the About section of the group page. Sign up for our discussion group! The online forum is private, and the conversation is meant to be engaging, polite, and productive!

In Pursuit Of Foreign Dollars, Major Corporations Urge American Sports Leagues To Endorse BLM.

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On the night of the NBA’s return, Charles Barkley delivered the most defiant and courageous gesture.

Shortly after members of the Pelicans and Jazz uniformly kneeled during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, Barkley opined:

“The thing is, the national anthem means different things to different people. I’m glad these guys are all unified, but if people don’t kneel, they’re not a bad person. I want to make that perfectly clear. I’m glad they had unity, but if we have a guy that doesn’t want to kneel or the anthem means something to him, he should not be vilified.”

Barkley’s utterance took far more courage than the donning of Black Lives Matter T-shirts, the equality slogans stitched on the back of jerseys and the orchestrated knee bending in deference to Black Lives Marxist.

BLM does not scare or defy the establishment. BLM is the establishment. It’s corporate-mandated civil obedience. It’s commercial goods trouble. As in the global sellers of commercial goods — Nike, for instance — promote BLM trouble as a way to resist President Trump’s isolationist, America First agenda.

Good$ trouble is the bastard child of Civil Rights icon John Lewis’ good trouble, the 1960s-style civil disobedience that fought America’s discriminatory laws.

In an effort to protect global expansion and global revenue streams, corporate America and Big Tech have mandated allegiance to Black Lives Matter. LeBron James, Adam Silver, Roger Goodell, the NFL and Major League Baseball have embraced BLM because their corporate sponsors have demanded it.

There’s no risk or courage involved in taking a knee in 2020. The disobedience and rebellion will be shown by the athlete, coach, executive or media member willing to defy his/her corporate overlord.

On the set of Inside the NBA last night, Charles Barkley flirted with civil disobedience.

Corporate America wants anyone who fails to obey its BLM mandate framed as a racist or a sellout. Thursday night Big Tech’s social media apps accused Barkley of tap dancing for The Man.

Who’s The Man? Nike’s Phil Knight? Twitter’s Jack Dorsey? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg?

Oh, that’s right. President Trump is The Man. The understanding of the world’s problems have been simplified to the point that anything that opposes Trump is classified as good$ trouble and anything that doesn’t, well, you know… the resistance has a negative way of defining that behavior:

Standing for the national anthem does not oppose Trump, therefore, bad people stand for the anthem

Bad people criticize the people who kneel during the national anthem

Only an unabashed Trump supporter would question the righteousness of the fraudulent Black Lives Matter movement.

What about those of us who have legitimate concerns about BLM’s ties to Marxism, stated agenda to disrupt the nuclear family and its singular focus on the very rare instances of black lives lost to white police misconduct?

There are some good people who have sincere religious faith who recognize Marxism is hostile to religion and religious freedom. There are some good people who believe strong nuclear families are the best weapon against the negative impact of racism. There are some good people who believe preventing the pervasive gang violence that takes innocent black lives on a daily basis should be a higher priority than preventing the police brutality that occasionally harms a resisting suspect.

There are good people who believe it’s unwise to turn the national anthem into the national polarization. There are good people concerned that a lack of national pride will eventually undo all the good accomplished and racial progress made in this country.

Good people love America and want to preserve the anthem as a moment of unity.

Some good people are not obsessed with Donald Trump. They believe America’s founding principles — the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution — limit any president’s ability to permanently damage the United States of America.

And you know what? Some good people think President Trump’s America First agenda is exactly what this country needs at this moment. They believe our culture has too much foreign influence and that American corporations with global aspirations could not care less about the average American citizen.

Some good people see BLM for what it is — a beard masking major corporations’ pursuit of foreign dollars.

Corporate-approved slogans and gestures don’t end racism. They serve the interests of corporate deception. Decades ago, Big Tobacco baked cigarette smoking into American culture the way Big Tech is melding BLM into sports, movies and academia.

That’s why I call LeBron James the new Marlboro Man and national kneeling Good$ Trouble.

Author: Jason Whitlock via outkick.com

A Belief In Free Markets And Entrepreneurship Gives Meaning To Life.

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A growing body of behavioral-science research indicates that believing life has meaning helps individuals thrive. People who view their decisions as existentially weighty cope better with stress and tragedy. They also live longer and healthier lives. Disbelief in meaning is a major risk factor for depression, substance abuse and suicide. But the idea that our actions are consequential has effects beyond psychology. Our research has found that a sense of life’s meaningfulness is tightly tied to positive views of capitalism and entrepreneurship.

As part of a new institute at our university—the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth—we conducted a survey to investigate how the need for meaning relates to Americans’ beliefs about economic freedom and their entrepreneurial ambitions. We were interested in a specific motivational dimension of meaning, what we refer to as existential agency: the extent to which people believe they are capable of finding and maintaining meaning in life.

In our study, 1,269 American adults 18 to 88 completed questionnaires that assessed psychological characteristics (including existential agency), their general views on economic freedom, and the extent to which they believe capitalism can help solve large-scale challenges such as climate change, automation and poverty. They also responded to items assessing how much they believe entrepreneurship benefits society, as well as their own entrepreneurial motivation.

We found that existential agency is strongly associated with views about capitalism. The more people believe in their ability to live a meaningful life, the more they view capitalism and entrepreneurship as good for society. Among those who plan to start a business, existential agency strongly predicts how motivated they are to pursue their entrepreneurial goals.

Even accounting for income and employment status as well as other correlates of economic beliefs such as age and political ideology, the effects of existential agency remain statistically significant and strong. Existential agency has a unique effect on views about capitalism and entrepreneurship, as well as entrepreneurial motivation.

We believe these results make sense in light of previous experimental studies demonstrating that when people focus their attention on what gives them meaning, they feel more agentic, driven to pursue their goals, and optimistic about the future.

Champions of free markets regularly point out that capitalism has made life easier, safer and longer. This is true and worthy of celebration. But humanity is an existential species: People want more than safe and comfortable lives; they want their struggles to matter. The more Americans believe they can achieve a life of meaning, the more they will push for economic freedom and be inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit that has helped our nation flourish.

Mr. Routledge is a professor of management at North Dakota State University and Mr. Bitzan is the director of the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth. This article first appeared in wsj.com

Teachers Unions Overplay Their COVID-19 Hand, Undermining The Government K-12 Monopoly.

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If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.

Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.

Second, once the pandemic ends, many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing. They will continue home-schooling, switch to a private school, or push hard to end restrictions on the growth of charter schools. Third, as schools sit empty and homebound teachers draw their regular salaries for less effective work, there will be more opposition to more funding for public schools, which, in turn, will make local school boards amenable to lower-cost options such as charter schools.

Consider California. On July 17, Gov. Gavin Newsom decreed that neither government-run nor private schools may open in counties that have rising Covid-19 caseloads and hospitalizations. Like most governors who imposed lockdowns in March and April, he has completely abandoned the original “flatten the curve” rationale for lockdowns; the curve has flattened but the lockdowns remain. With current caseloads and hospitalization rates, 80% of California residents live in counties that won’t be allowed to open.

Even if the numbers allow them to open, teachers and staff members will have to distance themselves by at least 6 feet from each other and from children. Students in third grade and higher will be forced to wear masks. Even if Mr. Newsom backs down, school boards in Los Angeles and San Diego have already decided against in-person instruction for the start of the school year.

Public schools are dominant because they don’t need to compete for funds. Taxpayers are forced to finance them. If a family decides to take a child out of the local public school, thereby saving the school board the cost of educating that child, the family gets no tax break, no rebate. If a family finds a cheap private school that charges $8,000 in annual tuition, sending the child there makes economic sense only if the family values the private education by at least $8,000 more than they value the public education. That’s a high hurdle for most parents.

But with public schools’ shift to online instruction, the equation changes dramatically for two reasons. First, the public schools have done a poor job of adjusting to the new reality. Second, and possibly more important, online instruction eliminates arguably the most valuable service provided by public schools: child care. On net, therefore, the value of the online public school is much lower, especially for young children, than the value of in-person public school.

Many will opt instead to home-school. This summer, parents have had time to plan for the fall. Many of them are forming “learning pods,” which are small groups of families getting together to hire a teacher or a tutor to teach their kids.

What if, as I predict, home-schooling works, on average, better than the public schools before the pandemic? Once the pandemic ends, many parents will want to continue with home-schooling. A poll taken in May of 626 parents found 40.8% of them saying they were more likely than before the pandemic to enroll their child in “a home school, a neighborhood home-school co-op, or a virtual school” once the lockdowns ended. There are now about 56 million children in K-12 schools. Before the pandemic, an estimated two million children were home-schooled. If even a third of the 40.8% of parents who said they might take it up followed through, the number of home-schooled children would almost quadruple.

Even many who don’t home-school will push for an expansion of charter schools, which tend to be responsive to parents and can more easily fire poor teachers. The advantage for taxpayers is that charter schools cost, on average, thousands of dollars less than traditional public schools. Teachers unions won’t be in a strong position to object to a shift to lower-cost charters if they continue to object to the idea of teaching in person five days a week. The unions might even “settle” for charter schools over the dreaded home-school option.

Get ready. A school renaissance is coming.

Mr. Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and editor of “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.” This article first appeared at wsj.com.

Are You A Dissatisfied Consumer? You Are One Of The Geniuses Of Economic Betterment.

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Entrepreneurship is the intentional pursuit of value. This pursuit fuels the engine of economic growth. The entrepreneurs who achieve the realization of value become folk heroes, and the great firms that create value at scale – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google – are stock market heroes.

All of this is acceptable wisdom. However, it’s the wisdom of outcomes, of recording the score after the play has been completed. Who drew up the play? Don’t we concede some genius to the coach and the offensive co-ordinator as well as the quarterback and the wide receiver?

Who Is Pursuing Value?

In order to understand cause and effect, we have to start at the input, not the outcome. Who is actually pursuing value? How did the entrepreneur – or Apple – know that something new was needed? That some improvement was required to retain the role of stock market hero?

Henry Ford is often quoted as saying (although he probably didn’t), “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The implication is that he placed no faith in the identification of consumer needs. His preferred method was invention (coming up with something new through his own genius) followed by innovation (translating the invention into something that could be produced, and then sold on the market).

In fact, Ford’s attitude, according to Harvard Business Review, “had a very costly and negative impact on the Ford Motor Company’s investors, employees, and customers”. Because it turned out that, once consumers had Model T’s, they quickly decided that what they wanted was better cars. General Motors developed a response in the form of their “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose,” strategy which aimed to produce cars for distinct market segments aided by installment selling, used car trade-ins, closed car models, and annual model changes. The Ford Motor Company was quickly relegated to a minor, small-share role in the American automobile market.

Think of this as the genius of the consumer. One minute, they don’t have cars. Next minute they are demanding not only better cars, but also better ways to buy them, better aesthetics, greater variety and frequent upgrades. Such boldness, such expansive thinking, such imagination! Edison brought them lightbulbs, and they imagined a world of devices attached to an electricity grid providing on-call productivity services of all kinds. Steve Jobs brought them the iPhone and they interconnected themselves to each other and to sources of knowledge and to global supply chains.

The double genius of the consumer.

What is this genius? It is twofold.

First, it is consumers who actually create value. How so? Because they are the ones pursuing it.  Entrepreneurs and the innovators put resources – such as cars and refined gasoline and silicon chips and touchscreens and internet connections – into consumers’ hands, and then the consumers roar into action, their creativity unleashed by new affordances. They try to create as much value as they can with the new resources. They drive to work and drive to school and drive across America and put grocery and tools in the backs of their cars (Hey, Henry! Make me a pick-up truck!), and maybe sleep in the car (Hey, Henry! Make me an RV!) and maybe make music in the car by singing and whistling to themselves or to their kids in the back seat (Hey, Henry! Where is the radio?), and maybe find themselves wishing they could call home to say when they’ll be home for dinner (Hey, Henry! How about a carphone?). Value occurs entirely in the consumer’s domain (or the customer’s if you are in B2B). Value is a feeling of satisfaction in the consumer’s mind.

Which brings us to the second aspect of the consumer’s genius. It’s their dissatisfaction. Henry Ford wanted to accuse them of lacking imagination. He got it all wrong. Anyone can imagine the future (flying cars for example). Not many can get it right. Consumers don’t waste their time on such high error rate activities. They concentrate on a subject where they are always right: their own feelings of dissatisfaction. “Henry, we get wet driving your car in the rain!” “Henry, it’s really hard to change the tires.” “Henry, I can’t afford to pay you that amount of money all at once. Give me some time, won’t you?” “You said it only comes in black, but blue is my favorite color.”  “Henry, your Model T looks the same this year as it did last year.” “Henry, can you speed this thing up?” “Henry, I need to work remotely. Can you make my F150 like a mobile office?”

The consumer has big dreams.

How genius is this? Dissatisfaction indicates that the consumer is able to dream bigger than the producer. Every new invention that becomes an innovation and is introduced to the market is immediately scrutinized under the lens of dissatisfaction, critiqued and criticized. No matter how many millions or billions of development dollars went into it, no matter how many Ph.D. engineers and Harvard MBA’s brought it to market, it can not survive the consumer’s examination unimproved. Because the consumer has big dreams.

The genius of the consumer outstrips that of the entrepreneur. Economists see the entrepreneurial process as one of trial and error, with the emphasis on error – a lot of mistakes before arriving (with the help of consumer feedback, of course) at a salable proposition, which is defined as one that generates less dissatisfaction than some alternative on which the consumer could spend their money.

Entrepreneurs are still heroes of course. If they weren’t willing to invest time, money and ego into the process of trying to please consumers, despite all the rejections, then there would be no progress. We might still be driving Model T’s, because no entrepreneur was willing to suffer the wrath of dissatisfied customers. We love our entrepreneurs. And we especially love those with more empathy – more ability to listen to consumers’ complaints to stimulate their imaginations for future betterment.

But let’s not err in identifying the locus of genius in this market process. Let’s help consumers achieve their dreams (before those of the entrepreneur).

Our Sociopathic Political Leaders – Bloodless And Totally Devoid Of Human Empathy – Are Further Divided From The People They Rule Than Ever.

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Why watch COVID press conferences and briefings by politicians? They are just upsetting. These people seem to have no clue about why the virus is ignoring them. They keep issuing strange and arbitrary rules that they make up, change by the day, all enforced by intimidation and compulsion. They posture in this silly way as if their edicts have this virus under control when they clearly do not.

Even worse, and what chills me to the bone, is the strange absence of normal human emotion in their public performances. With day-to-day human communication in the presence of uncertainty, there would be some admission of the possibility of being wrong, of mistakes made, of the difficulty of knowing, of the limits of information to make informed decisions, of the pain wrought through such disruptive governance.

You don’t see any of this in these governor’s announcements. Despite all evidence, they act as if they have got this under control. They don’t admit error. They don’t admit ignorance. They stare straight at the cameras and issue edicts, without even an apology for all the lives they have ruined and continue to ruin. They talk down to us. Condescension in every word.

You are welcome to watch a typical case here, but no need since you know exactly what I’m talking about.

We don’t talk this way to each other. Instead, we share stories of how our lives have been affected. We share pain with each other, and frustration at how destabilized we feel, how we’ve been separated from family, how lockdowns have led us to dark places, how caged we feel. We worry about our finances, our loved ones, our very futures. We are astonished at how quickly and radically our freedoms have been taken away. And in sharing these stories with each other, we come to understand more and feel a bit of healing perhaps.

In short, we have empathy. The politicians on the other hand show none. They have glassy eyes that reflect cold blood. Even worse, they come across as bloodless, like generals who order troops around knowing with certainty that many people will die.

They rarely if ever talk about what they are doing in human terms. They talk about data, restrictions, trends in infections and hospitalizations, and death, but not as if any of this involves real humans or tradeoffs. They preen with certainty that is not really believable.

Adam Smith explained empathy as a feature of the human personality. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he wrote, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel like in the situation … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments … and become in some measure the same person with him.”

That’s what real life is like. But political life today seems to seek to banish that very human feeling. It’s as if they are playing a video game featuring all of us but we are mere figures on a screen programmed to do what they want. They have no obligation to understand us, much less worry about the pain they inflict, because, like figures on a gaming screen, we surely don’t feel pain at all.

And that is also how the media has come to talk of this calamity. Its numbers, charts, and trends, all highly alarmist and always with the same conclusion: the political class needs to impose more restrictions on us to make this virus go away. We sit helpless watching all of this unfold day after day, astonished that our rulers could be so impervious to what has taken place before our eyes.

The emotional gap between the rulers and ruled has never been wider in modern times. It seems completely unsustainable. It’s like they aren’t even trying to connect with people.

Politicians are no great shakes in normal times but they seem worse than ever now, throwing out law, tradition, morality, and even the appearance of caring about how their lockdowns have destroyed so many lives.

The question is why. Here is my attempt at an answer. The lockdowns have all been based on an implausible claim that viruses can be controlled via coercion, same as people can be. But they cannot. And it is not surprising to find enormous evidence, accumulating by the day, that everything they have done has achieved nothing.

Below is a chart that compares COVID deaths per million around the world against Oxford University’s government stringency index. If lockdowns achieved anything you could expect there to be some predictive power here. The more you lock down, the more lives you save. The lockdown countries could at least claim to have bolstered the lives of their citizens. What you see instead is: nothing. There is no relationship. There is the virus. There are lockdowns. The two operate as seemingly independent variables.Source

The political class has started to intuit this. They suspect in their heart of hearts that they have done something horrendous. They worry that this realization is going to spread. Then they will be held accountable, maybe not right away but eventually. And this is rather terrifying to them. Thus are they spending their days trying to forestall this moment of truth in hopes that the mess they made will eventually go away and they escape blame.

Which is to say: they are lying. Then they lie more to cover their previous lies. If you are going to push such a line in the face of the mounting evidence showing them to be frauds, if you are going to lie with impunity to keep the game going, you will have to steel yourself against emotion and empathy. You become a sociopath. This might be enough to account for their bloodless posturing.

There is another factor too: the more pain you inflict on people, the worse of a person you become. Power is dangerous even when not used, but deploying it brutally and pointlessly rots the soul. This is a good description of almost the entire ruling class around the world today, save a few civilized countries that never locked down.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. This article appeared at aier.org.

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