Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Lara Logan Does Have An Agenda – Principles

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The Poetic Justice Warrior Society Manifesto declares that “If you believe that your success and happiness are the result of your vision, attitude, and determination, not the favors of others, then you are an individualist.” Another way to communicate abstract concepts is to simplify them, to reduce them to their essentials. Who better than Poetic Justice Warrior Lara Logan herself?

I’m always gonna be crazy about dishes in the sink. Crazy! Because it’s a sign of disrespect. It says that you think someone else is going to clean up after you: that you’re not prepared to do it yourself.

In a society dominated by institutions that march to the beat of politically correct speech, egalitarianism, and mediocrity worship, finding an individualist among the ranks of politicians, professors, and journalists is a bit of a challenge.

Yet there was one at the icon of progressive ideology, CBS News, and their flagship news magazine, 60 Minutes. Logan was hired by CBS as an international correspondent in 2002, and quickly developed a reputation for her fearless reporting. Her professionalism was rewarded with a promotion to Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent in 2006, and Lara eventually became a regular contributor on 60 Minutes II.

Political Correctness

Another tenet of Poetic Justice Warriors is “Our lives are spent accumulating knowledge, learning from mistakes, and establishing principles for living that can only be altered through rational consideration, empirical evidence, and solving contradictions.” In November 2013, Logan was forced to take a leave of absence from CBS News after publicly apologizing for a 60 Minutes report that relied, in part, on an unreliable source.

After the segment aired that October, it was learned that a primary source, a member of the US Consulate security force in Benghazi, had lied. In response, Logan maintained her rectitude and owned it,

Today, we made a mistake, and that’s very disappointing for any journalist. That’s very disappointing for me. Nobody likes to admit they made a mistake. But you have to stand up and take responsibility, and you have to say you were wrong.

Of course Ms. Logan’s graciousness – praising the integrity of the journalist profession in her public apology, did not go unpunished. As social justice would have it, CBS News initiated her leave of absence about three weeks later, despite the fact that another CBS property, Simon and Schuster, published a book by the same source with the same lies. The CBS rationale was a Logan speech that was critical of the Obama administration’s response to the attack and murders at the Benghazi consulate.

Egalitarianism

Our Society also believes that “The unifying force for human flourishing is trust, which comes from commonly shared values and beliefs. Reason, individualism, and equal justice under law are the integrated system of values that maximizes trust.” Lara Logan adds,

If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.

The same cannot be said for the decivilizing force of New Journalism, which according to Wikipedia “is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style emphasizing “truth” over “facts,” and practiced at publications like New York magazine. The very idea of ‘subjective truth’ is a contradiction in terms, yet in logic, there can be no contradictions. It is a useless term meant to crush a legitimate concept – truth.

In postmodern groupthink, all “truth” carries equal merit. Until it doesn’t. There are no principles. As such, it makes sense that New York magazine would defame Logan’s fidelity to rational consideration of empirical evidence, and publish an article in May 2014 titled Benghazi and the Bombshell. It alleged that “Logan’s star power blinded her superiors to her flaws.” The writer also claimed “one way of looking at Lara Logan’s rise at CBS is as an antidote to the network’s perceived bias.”

Mediocrity Worship

So then, the subjective magazine published a subjective article by a subjective reporter about a subjective network who hired an objective reporter. Naturally, 60 Minutes scuttled their plans for returning Logan to the broadcast. As she explained last year,

If there are any independent journalists who are not beating the same drum, then we pay the price. If they can’t take down the substance, they smear you personally. They go after your integrity.

In contrast, the Poetic Justice Society rewards integrity, “We are optimists who are grateful for the personal liberties and leisure we enjoy today, and we know from whence it came.” When her contract with CBS expired in 2018, Logan walked away and explained,

What I can control is the work that I do. To date nobody has tried to make me do anything other than that. Nobody. I want to say this loudly and clearly to anybody who is listening. Nobody owns me. I’m not owned by the left. I’m not owned by the right.

If independence is a virtue to be punished, mediocrity is the vice to be rewarded. Mediocrity is not just average ability, but average intelligence mixed with envy, and it festers in today’s newsrooms, legislatures, and universities. As economist Friedrich Hayek explains about the authoritarian state, “Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.”

Bias Has Victims

Earlier this year she landed a new gig under the banner of Fox Nation, the paid subscription service of Fox News, including 16 new episodes titled Lara Logan Has No Agenda. She now describes much of the American news media as ‘political activists’ and ‘propagandists,’ particularly over the election of President Trump. In an interview with Joe Concha in The Hill she says about the new show,

It’s classic storytelling. It’s a journalism show, not an opinion show. And that was the purpose of the title, to cut through some of that spin so that people could see it for what it is, and not how it might be cast.

Logan describes the 20 – 30 minute episodes as “Going out there, reporting, having conversations. It’s the back-and-forth that I love so much. I’m naturally and instinctively drawn to that.” Some of them will investigate America’s southern border crisis – Two Sides to Every Story and North of the Border, as well as subjective media activism – Bias Has Victims and The Hidden Faces of Hate.

In the Hidden Face of Hate, Logan interviews Trevor Fitzgibbon, a one-time major consultant for the progressive left’s media war machine, until he crossed the wrong people on the left, and got smeared into lawsuits and bankruptcy. Logan reports, “He learned how the left leverages media, Hollywood, and civil society, including advocacy groups, watchdogs, and charitable foundations.” In Bias Has Victims, Logan airs a disturbing montage of progressive national broadcasters promoting violence, on prime-time air, for the cause of anti-fascism, by their own black-shirt fascists.

As philosopher Ayn Rand explained in her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, “There is no escape from justice, neither in matter nor in spirit. If the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.” Joe Concha tells us “Journalism needs Lara Logan.” Our Manifesto declares, “We are producers who sanction the well-being of all, but not our own victimhood.” 

Of course Lara Logan says it best, “I’m high maintenance. But I’m worth it.”

 

 

Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.

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Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Sweden is fighting coronavirus with common-sense guidelines that are much less economically destructive than the lockdowns in most U.S. states. Since people over 65 account for about 80% of Covid-19 deaths, Sweden asked only seniors to shelter in place rather than shutting down the rest of the country; and since Sweden had no pediatric deaths, it didn’t shut down elementary and middle schools. Sweden’s containment measures are less onerous than America’s, so it can keep them in place longer to prevent Covid-19 from recurring. Sweden did not shut down stores, restaurants and most businesses, but did shut down the Volvo automotive plant, which has since reopened, while the Tesla plant in Fremont, Calif., was shuttered by police and remains closed.

How did the Swedes do? They suffered 80 deaths per million 21 days after crossing the 1 per million threshold level. With 10 million people, Sweden’s death rate‒without a shutdown and massive unemployment‒is lower than that of the seven hardest-hit U.S. states—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey and New York—all of which, except Louisiana, shut down in three days or less. Despite stories about high death rates, Sweden’s is in the middle of the pack in Europe, comparable to France; better than Italy, Spain and the U.K.; and worse than Finland, Denmark and Norway. Older people in care homes accounted for half of Sweden’s deaths.

We should cheer for Sweden to succeed, not ghoulishly bash them. They may prove that many aspects of the U.S. shutdown were mistakes—ineffective but economically devastating—and point the way to correcting them.

Mr. Rodgers was founding CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp.

Politicians Did This. Their Choices To Restructure Society Have Resulted In Desperation For Many Americans.

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How many readers of this piece were demanding Zoom before its software was launched in 2013, or Postmates before drivers in its employ began meal delivery in 2011, or transportation at the touch of a button before Uber began operating in 2009? Traveling further back in time to the mid-1990s, how many readers were demanding books that would arrive at their door after buying them “online” on Amazon, or for that matter, how many were demanding internet services and “websites” to begin with?

It’s worth asking in consideration of Sen. Marco Rubio’s latest emotional outburst in the form of an op-ed in the New York Times. Seemingly still trying to come to terms with how little voters took to him during his 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination, Rubio continues to search for a policy raison d’etre through cloying opinion pieces that only succeed insofar as they remind us how lucky we are he never came close to the White House. That’s the case not because Rubio’s policy musings are ludicrous, though they are, but because individuals this needy shouldn’t be heading the most self-reliant nation on earth. Rubio writes: “Over the past several decades, our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society — choosing to prize economic efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment, individual enrichment over the common good.”

Books could be written….

Oh well, and with brevity somewhat in mind, it should be stressed that the U.S. economy was until recently the world’s most dynamic precisely because emotional puddles like Rubio were not making “choices about how to structure our society.” Some will say it’s because Rubio lacks any real world experience, others will just say he’s bereft of common sense, still others will say Rubio’s ghostwriter lacks any real economic understanding, but the why of Rubio really doesn’t matter. The Times’ piece is in Rubio’s name, and it naively presumes that brilliant economic outcomes that enable employment and living standards that are the envy of the world, can somehow be planned or “structured” by politicians.

In truth, it’s the present economy defined by tens of millions suddenly jobless that has the fingerprints of people like Rubio all over it. Desperate to be seen “doing something,” desperate to be needed, politicians of Rubio’s ilk insulted every American by presuming we all needed to be forced by politicians to avoid potential illness in rare instances, or death under the rarest of circumstances. The “structure” put in place by the political class that Rubio’s a fairly senior part of was to foist mass unemployment and bankruptcy on the people whom Rubio et al deemed a menace to other people. You can’t make this up. Using Rubio’s own words in a different way, “our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society” that has resulted in desperation for millions of Americans.

Politicians did this. In response to a virus, the political class foisted economic contraction on the American people, only to then extract trillions more from them so that they could throw money at what they broke.

In short, the Senator has it backwards. Before March of this year, Republicans and Democrats had done very little structuring of the economy. Evidence supporting the previous claim? The economy’s remarkable dynamism, that proved a magnet for investment from around the world.

Which brings us to Rubio’s line about politicians allegedly choosing “efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment.” Rubio should fire his ghostwriter, himself, or perhaps both. Indeed, it seems he’s unaware that the financial flows he resents are what make the “resiliency” he prizes possible in the first place. Think about it. And then think about it some more.

Could the political class of 1995 have shut down the economy in the way that Rubio et al did in 2020, and could they have cheered American resiliency in the face of staggering political ineptitude care of politicians? Not on your life. The U.S. economy couldn’t have been shut down simply because the Wall Street that Rubio so childishly disdains hadn’t yet financed the rollout of broad internet access, online shopping, takeout at the touch of smartphone button, and other Main Street comforts that have made the political class’s monumental errors in response to a virus at least somewhat palatable.

Rubio or his ghostwriter laments “offshoring” and “an economy based on finance and service,” but the truth is that that there’s no Senator Rubio without the globalization of production and the financing of that same production. Translated, Americans couldn’t be so careless about whom they elected in the days before “an economy based on finance and service” moved resources to remarkable innovators whose amazing advances made it possible for tens of millions of Americans to work from home amid a braindead lockdown authored by the political class, not to mention that it made it possible for tens of millions more to endure the impressive foolishness of politicians in relative comfort.

Rubio or his ghostwriter then makes the routine (for Rubio) tack toward China, and the lament that copious manufacturing in the former slum has meant Americans have suffered shortages of market goods like ventilators and, try not to laugh, hand sanitizer. Actually, until the political class chose to wrest freedom away from Americans in order to “structure” command-and-control, there were no shortages of anything, including jobs. Rich countries free of politicians prone to panic never worry about shortages simply because their efficient production born of interconnectivity with the whole world, interconnectivity financed by Wall Street, proves a major lure for the abundance produced globally.

It should be added that absent the stupendous wealth in the U.S. that’s a consequence of Wall Street’s unrivaled ability to move capital to its highest use, there aren’t trillions for Rubio and his senators to throw at their constituents in such insulting fashion. In short, the hyper-emotional Senator couldn’t handle the relatively brutal world that would exist without an economy “based on finance and service,” but then again, it should be stressed yet again that absent the wondrous living standards that are a consequence of talent being matched with finance, there’s no way Rubio’s a Senator in the first place. The panicked don’t poll well during times of true want.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets.

A Society That Fails To Encourage Entrepreneurship Is Producing Negative Human Capital.

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Although there is a proliferation of goods and services brought to markets by entrepreneurially minded producers and investors, this production was preceded by someone or some firm harnessing the power of human capital in order to produce those goods and services.

Unfortunately, this is often ignored and we instead are regularly confronted by arguments against markets and against the value of entrepreneurs. This often involves attacks on the very attitudes that lead to entrepreneurship itself. Over time, these attitudes kill the spirit of entrepreneurship and stymie growth potential. Promoting this “negative human capital” works against the vital consumer-entrepreneur market process. Who will serve the consumer?1 Who will solve uncertainty and facilitate value, which Per Bylund ascribed to the entrepreneurial ethic?2 Negative human capital slows the engine of entrepreneurship and does not cultivate human flourishing. A helpful resource on this is Layman Stone’s “Being Their Own Boss: A Review of American Demography and Entrepreneurship.” In reading this article, I overlaid it with an Austrian economic point of view, looking at the phenomenon from the Kirznerian view that the market as a process is always a determining factor in entrepreneurial activity3 and where real flesh-and-blood people operate and have to make decisions.

In his famous book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Transferring the fruits of human capital is not as fundamental as spreading the human capital itself.”4 Negative human capital is characterized as a nonproductive attitude, nonalertness to market demands, differences toward learning new skill sets, producing value for someone else, the disdain for the mundane knowledge. A simple phrase captures the essence of negative human capital: “Someone else will make it, so I don’t have to” or “If customers do not buy my product or service, my business has failed.” This is one perspective of negative human capital. Another might be cultural impediments toward learning different ideas or skills from other people outside one’s own cultural group, how individuals within a cultural group invest their time toward the replacement or acquisition of a new trade or market discovery, and, generally, one’s willingness to serve the customer. If entrepreneurship is dwindling in terms of growth potential over time, as some have reported, the dwindling factor might be the negative human capital that is diffused through many peoples and cultures. These inherently negative attitudes about human capital that many possess are aimed at, among other things, the values, habits, and skills needed for self-ownership and economic freedom. It is one thing to buy a product or acquire a service, but it’s another altogether to produce it.

The fact of the matter is, these broad factors may not show up in analyses, but they have detrimental effects, producing a negative view of self-ownership and the skills needed to engage in the market, not only for consumption but the imperative of production, as this is how early Americans survived.5 Daily, entrepreneurs encounter inherent market and cultural impediments that act as constraints and that do not show up on models and statistical projections.

Skills and Entrepreneurship

A negative attitude about the skills needed for economic freedom reduces the entrepreneurial spirit. These differences in attitudes and habits cannot be measured by a statistical box score analysis but are evident nonetheless in outcomes. Negative human capital is essentially transmitted and carries with it thoughts such as: “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” “Someone else will produce it and bring it to market.” There are many reasons why families, cultures, nations, and individuals disdain the acquisition of market human capital while some take advantage of and embrace the acquisition of market-based skills.

Real entrepreneurs must make decisions and judgments about what they can do and what they cannot do to run and operate a business. These are affected by internal and external cultural impediments and attitudes toward changing market circumstances that require investments and flexibility in acquiring or borrowing human capital from others.

Sowell has noted the cultural constraints of negative human capital in terms of skills: “A nation whose population remained illiterate, while literacy became widespread among other nations, will of course benefit from people on par with people in countries where literacy has been the norm for generations, or for centuries.”6

For instance, the Chinese of the sixteenth and seventieth centuries valued skills in time and astrology. Although Western nations had introduced them to the clock, it remained a curious toy at the time.7 In addition to beliefs and values attached to skills and mobility of said skills, human capital is a nation’s most vital asset for successful entrepreneurship and economic vitality. For example, during the sixteenth century, France greatly profited from skilled Italian craftsmen. After the sixteenth century, when the Italian craftsmen had greater mobility and were no longer just tied to French markets, France lost numerous workers who could not readily be replaced.8

Thinking Differently

Attitudes differ between those who start a business and those who do not. Let’s be honest, some have negative attitudes toward what constitutes work or production at work. Even a person’s career choice is intricately tied to one’s attitude about the investment in or acquisition of human capital and the benefits that can be obtained with it in the market. Those with positive attitudes regarding their self-development and acquired skills invest so that they can reap economic benefits and serve others. These investments consist of learning new things, adapting to different challenges, living through various circumstances, and experiencing life and learning from others.9 Why would entrepreneurship be any different? Negative attitudes toward human capital development are detrimental to the future ranks of entrepreneurship and to economic prosperity.

There are numerous ways to gain human capital that can be rewarded in the marketplace, stemming from experience on the job, hobbies, educational classes, and new learning experiences. Consuming goods and services does not take the place of learning how those goods and services are produced. Entrepreneurship and its advancement are affected by individuals who disdain the notion of commercial and industrial enterprise, self-ownership, private property, and the benefits of freedom of exchange. Surely, if families and social circles provide products and services without investing in tacit learning and seeking economic freedom with that tacit knowledge, there will be increasingly less growth and long-run prosperity for entrepreneurs.

What or who is to blame for negative views of self-ownership? Can we suppose that at the cultural level some are more apt to invest in the knowledge and experience needed to build up one’s human capital advantage, or that in other cultures assets are unable to be realized and opportunities to realize them are sparse? It is amazing how within various cultural groups, there are individuals who, no matter where they go, find market gaps and fill them for the general population of consumers.10 How is it that some persist in production and self-ownership while others do not? It’s simple: there is a negative attitude toward the human capital needed to acquire economic freedom.

1.Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis (Atlanta, GA: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.. 1998).

2.Per Bylund, “Per Bylund: The Entrepreneurial Ethic,” Mises.org, Feb. 18, 2020, https://mises.org/library/bylund-entrepreneurial-ethic.

3.Israel Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

4.Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

5.Thomas J. DiLorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: Crown Forum, 2004).

6.Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics.

7.Carolo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture: 1300 to 1700 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1967).

8.Ibid.

9.John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand, 1859) talks about how the individual must live varied experiences in order to cultivate and grow as an individual.

10.Ibid.

How To think About Science And Scientific Studies In The Age Of Coronavirus.

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Suddenly everyone is an #epidemiology expert, which understandably frustrates ‘real’ experts.

But it is good that people read/share information and form opinions. The problem is the widely shared fantasy about what empirical science does and how it works. Science is not a one-shot game where you design one impeccable study to deliver the knowledge we need, and then a “settled” science based on The Truth™. There is no such thing as an impeccable, truth-generating study. There are always things to critique and that can be done better.

This means two things: that we should not take any one study as gospel, and we should not dismiss every study for having weaknesses. Scientists work in the very opposite way, and slowly build a widely agreed-upon body of theory by incrementally refining methods and adding to the evidence. Even the so-called scientific method itself suggests that we cannot ever get to known and verified truth. We can only approach it by continuously progress, learn, and undermine or falsify prior claims. So it is a serious error to dismiss any findings outright because of imperfections in the study.

When scientists take apart a study, they are doing their jobs: by finding flaws, weaknesses, and expressing doubt about results, they are vetting the research and indicating the need and direction for follow-up research. This is very different from the common claim by ‘new experts’ in social media that a study is “false” because scientists have found that it has weaknesses or flaws. Virtually every study is “false” in this regard. It doesn’t mean that the truth has been uncovered, and it certainly doesn’t mean that one can assume that the opposite is true.

Empirical science is more akin to a discovery process than an uncovering of certainly true pieces of knowledge. All knowledge is interpreted through a lens, which in science is established theory, but it happens that the lens is discarded. This is what Thomas Kuhn referred to as scientific revolutions, which happen as evidence contrary to the commonly used lens amasses and raises doubts about its reliability, causing a ‘crisis’ and a new paradigm.

This does not mean that everything that took place before this shift is without value. The prior findings were not discarded, and physics did not start from scratch with the publication of Newton’s theory. The same with Einstein’s theory of relativity. But prior findings are seen in a new light and their significance might shift as the evidence is reinterpreted using the new lens, creating (usually) new understanding. In science, this is par for the course.

Scientists are and should be skeptical, critical, and even unconvinced. They should disagree. It is how our accumulated knowledge grows and is refined. Unfortunately, society has adopted a form of unreflective and normative scientism in which science is assumed to immediately have all the answers. This is, I think, the reason why it is so common in political debates to use as argument that “scientific studies show that…” It is a meaningless statement, but plays on our unreasonable view of science as the generation of immediate and eternal truth.

If we instead recognize science as a discovery process, it should be obvious that there likely are scientific studies in support of most views. But even if I can cite 1,000 studies in support of my opinion, it means little if they were all conducted using unsupported, unreasonable, or since then rejected assumptions (such as geocentrism). Scientific findings are never adopted because there is one study. Yet, prior findings can, at least in principle, be undermined and challenged by a single study finding contradictory evidence. But such falsification of theory, which is how science progresses, requires that the new study is done well and uses state of the art methods and data.

That’s why scientists immediately jump on and mercilessly critique, if not attempt to shoot down, a new study with results that are surprising or even challenging to what they believe to know. If it withstands the critique, it must be taken seriously. If it does not, it is not automatically rejected but may have provided important clues for how to design future studies, refine methods, etc. But what matters is that the study is overall rather well done and, then, that its weaknesses are uncovered.

This is why scientists go through years of training. The point is not (only) to learn the field’s terminology and memorize theories, but to learn the trade: how to do good research and spot weaknesses. Any good scientist can offer a list of weaknesses in any study, which to a layman likely sounds like an outright rejection of the findings. But that’s a highly simplified interpretation that is easily an error. Many groundbreaking works were ferociously resisted by the scientific community before the ideas were adopted (examples like Semmelweis and Chandrasekhar come to mind). This is not necessarily a flaw. Science “should” resist novelty by demanding convincing evidence before adopting new explanations. (But it should not resist for reasons other than logic and evidence.)

In the current pandemic, studies are still scarce and scientists are working to figure out how to properly measure trends in this changing landscape–and make effective recommendations to policymakers. Studies will only get better as we get a better understanding of the virus, more (and more reliable) data, better interpretations, etc. But this cannot be accomplished if new findings are quickly dismissed outright and scientists shunned for not producing evidence in line with people’s (or policymakers’) preferred imagined reality. Science takes time and must take time. It progresses through scrutiny, skepticism, and critique. But informed such, not mob-like attacks on scientists with the “wrong” results.

Our Economic Recovery Will Be A Race Between Smith (Adam), Schumpeter (Joseph) And Stupidity (Government).

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Economists have been the object of ridicule for centuries. We supposedly know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The stress on scarcity and choice within constraints is seen as raining on the hope and aspirations for a better world.

In The Four Pillars of Economic Understanding, I try to counter these criticisms by pointing out that the message of basic economics not only provides truth and light to the uninitiated would-be students of society by capturing the beauty of the complex coordination of commercial society. It conveys the hope that entrepreneurship offers for the discovery of new and fascinating products and the implementation of new rules of social interaction which enable productive specialization and peaceful social cooperation.It does so with a sense of deep compassion for the least advantaged, who most benefit from the unleashing of economic forces to alleviate extreme poverty, and raises the material standards of living of people. Economic freedom brings with it progress and peace.

Unfortunately, economics is often taught as an abstract discipline with abstract examples to illustrate. Don’t get me wrong, abstraction is a necessary intellectual tool. Our theories must be logically sound, and as such must be empirically relevant. That requires discipline of thought and expression. Economics is not poetry, and neither is moral philosophy and political economy. We must practice these distinct but related disciplines with the utmost of intellectual care.

Why must we do that, you ask? Wouldn’t it be so much more inspiring to spin fanciful tales of better worlds to inspire the youth?

I want to say NO. James Buchanan, my teacher, argued that what we needed was to articulate a vision in political economy of a “workable utopia”. Hayek earlier had argued that we need a vision of a “liberal utopia,” and that we had to excite the imaginations of the best and the brightest to explore the workings of a free society — a true radical liberalism. But in both Hayek and Buchanan, the idea was to have these “utopias” firmly grounded in the teachings of basic economic reasoning.

As Hayek argued in his 1945 essay “Individualism: True and False,” the idea was to find a social system that relied not on individuals becoming better versions of themselves for its operation, but which made use of individuals as they are — sometimes smart, more often stupid; sometimes good, but capable of being bad. In fact, the idea was to have a system not where the best and the brightest could rule over others, but where bad men if they were to find themselves in charge could do least harm. In this way, freedom could be granted to all, and not restricted to only a few.

This is why Adam Smith’s critical idea of the invisible hand is so vital to our understanding of commercial life. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker and the brewer that we can expect our dinner, but from appealing to their self-interest. We cannot rely on friendship and fellow feelings to secure for us the material progress required to lift us from the Malthusian trap of subsistence. We escape that Malthusian trap through expansions of the trade and technological innovations spurred by the gains realized from turning scientific knowledge into commercially useful knowledge as the great economic historian Joel Mokyr has so convincingly argued throughout his career. To put it another way, borrowing from Mokyr, there are always headwinds that resist the forces of progress, and tailwinds that push progress forward, and the economic history of humanity is made up of the story of this battle between headwinds and tailwinds.

That metaphor is a useful one to keep in mind when thinking about our current situation, and where the primary winds are coming from — public sector, private sector, independent sector, or some combination. What are the headwinds that seem to block the timely and honest communication of knowledge about public health issues to us, what are the headwinds that delay testing and medical innovations; what are the headwinds that keep the allocation of scarce yet critical medical resources from being allocated to their most urgent use?

On the other hand, where are the tailwinds coming from that will cut against those headwinds and push us forward to make progress against the reality of the current situation? When the history of 2020 comes to be written, obviously a serious accounting of the headwinds and tailwinds will need to take place.

After 2008, in my effort to try to communicate basic economic reasoning to make sense of the reality we were collectively experiencing, I started to utilize my own metaphors and analogies. One was to look at Michael Phelps, the great Olympic swimmer, and to ask my readers to imagine what would happen to his ability to swim across a pool if we first just tied his hands together.

Well it turns out that Phelps gets across the pool in a slower time using the breaststroke than he does freestyle, but still at amazing speed. How about if we tied his feet together as well? Well, again, Phelps is one of the best butterfly swimmers that the world has ever seen, so that dolphin kick would not be impeded by tying his feet together. But again, much slower than his freestyle. How about if we added a 250-pound weight to his waist?

At that point, he would sink to the bottom of the pool. The point I am trying to make however is that you would never say that under those circumstances Phelps’s failure to get across the pool represents swimmer failure. The failure is clearly due to the obstructions placed on his ability to swim. That, I argue, is the error we make when, in the context of highly regulated market economies, we continue as economic educators in discussing “market failure.”

Adam Smith long ago recognized that individuals can find workarounds and ingenious ways to realize gains from trade and gains from innovation even in the presence of what he identified as hundreds of impertinent obstructions which human folly may put in the way.

This led me to articulate another example in hopes of communicating an important economic lesson. To capture the idea of gains from trade and gains from innovation in the face of those impertinent obstructions, I asked readers to envision a horse race between three horses — one named Smith (for gains from trade), a second one named Schumpeter (for gains from innovation), and a third one named Stupidity (for those government-imposed obstructions).

My basic ideas was, following Smith, that as long as the Smith and the Schumpeter horses were running ahead of the Stupid horse, tomorrow will be better than today. The counter-factual is this: what if the Smith and Schumpeter horses were able to run freely, without that Stupid horse biting at their heels and bumping into them rather than staying in their lane.

What I think is important to get from this illustration that is relevant for today is that we aren’t letting the Smith and Schumpeter horse run! They are currently locked in the barn, or trapped behind the start gate. This is why I don’t think the usual Business Cycle story of a cluster of errors being revealed in the bust, and thus a recalculation of ensuing labor and capital is applicable to our understanding of the current situation. It is important for students of economics to remember that in the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the recession is the correction, and the reason is that during the bust phase there is a recalculation of labor and capital to reflect better the preferences and savings and investment trade-offs that individuals are willing to make.

This is decidedly not what is going on at the moment if for no other reason than that the capital and labor is locked up in that barn with Smith and Schumpeter. Don’t misunderstand me, there are serious financial fragilities in the global capitalist system due to policy errors and the manipulation of money and credit combined with fiscal irresponsibility, but that isn’t what is going on right at this precise moment in my humble opinion.

What we are witnessing right now is macroeconomic volatility caused by an exogenous shock due to a public health crisis combined with a policy response that has shut down the economy. Back to my metaphor, while Smith and Schumpeter are trapped in the barn, or at least stuck at the starting gate, the Stupid horse is running freely and getting a lap lead.

Thankfully, those Smith and Schumpeterian horses are younger, fitter, faster and more nimble. Once they are unleashed, it is my sincere hope that they will burst out and catch up quickly to that dumb old hag of a horse Stupidity. They will leave Stupidity in its wake, the accumulated surplus fund will be replenished, and tomorrow will be better than today.

So, let’s get those tailwinds blowing harder than the headwinds, stop tying down our entrepreneurs, and let those Smith and Schumpeter horses run freely. We have to solve a public health crisis, one that requires creative ingenuity and innovation.

We have to restart a stalled economic system; that requires creative and imaginative entrepreneurs. In both cases, our greatest reason for hope is to be found not in bumbling bureaucrats who attempt to lead from ossified institutions of authority, but in the erring entrepreneurs who have their judgements constantly contested by others and only the most nimble and creative are able to negotiate the turbulent times to provide the solution to our woes.

Peter J. Boettke is a Senior Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research, and this article first appeared at aier.org. He is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, as well as the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Welcome To the Great Reset. Start Managing For Perpetual Change.

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We surpassed the unemployment of The Great Recession. In two weeks. For our economy and our society, we need to flatten The Slump.

As the surreal impact of the pan-global pandemic sinks in, we can all be forgiven if we feel suddenly thrust into a dystopian science fiction movie. When it comes to work and our economies, The Great Reset has accelerated so many tech-fueled trends that the list grows daily. To paraphrase sci-fi author William Gibson, the future of work is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

We’ve known for some time what we needed to do. We’ve talked about Digital Transformation, Agile Organizations, and Lifelong Learning until they’ve become cliches, more observed in aspiration than in practice in too many organizations.

Then along came a virus.

Suddenly:

  • We are working as fully-distributed teams, with every in-person meeting instantly transformed into a Brady Bunch-style videoconference scrum.
  • Our organizations are being forced to adapt literally overnight. This isn’t agility, though. It’s a survival reflex.
  • Colleges have become hybrid learning platforms, virtual and physical, likely transformed forever, while adult online classes are also surging.

And societally, we are rapidly turning into Amazon-ordering, Zoom-clustering, auto-cocooning consumers. (Nothing new. Just exponentially more.)

The speed and scope of these changes dwarf prior shifts so dramatically that we would have probably stopped binge-watching any streaming video movie that hung its narrative on such an implausible plot. Superlatives fail. The exponential curves of technology adoption like the microprocessor and the smartphone used to be the sole purview of Singularity University lectures (including mine, on the future of work). But the progression of the novel coronavirus has seared the image of hockey-stick growth on a billion minds.

But there is a reverse hockey stick at work, an exponential Slump. It’s called Jobs.

We have seen this script before. Each of the modern economic downturns – early 1990’s, 2001, the Great Recession – had a seismic impact on the world of work. But to take the risk of quoting those pundits of exponential change, Bachman Turner Overdrive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. John Hagel from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge calls these tectonic transitions Big Shifts. The Great Reset may become the Biggest Shift in our lifetimes.

What happens in such transitions?

  • Unemployment musical chairs means the music stops for millions. The Great Recession at its peak displaced about 9 million – a level we hit this time in just two weeks. The Fed suggests that nearly half of all jobs – 67 million- may disappear. Let that sink in.
  • Automation accelerates. Each of the last three recessions dramatically increased technology implementation in business. As Mark Muro of Brookings Institution says, “What can be automated, likely will be.”
  • Unbundling work accelerates that process. As we distribute and atomize tasks, we make it far easier to mobilize AI software such as Robotic Process Automation, which automates routine tasks like filling out forms and moving documents through workflows–the kind of work done by millions in call centers, for example. And the hyper drive to increase productivity and reduce costs in the post-Reset economy will place enormous pressure on organizational leaders to only re-hire people for the most critical roles.
  • The Middle evaporates. From 2007 to 2017, the vast majority of new hiring in the U.S. was in non-standard, impermanent roles. The low end of wages has already become the realm of precarious gig work, and the upper wages are reserved for veterans and experts, like blockchain and AI programmers. Technology inevitably reduces the amount of middle-skilled work.

The Unemployment Slump is likely to happen in three phases.

  • In Phase One, there is a downward plunge in employment, and a dramatic rise in business failures. We could hit the bottom as soon as June.
  • In Phase Two, as we riffle along for an indeterminate period, some geographies will begin recovery, but it will literally be like a fever chart, with intermittent employment wins and losses. This could last a quarter, or maybe it could last a year and a half. Much of the work people do find will be informal, precarious, and impermanent. And then a third wave of failures will appear, when municipalities and states see huge drops in tax revenue.
  • In Phase Three, the recovery accelerates. Some industries will bounce back rapidly, but others, like hospitality, air travel, and tourism, will take far longer. And as history is our guide, it will leave many behind, especially low-wage workers and those in rural areas.

So here in Phase One, if we want a thriving Phase Three economy, we need to get busy. We must:

We need to do this because it’s the right thing to ensure every human has access to meaningful, well-paid work. Or, if that’s not enough incentive, do it because otherwise, you won’t like the economy we get later.

The Great Reset will forever transform everyone’s lives in many ways. The most important way is that this virus has in a few short months shown us the interconnections between virtually every human life on the planet. But after the health of people comes the health of work and the economy.

No human left behind.

Gary A. Bolles is the Chair for the Future of Work with Singularity University. He posts regularly on LinkedIn.

Poetic Justice Warrior Douglas Engelbart Bootstraps Individual Production to Collective Knowledge

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Legal justice is a system of laws, however subjective they can be, that punish vice. Poetic justice is a code of moral principles that rewards virtue and punishes vice. While some politicians are threatening the arbitrary use of government force during the Wuhan virus fiasco, and others are defending individual rights, no one is talking about the poetic justice solution to the pandemic.

Most politicos rally around the three V’s – vaccines, ventilators, and v-shaped recovery. In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine claims that life will not get back to normal until there is a vaccine. A threat. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo complains about the lack of ventilators in area hospitals. Yet he has authorized spending billions on the failed projects of his donors. In Washington, economic advisor Larry Kudlow and his sycophants in national media are cheerleading a v-shaped economic recovery, despite their demand-side remedy for their supply-side disaster.

They fail to grasp two moral principles – production is primary to human life, and producers must be free to innovate. These principles are codified in Say’s Law, the mother of all economic theory – production creates its own demand. A corollary is Engelbart’s Law, the mother of all high-tech bootstrapping – exponential progress. The justice of the peace who married the individualism of production with the collectivism of human knowledge is Poetic Justice Warrior Douglas Engelbart.

The Ultimate Resource

Engelbart’s philosophical achievement is proving the volitional nature of knowledge, we are not merely products of our environment. We can objectively understand reality, even when political overlords try to indoctrinate us into dependency. He defines this as the socio-technology fabric.

Engelbart showed we can grasp the nature of this socio-technology fabric, and make improvements to it. With his Bootstrap Paradigm, Engelbart demonstrated that the accumulation of human knowledge is exponential, and is stored for human flourishing in the Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Technically speaking, its all part of his Concurrent Development, Integration and Application of Knowledge (CoDIAK) process.

More simply, in economics, its called prices. In politics, its called, say what? Oddly enough, the political solution to complex problems is something less reliable than moral principles, it’s their computer models. Their utilitarian purpose is to predict the future and control behavior, for the common good.

Economic forecasting to justify government spending is known as Econometric models. Climate forecasting to justify government spending is known as Earth System models. Since both have perfect batting averages for striking out, the political response to the Wuhan virus pandemic is also rooted in computer models. Oddly enough, they too were horribly wrong, and huge swaths of vital production have come to a halt.

The solution to macro social problems is human ingenuity. In economics, Julian Simon proved this in his book, The Ultimate Resource. In environmental science, philosopher Alex Epstein proved this in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. For computer models designed for physical sciences, economist Jesus Huerta de Soto proved they are useless for the dynamic systems of human ingenuity.

Moore’s Law

Engelbart’s theory of knowledge, abstract concepts derived from simpler forms, is his ABC Model. In this structure of human behavior, the simplest activity is A-level, business as usual. Its history is the Dark Ages, society does not advance. In demand-side economics, this is known as equilibrium. A-level compulsory public education was best expressed by its architect, John Dewey, “There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”

B-level activity improves on the status quo, society advances, and civilization evolves. The prime historical example is the rebirth of reason that led to the Renaissance. Because Western society began to flourish under individualism, freedom, and science, supply-side capitalism broke the chains of feudal anarchy and deprivation. Its educational philosophy was advanced in the private-sector by Maria Montessori; a system aimed at the cognitive, rational faculty of each student’s mind. In calculus, B-level would be the first derivative of speed, and C-level would be the second, acceleration.

Engelbart preferred turbocharging the “C” activity by accelerating the acceleration. In the world of semiconductors, we know it as Moore’s Law. Named after Gordon Moore, he predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year. His prediction was based on the more reliable SWAG computer model (scientific wild-assed guess), “I just did a wild extrapolation saying it’s going to continue to double every year.”

For Engelbart, bootstrapping had its own corollary, the exponential nature of human life. As living proof of Engelbart’s CoDIAK process, the science of DNA sequencing was taking shape as semiconductor performance was doubling. Concurrently, Nobel physicist and microbiologist Walter Gilbert and his colleagues were isolating proteins that bind to specific regions of the DNA strand.

Here’s a simple way to think of this, all life has three components – the memory chip instruction manual is DNA, the fat burning motor is mitochondria, and the glue that holds it all together are proteins.

The Mother of All Poetic Justice

Because of computing power, Engelbart’s Law also applies to the cost of DNA science. It now costs $10,000 to map an entire genome instead of $100 million twenty years ago. The Wuhan virus genome was mapped earlier this year. None of this was possible without capital. Capital is not possible without production. Production is not possible without human ingenuity. Human ingenuity is not possible without political freedom. Political freedom is not possible without economic freedom. Economic freedom is not possible without profit.

Profit is the poetic justice solution that is rooted in moral principles. Yet our political overlords have contempt for the profits essential for vaccines, ventilators, and v-shaped recoveries, let alone the producers who are essential to human existence. To them, it just happens, so it makes sense they would suspend the supply-side economic activity they consider unworthy.

Instead, they give stay-at-home orders, and disregard the immune system overload that is the greatest danger of the Wuhan virus. Hygiene is essential, but our overlords are silent about fortifying immune systems. While maximizing the number of low risk, healthy, highly productive workers should be the top priority, we’re sacrificing them instead, for the common good.

According to Dr. Amesh Adalja of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Wuhan virus, like every corona virus that preceded it, will be with us forever. In fact, immune systems have adapted to countless viruses over millions of years of evolution. Known as terrain theory, healthy living is dependent on our body’s ability to resist disease. Choosing to live is not the avoidance of death, yet our overlords are addicted to germ theory because avoiding disease depends on their pharmaceuticals.

As poetic justice would have it, Douglas Engelbart chose to live. He delivered The Mother of All Demos 52 years ago in San Francisco. Its goal was to show how technology would turbocharge “C” activity, augment the ability of the human mind, and expand possibilities, exponentially. The windows graphic user interface, display monitor, word processer, hypertext, file linking, keyboard and mouse were introduced to the world; proving that necessity is not the mother of invention.

For today’s A-level thinkers in government, all of this was non-essential activity. Tell that to those under stay-at-home orders from the ignorant, power-mad governor of Michigan, while networking and performing essential work, remotely, thanks to Engelbart’s Law.

 

 

 

 

Progressives Think They Have The Catastrophic Event They Were Hoping For To Destroy Free Market Capitalism.

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After weeks of lockdown, several states have begun to outline plans for returning to business as usual. The economies in these states don’t need political schemes. They simply need to be released from government chains.

Governments don’t create economies. It’s not only beyond their legitimate functions, it’s beyond their abilities. They need to stay out of the way and let the wisdom of markets steer us back to normal. But some officials see an opening through which they can drive their big government dreams.

For instance elected officials in California, which is likely to be the last state to fully open though it hasn’t seen the most suffering from the COVID-19 outbreak, view the crisis as a means to push the state harder and faster down the Blue State path. When asked by a reporter earlier this month if he saw “the potential, as many others in the party do, for a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said yes, of course “there is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism.”

“Absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern,” Newsom added.

A little more than two weeks later, Newsom announced the formation of his Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. Behind the official-sounding name, and a few non-Democrat token members, hides a plan to use the pandemic as a means for advancing Blue State economic interventions that include: greater redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, bankrupting the oil and gas industry, an “unhinged” green energy program, minimum wage that breaks the backs of small businesses, and more of California’s hostility toward business in general.

Expect Newsom’s task force to draw the blueprint for other progressive states to follow.

The task forces, committees, and other councils across the country that will be charged with reopening economies “didn’t build that,” if we might borrow a particularly repugnant phrase. In fact, there is a certainty the most active of these will take what others built and wring the life out of it.

“Centrally planned economies have a 100-year history of stagnation, inefficiency, and shortages of basic consumer goods,” says the Independent Institute’s Benjamin Powell.

“It didn’t take a global health crisis to empty the shelves in Cuban or Venezuelan grocery stores. Mistakes made by central planners, who hold monopoly power over economic decisions, did that all on their own.”

Art Carden, researcher and Samford University economics professor, puts it another way:

“States are very good at identifying a well-defined problem and rendering a system legible to its functionaries,” he wrote last week. “This is not the same thing as identifying the right problem (or set of problems) and providing anything approximating the ‘right’ solutions. It is just finding something for powerful people to measure and control.”

Business owners and managers, not elected officials, not bureaucrats, not task forces, will know how to reopen their companies, and how best to protect their employees and customers. It’s in their self-interest to succeed.

They don’t need assistance and direction from a government that cannot possibly take in and then disseminate information necessary to set market pricing, manage supply chains, appropriately acquire and invest capital, and efficiently use employees. Nor are businesses aided by politics that eventually produce cronyism, oppressive regulation, and stifling laws.

Maybe the best way to illustrate how a government-led reopening is not advisable is the biting response to a Twitter user who said “I’m moving to an island and starting a new country. I’m taking Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin with me! Who’s coming?”

The reply of the year:

“Cuba already exists, buddy.”

The easily understandable point is that neither Sanders nor Corbyn nor any of those who believe in heavy-handed, top-down policies has any idea how to build an economy. They and their followers would starve on that island in a short time. Using the implied and sometimes applied force of government will never create or foster a thriving economy.

Two years ago, historian Sean Wilentz made clear the thinking of those who wear the label “progressive.”

“Deep down,” he wrote, progressives “harbor the hope that one day, perhaps through some catastrophic event, American capitalism will indeed be replaced by socialism – a system of public property and social ownership that, this liberal notes, has been discredited through all of modern history.”

For many, if not all, progressives, that “catastrophic event” is happening right now.

 

This article first appeared at Issues and Insights, written by the I&I Editorial Board.

Work Is Happiness, So Politicians Destroy It.

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I can’t not act.  It’s what I was made to do.” Those are the words of Jennifer Lawrence, one of the highest-paid actresses in the world. They’re from a Vanity Fair interview conducted several years ago.

Lawrence is lucky enough to live in a time and place where what she was made to do also affords her a living. Since she “can’t not act,” it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Lawrence puts herculean effort into her craft. Loving what animates her, work is an expression of her unique genius. Indeed, as she acknowledged in the aforementioned interview, acting is the “only thing I’m good at.”

To be clear, Lawrence is an outlier. That’s well understood. At the same time, Lawrence’s passion is a reminder that arguably the greatest gift of economic growth is the growing ability of people to showcase their individual skills and unique intelligence while on the job.

This wasn’t always the case. Before automation, and yes, global trade, the vast majority of human exertion was directed toward the creation of food. Work was life, albeit not in a happy way. People worked dawn to dusk six days per week in order to survive. Most worked until they died.

Thanks to automation and trade, it’s more and more the case that people can “outsource” to others their need for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, etc. Think about what that means. If it’s hard to contemplate, stop for a minute and imagine what your hair would look like if you had to cut it, or what your clothes would look like if you had to make them. There’s a reason clothes from more primitive times and locales resembled and resemble rags.

That we can buy from others doing what they do best means we have much greater odds of specializing in the work that we “can’t not do.” This is the stuff of economic growth. Specialized workers are productive workers.

Importantly, there’s a human side to all this. More and more of us will work until our last days not because we have to, but because we want to.

And because work for all-too-many is more and more about doing what we want to, it should be stressed that work is increasingly the stuff of happiness. Work reinforces what we’re good at, which means it’s hard for a growing number of us to not be working.

This wildly uplifting truth about work is something else tone-deaf politicians plainly missed in their hysterical responses to the new coronavirus. Having panicked over a virus that thankfully sickens very few, and that very thankfully kills even fewer, politicians expressed their alarm through the forced shutdown of economic activity. Unnerved by something they didn’t understand, they substituted their extraordinarily limited knowledge for that of the marketplace on the way to putting tens of millions out of work in the U.S. alone.

Tragic about all this is that politicians aren’t just alarmist. They’re also self-unaware. Having engineered an economic contraction that wiped out the livelihoods of tens of millions, those same politicians then doubled down amid their stupor as they extracted trillions of dollars from the private economy in a panicked effort to throw money indiscriminately at a problem of their own making. Yet in attempting to buy calm after their act of economic terrorism, they just added to their insult of the workers they devastated. Think about it.

It’s not just for money that we work. That’s why when politicians suffocate economic growth under the pretense of protecting us from our allegedly stupid selves or stupid others, we lose much more than income. For all-too-many we lose what causes us to excitedly get out of bed each morning.

Work is once again happiness. Figure that Warren Buffett could, if he wanted to, retire thousands and thousands of people to lives of monetary splendor. But he couldn’t give them happiness. Happiness comes from work done well.

Politicians shut down “non-essential” businesses, and then paid those whose jobs vanished a pittance to soften the blow of their unemployment. But these endlessly club-footed legislators missed that jobs are so much more than money. Work is where people get to be stars and superstars.

Writing about the men and women crafting amazing dishes in his super-high-end kitchens in 32 Yolks, legendary chef Eric Ripert described their “dangerous, rock star charisma that comes from those who are truly good at what they do.” Ripert’s book should be required reading for every politician.

Though most would likely gloss over the essential truths about passionate work, a lightbulb might come on in the heads of some. They might see that work is so much more than a way to pay the bills. Thanks to economic growth that has nothing to do with politicians, and everything to do with entrepreneurs outrunning their outstretched hands, more and more of us get to be truly good at what we do.

Looked at in terms of the present, politicians implicitly said workers couldn’t be trusted, and that businesses couldn’t be trusted to remain open amid what they proclaimed a pandemic. Their message was we’ll “shut you down for your own good, but pay you while you’re idled.”

How they missed the point. Precisely because so many modern workers love getting to do what “they’re truly good at,” they would have made all manner of changes to their daily routines just so that they could continue to work. Just as athletes play hurt all the time simply because they can’t not play, free workers would have made all manner of adjustments to how they work amid a spreading virus just so that they could do what makes them stars.

The problem yet again is that politicians on all levels panicked, and having panicked, they foisted cruel, one-size-fits-all solutions on their constituents that resulted in sick-inducing job loss and bankruptcy. In the process they robbed millions of what gives them daily meaning and happiness. and others of the chance to eventually find work that uniquely suits them, but that is invariably a consequence of the economic growth that politicians so obnoxiously snuffed out.

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