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Where Are The Entrepreneurs To Bring America The Honest, Trusted News Media We Need?

January 14, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

And yet, America’s mainstream media still finds itself in a credibility crisis that seems to get worse every week. Why?

It’s not that the media don’t understand their crucial role in our society⁠—to provide dispassionate reporting about the news of the day. It’s that most mainstream reporters don’t like that role; they want a different one. They don’t want to inform; they want to persuade. They want to be advocates, spinning narratives rather than just reporting facts.

Consider two stories the media failed to cover in 2019.

In October, Indiana authorities discovered that a recently deceased abortionist⁠, Ulrich Klopfer⁠, had hoarded the bodies of 2,246 aborted babies in his garage.

You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard Klopfer’s name before. A quick search of the New York Times finds that America’s “paper of record” published exactly one original article about this blood-chilling scandal.

On the other end of the spectrum is the media’s collective yawn when it came to the abuse of the FISA system by House Democrats to collect and then publicly release the phone records of Members of Congress and members of the free press.

As part of the Democrat House Intelligence Committee impeachment report, committee Democrats included records of phone calls between Republican Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and journalist John Solomon, formerly of the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and The Hill.

Rather than be outraged at the obvious circumvention of the First Amendment and civil liberties, mainstream media pundits rolled their eyes. “Lordy,” said Lachlan Markay, a Daily Beast reporter, in response to my tweet expressing my shock.

Given that Solomon’s and Nunes’ phone records were never the subject of congressional subpoena but were later published for all the world to see in abject violation of their First Amendment rights, one would think “Lordy” would not be Markay’s knee-jerk response.

Moreover, when it was revealed that the FBI altered material evidence and knowingly misled the FISA court multiple times in order to surveil Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, most media outlets yawned and said “mistakes were made.”

“Mistakes?” As Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) put it in disbelief. “It’s not like, ‘oops, I just filed a FISA warrant.’”

“But no political bias was found!” screamed headlines in response to the Department of Justice inspector general’s report⁠—conveniently ignoring Michael Horowitz’s response to questions from both Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in which the inspector general stated explicitly that the “no political bias” claim was actually undetermined, given the unsatisfactory answers they received in response to why the myriad FBI foul-ups regarding surveillance of Trump officials occurred in the first place.

This seems like two stories⁠—one about a creepy abortionist, the other about journalistic apathy in the face of abuse by the surveillance state. But it’s really one story, about the mainstream media’s self-identity as shapers of political narratives rather than unbiased reporters of facts.

The liberal journalists who run mainstream media newsrooms swept the facts of Ulrich Klopfer’s story under the rug, while they flooded the zone with spin about how the FBI willingly distorted facts.

In their narrative, abortion is good and abortionists must be seen as compassionate, caring healthcare providers⁠—not corpse hoarders. And in the same narrative, President Trump is bad and anything that happens to him, even gross abuse of power that threatens us all, is well warranted.

On abortion, on Trump, and so much more, they’re not reporters. They’re propagandists. And after all these years, everyone knows it.

Having squandered the public’s trust, desperate media liberals can now only satisfy their corporate advertisers’ demand for eyeballs with sensationalized hype. Liberal journalists can’t just report the news now, because—like the boy who cried wolf⁠—no one really believes them.

That’s bad news for the old media of leftist activists posing as gatekeepers. But it’s potentially good news for a new generation of entrepreneurs and journalists actually interested in picking up the mantle of accountability and honesty that generations of progressive propagandists have trampled.

Facts are still important, even if the New York Times and NBC news no longer are good places to find them. And the fact is that leftist ideas⁠—not just about abortion and Donald Trump, but about globalism, socialism, and “woke”-ism⁠—are failing all over the world.

There is no reason the news must be a progressive fantasy novel. Just as Donald Trump overthrew the elite establishment in politics, journalistic rebels and outsiders from the Daily Caller and The Federalist to our own American Greatness have shown the media establishment is just as vulnerable to populist insurgencies.

The American people still need an honest, trusted news media. The only question is, who will have the courage to give it to them.

This article by Rachel Bovard first appeared at American Greatness.

It’s Unequal! Lower Paid Workers’ Wages Are Growing Fastest In The Current Employment Surge.

January 13, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The December employment report on Friday was a modest disappointment with fewer new jobs and slowing wage gains. But the report is an exception to other strong recent labor data, and the big picture is that the longest hiring expansion in 80 years is lifting lower-income workers in particular as accumulating evidence shows.

The jobless rate remained steady at 3.5% as labor participation held at its recent high of 63.2%. The 145,000 new jobs are fewer than the 184,000 average monthly gains over the last three months and the 165,000 average over the past year. Most of the slowdown appears to be trade-related and reflects lower business investment.

Wage growth for production-level workers slowed with average hourly wages up 3% over the last year compared to 3.4% in November. Some of this may be monthly statistical noise, and the trend in the last two years has been higher wage growth among lower earners. That’s a contrast to the early years of this expansion when real wages were flat.

The Federal Reserve’s interventions inflated asset values, which helped the affluent but did little for low- and middle-income Americans who don’t own stocks. Enter Donald Trump, whose deregulation and tax reform unleashed a surge of business investment (before his tariff spree) and hiring, which has drawn workers off the sidelines and raised wages.

The comparative data are striking, and mostly ignored by the press. During the first 11 quarters of the Trump Presidency, wages for the bottom 10% of earners over age 25 rose an average 5.9% annually compared to 2.4% during Barack Obama’s second term, according to the latest demographic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages for the middle two quartiles increased 3.2% compared to 2.2% and 2.7% between 2012 and 2016. Wage gains for the top 10% have held steady at about 3%.

Less educated workers have also seen the strongest gains. Wages have risen at a 6.1% annual clip for workers over 25 without a high school degree and 3.9% for those with some college—both about three times faster than during the second Obama term. Wage gains have also accelerated though to a lesser degree—to 3.2% from 2.2%—for college grads.

Irony alert: Socialism-loving young people are getting the biggest pay raises. Wages have increased on average 5.8% annually for teens, 4.4% for 20 to 24-year-olds and 4.8% for 25 to 34-year-olds during the Trump Presidency. Maybe as their incomes rise, more millennials will question the tale of woe and revolution that Bernie Sanders is selling them.

As for inequality, the Gini coefficient that measures the income gap has been declining among folks who earn a paycheck. Rising wages have lifted millions of Americans out of poverty and off the government dole. The poverty rate for blacks (20.8%) and Hispanics (17.6%) is the lowest on record.

Forty million fewer people last year lived in households receiving government assistance than in 2016, and the food-stamp rolls have shrunk by 9.5 million over the past three years. Reduced government dependence is a social good far beyond the lower costs to taxpayers. More important are the benefits in self-sufficiency and the contributions to the community that flow from that.

Democrats on the campaign trail say the middle class is vanishing, but the opposite is true as more Americans escape poverty and others join the ranks of the affluent. Between 2016 and 2018 the number of taxpayers earning less than $25,000 declined 5% while increasing 8% for those making between $100,000 to $200,000 and 13.9% for those making more than $200,000, according to IRS data.

And it’s not only folks along the coasts who are doing better. The number of people making more than $200,000 increased by 9.6% in Iowa and 17.6% in Michigan between 2016 and 2018. The median two-earner household in the U.S. last year made about $101,000, which after inflation is nearly $10,000 more than a decade ago.

Pete Buttigieg claimed during the December debate that wages aren’t keeping up with the cost-of-living. Perhaps he’s spent too much time raising money in California’s Bay Area. In most other areas of the country, wage gains are outpacing the living costs including housing. Average weekly earnings in South Bend, Ind., have grown 9.9% over the last year as employers have increased both hours and pay.

These are the happy wages of a growing economy, and a labor market that has tightened in the long expansion that received a second wind from the Trump-Paul Ryan pro-growth policies of 2017-2018. By stressing growth, they have done more to reduce inequality than did the Obama-Nancy Pelosi policies that stressed inequality at the expense of growth.

This article appeared at wsj.com.

It’s Not Luck: Recognizing And Acting On Opportunity Is The Way To Get Ahead In America.

January 12, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Some people believe that becoming rich is a question of luck. I disagree. Whether chance presents you with a good opportunity or not is not the key question. Rather:

Do you actually recognize the opportunity in front of you? Or do you fail to appreciate it for what it is? As the Swiss author Max Frisch once said, “Chance shows me what I have an eye for.”
And if you do recognize your lucky break, do you take advantage of it? Do you act? Or are you someone who says: “Maybe now is not the right time. Perhaps it’s something to think about one day…”

The likelihood that someone would only ever experience either good or bad luck during their lifetime is very low. Over many years and decades, in most cases, good and bad luck should balance each other out.

1. Setting Big Goals

Jack Ma failed the test to get into university, wasn’t very good at math, and didn’t know much about technology. But from the beginning, he thought big and set very ambitious goals for himself. Shortly after founding Alibaba, he told a journalist: “We don’t want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.” He was so sure of his future success that, in February 1999, he even had one of Alibaba’s earliest meetings filmed—to make sure this key moment was documented to mark the beginning of his success.

2. The Ability to Sell

Two-thirds of the interviewees in my book The Wealth Elite stated that they owed much of their success to their ability to sell. For them, selling is not just about marketing products or services. They define sales far more broadly. To them, selling is all about being able to convince other people, whether it’s getting approval from a government official, persuading the perfect applicant to accept a job, winning over employees, or talking a banker into making a firm financial commitment. “Everything is sales,” explained one of my superrich interviewees.

3. Nonconformity: Taking Joy in Swimming Against the Current

The investor Jim Rogers studied history and philosophy at Yale and Oxford before he took a job on Wall Street in 1968. During hard times for the US stock market, he succeeded in laying the foundations for his wealth and success.

Rogers met George Soros at a major investment bank. Together, they founded the Quantum Fund. They tore up the investment banking rulebook, buying stocks, commodities, currencies, and bonds from all over the world. They were also among the first to use innovative strategies such as short selling.

Unlike most other investors, Rogers bought shares in companies that were in trouble. In the mid-1970s, for example, he invested heavily in the aircraft company Lockheed. Rogers once told the story of a fancy dinner with bankers and investors. One of the other guests had heard that Rogers had been buying Lockheed shares. At that time, Lockheed was hit by a number of scandals and getting bad press nearly every day. The company’s share price had collapsed.

“Who would invest in a company like that?” wondered one of the guests—loudly enough that everybody at the dinner could hear him. The other guests joined in the laughter. Rogers felt humiliated—after all, he was the butt of their joke.

But Rogers had done his homework, and he was right with his positive analysis of the company. The share price shot up, and his fund made a huge profit. At the same time, the S&P 500 Index rose by just 47 percent, the Quantum Fund managed by Rogers and Soros gained an incredible 4,200 percent.

4. Being Able to Handle Setbacks

Most of the superrich have faced serious setbacks and crises. What is striking is the attitude they generally take when things go wrong. They do not blame outside forces or other people but look for the fault in themselves.

They do not complain about being the victims of circumstance or the evil deeds of their opponents; they take personal responsibility for their mistakes. Nor do they make excuses for negative market developments. If the market takes a tumble, they blame themselves for misjudging the market. So often, this is what distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful people.

5. Focus, Focus, Focus

In early July 1991, Bill Gates Sr. invited some guests over for dinner, including his son Bill Gates, Jr.— the founder of Microsoft—and the investor Warren Buffett. These were two of the most successful men in the world who, for many years, had been at the top of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list. The host asked his dinner guests, “What factor do you feel has been the most important in getting to where you’ve gotten in life?”

Buffett immediately replied, “Focus.” Bill Gates, Jr. agreed.

Warren Buffett, too, had focused on a single goal for decades. According to his biographer, Alice Schroeder, even as a child, his dream was to become rich. One of his favorite books was One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. When he was 11 years old, Buffett announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 35. At 16, he had already saved up $5,000. Today, that would be worth about $60,000—not bad for a 16-year-old. His prediction was only off by five years. He made his first million by the time he was 30.

6. The Ability to Win Trust from Others

John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest men in history, is proof of just how important trust is in business. For the young Rockefeller, a key to his future success was realizing that “old men had confidence in me right away.” Throughout his incredible career, he said, his biggest problem was always “to obtain enough capital to do all the business I wanted to do and could do, given the necessary amount of money.”

His ability to win the trust of banks and investors was one of his most valuable assets, as Rockefeller knew well: “It is chiefly to my confidence in men and my ability to inspire their confidence in me that I owe my success in life.” So, what’s the best way to get other people to trust you? By acting and—even more crucially—by thinking in a way that inspires trust. Warren Buffett applies the following test to every decision and action: is it something you would be happy for your wife, family, friends, and neighbors to read about the next day in their local newspaper?

7. Persistence and a Willingness to Experiment

Many books stress the importance of persistence, and that’s true. But staying power alone is no guarantee of success. It needs to be combined with another very important characteristic: the willingness to experiment. Experimentation is more important than a precise business plan.

Michael Bloomberg, No. 9 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world with assets of $55 billion, details the earliest days of his company. One of his key insights is that rigid planning can do more harm than good:

You’ll inevitably face problems different from the ones you anticipated. Sometimes you’ll have to “zig” when the blueprint says “zag.” You don’t want a detailed, inflexible plan getting in the way when you have to respond instantly.

If you want to understand the success of many startup companies in Silicon Valley, you need to understand the idea of “pivoting.” This involves being prepared to radically change your business model at a moment’s notice. The goal is not to stick to an original concept and prove how good it is. The goal is to establish a strong market position. If that means abandoning the plan and giving the company a completely new and different direction, then it’s time to pivot.

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. This article appeared at fee.org.

Private Giving Achieves What Government Can’t—Which Is Why Progressives Hate It.

January 11, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

America has just completed a banner year for private giving. The 10 largest donations in 2019 amounted to $6.2 billion, up 8% from 2018. These went to a wide array of causes, and came from men and women of the right ( Jim Walton, Karen Huntsman ) and the left ( George Soros, Eric Schmidt ). When the total of all U.S. philanthropy becomes available this summer, it will show that Americans voluntarily gave away around $430 billion in 2019.

Private giving builds institutions of civil society that provide valuable services, alleviating many pressing public problems. The New York Public Library has operated as a charity since its founding 125 years ago, and Central Park is run by a donor-funded conservancy that rescued it from decay in 1980. Quietly effective philanthropies get little visibility, though, and scant credit from journalists, academics and politicians.

Instead, progressive editorialists and political candidates openly call for deep cuts in the charitable deduction, an end to tax protections for churches and other charities, the taxing down of personal fortunes, and new regimes in which government becomes the sole ministrant of societal needs. Givers like the Kochs and Waltons are treated as punching bags for ideological reasons, but even liberals such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad and Robert Smith are pilloried for practicing philanthropy.

Mr. Gates is called everything from a rank amateur to a manipulating megalomaniac for making massive donations to public health, education and other causes. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles has been picketed and its patron savaged for his gifts to charter schools. Paying off $34 million of loans for Morehouse College students earned Mr. Smith opprobrium for having made money in private equity.

“A gift like [Mr. Smith’s] can make people believe that billionaires are taking care of our problems, and distract us from the ways in which others in finance are working to cause problems,” writes Anand Giridharadas in “Winners Take All,” this year’s trendiest critique of philanthropy. One of a half-dozen books now out with a similar tone, it was lavishly praised by the Washington Post, New York Times and NPR for arguing that charitable giving is an “elite charade” that does more harm than good, a way of disguising merciless taking by appearing to give back, a tool of injustice in a rigged system, a means of suppressing dissent.

Today’s critics of private giving are most misleading in their suggestion that it is primarily a game played by “the billionaire boys’ club.” That’s not even close to accurate. The lion’s share of America’s vast philanthropy comes from ordinary citizens, 100 million of whom make charitable gifts annually, with the average household donating around $3,000. In addition, 77 million citizens volunteer time and labor. This broad generosity powers some 1.5 million independent nonprofits across the country, operating in every imaginable part of the economy, pursuing a panoply of approaches to national improvement.

Rather than being an instrument of plutocracy, America’s highly decentralized philanthropy is one of its most pluralistic and democratic elements. Philanthropy disperses authority, gives individuals direct opportunities to change their communities, and lets nonmainstream alternatives have their day in the sun.

Charitable problem-solving also has many practical advantages. What works to alleviate homelessness or loneliness in old age may be different in Nebraska than in New York. With government programs it is almost impossible, even illegal, to pursue different strategies in different places. In philanthropy that’s easy—local variegation is one of the field’s inherent strengths. Studies show that philanthropic efforts are more effective than government in the amount of social repair accomplished per dollar.

One reason many progressives are so hostile to private giving is that government and charity are often competitors. They function in many of the same areas and sometimes attack the same problems, albeit in different ways. Critics of philanthropy argue that it is disruptive, even illegitimate, for civil-society groups to compete with the state. Public-employee unions, agency officials and activists for big government scream when social authority and resources migrate from state bureaus and into independent organizations like charter schools, churches, medical charities and trainers of the poor.

Authoritarians have always hated independent civil society. Russian, Iranian and Chinese dictators clamped down on charities in recent years because they want the state to be the only forum for human influence. “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” was Mussolini’s encapsulation. For people with a controlling impulse, private wielders of resources represent alternative sources of ideas and social legitimacy that must be suppressed in favor of unitary government prescriptions.

Even democratically elected leaders are often jealous of civil society and blind to its productivity. Vice President Joe Biden said a few years ago that “every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century, and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.” The late Sen. Ted Kennedy once said that “the ballot box is the place where all change begins in America.”

Actually, government and ballot boxes had surprisingly little to do with many climactic shifts in American history. From the rise of universal schooling to the revulsion against slavery, from the creation of great universities to the national mastery of rocketry and space flight, private donors paved the way for many breakthroughs. Charitable action has been one of the country’s most valuable sources of ingenuity and social progress. In fields from brain research to immunotherapy, from family revival to improving teacher quality, philanthropists continue to lead.

If we view social refinement as solely the work of government, we will eventually despair because the political process so often disappoints. When we recognize the contributions of community institutions, self-help groups, faith activity, local norms, neighborhood networks and grass-roots collaborations, our prospects appear much brighter.

In America, independent problem-solvers pounce on many issues before they even rise to national notice. Privately funded civil society attends to a vast range of problems and threats. This is a distinguishing strength of the U.S. It will be a tragedy if Americans allow our rich tradition of voluntary action to be smothered.

Mr. Zinsmeister is author of the Almanac of American Philanthropy and editor in chief of Philanthropy magazine, from whose Winter 2020 issue this article is adapted.

Climate Hysteria Is A Backdoor For Imposing Personal Interests On The Public.

January 10, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The “fight” against global warming is not a selfless movement wholly focused on saving our world but a means for activists to impose their personal desires on the rest of us. They want to shut down farms, stop homebuilding, dictate what we can eat, and are eager to financially reward politically favored groups.

Our first stop on this tour of private crusades is in the United Kingdom, where Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser for the government, is claiming, according to a recent British Guardian report, that “half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife.”

“We need a large, radical transformation and we need to do it quickly, in the next decade” said the good professor.

Continued Boyd: “If anybody asked me: ‘If there is one thing I can do to help save the planet, what would it be?’ I would say just eat a lot less meat. It’s the easiest thing to do. I’ve done it.”

And we are therefore supposed to be impressed by his commitment and inspired to follow the great man.

Of course he’s not making the sacrifice alone. Others have chosen to cut back or eliminate their meat intake in the name of saving us from global warming. None were easily found at the last United Nations climate conference in Madrid, where “U.N. bureaucrats chow(ed) down on burgers – while attacking meat.”

While some alarmists have gone to war against meat consumption, a UCLA urban planning professor apparently wishes housing was a communal rather than an individual or family affair.

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says the subhead of piece published in The Nation two days before Christmas.

Professor Kian Goh, who is teaching young minds vulnerable to radical thinking, is also critical of property rights in general. He prefers “government-planned and -built public housing,” as well as “new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing.”

“The idea of cooperative living,” (which clearly means “communal” living and therefore is socialism-based) “in both financial and social terms,” writes Goh, “needs room to breathe and grow.”

Obviously there’s no room for the freedom to choose in Goh’s world.

Finally, we move on the reparations crowd, which skipped the steps of Eric Hoffer’s progression of causes and jumped directly to the racket level.

“Shout out if you want to destroy fossil fuel capitalists,” a woman described as an “environmental strategist” told the crowd gathered last week at Fire Drill Friday, a Capitol Hill climate protest held each week.

“We will demand reparations for the harm that they caused,” she tweeted. “Together we will redistribute trillions of dollars to fund a #GreenNewDeal.”

According to Townhall, the woman – who was given a microphone and stage clearly to stir up emotions, and has common ground with Joe “Put Fossil Fuel Executives In Jail” Biden – also said “let me hear your vigor for ending racism while you do it” and “we need to make them pay today.” So again we find evidence that the goal isn’t to stop Earth from overheating, but to fulfill a left-wing wish list.

Even Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who is supposedly a prophetess warning that we’re burning through our blue rock, has tapped into the wider agenda. Last month, she told her thrilled-to-be-scolded followers that “the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”

Sounds much like the warming alarmists who dream of taking down capitalism without firing a shot.

We should be appalled at the dishonesty that’s at the rotten core of climate fanaticism. But we’re not, because its disciples learned from some of the most deceitful and vicious characters throughout history.

This article first appeared at Issues & Insights (issuesinsights.com)

Image by Alejandro Alvarez

Regulators Are Regulators Because They’re Not Smart Enough To Get A Job At A Corporation That Hires The Best Talent.

January 9, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

It’s regularly pointed out that a very small, single digit percentage of applicants to schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford is actually admitted to those schools. Interesting about this is that difficulty when it comes to gaining admission has traveled well beyond the schools mentioned. No doubt some of those reading this piece attended schools 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago that they wouldn’t stand a chance of getting into today.

The reality of college admissions seemingly speaks to a lot of factors, but an obvious driver is that the popular lament about stagnant wages stateside since the 1970s is a monumentally absurd myth. There’s been great economic liberalization since the ‘70s, and earnings for American workers have soared. The world’s producers don’t eye U.S. market share excitedly because Americans are stagnant, but because their earnings continue to grow. This truth has plainly factored into even greater demand for limited seats at the palaces that we call American universities.

After that, there’s been a rapid liberalization of global economic activity too. The world is becoming more well-to-do by the day, and this helps explain why those same U.S. universities more and more resemble a Benetton ad: global demand for the palaces that we call American universities is soaring. China alone can claim over 300,000 nationals attending U.S. universities, and that number will only grow.

Some claim easy federal loans have driven a supply/demand imbalance at U.S. colleges and universities that has led to soaring tuition and applications, but it says here the bigger driver has been economic liberalization that signals less government. Economic freedom begets wealth, and one major way those with means tend to express their status is through college.

Interesting about the massive demand for limited university spots is what it plainly means for businesses. The proliferation of the degreed from around the world has logically revealed itself through growing interest among graduates in top corporations. If demand for a spot at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford is high, one can only conclude that demand is similarly high among the graduates of those schools for spots at the top corporations that those schools have historically sent graduates to. It’s not unreasonable by extension to assume that hiring rates at the best companies more and more resemble acceptance rates at elite U.S. universities.

Which brings us to a recent piece by Wall Street Journal columnist John D. Stoll. Though it’s possible he was merely looking for an irreverent way to begin his column (“To These Firms, Rules Are Golden”), Stoll’s approach was careless. He observed that “Few things can make a chief executive break out in hives as quickly as the word ‘”regulation.”’ Such a statement is true in a sense, but it seems Stoll hasn’t thought much about why it’s true.

To understand why it may be useful to think again about acceptance rates at top U.S. schools, and hiring rates at top U.S. companies. Only the best of the best gain admittance, and this includes athletes who’ve long been coveted by U.S. businesses; Wall Street businesses most notably. While some will say academic standards are sometimes relaxed for athletes, they forget how intensely cerebral are some of the sports these athletes play, not to mention how mentally taxing it is to play them. Translated, an individual who learned football at the knee of Nick Saban, and who did so in grueling fashion, brings skills and remarkable mental toughness to a university and business that the typical college and job applicant doesn’t.

So “regulation” causes CEOs to “break out in hives”? Well, of course it does. While education itself is beyond overrated, acceptance at the top schools says something about the individual. Regulators are those who mostly didn’t rate acceptance at elite institutions, plus it cannot be stressed enough that for the most part those who presume to regulate are the ones who couldn’t get jobs in the industries regulated.

Imagine then, what the above means to chief executives? While the businesses they run aim to achieve greatness by hiring the best of the best, they’re suddenly being “advised” on how to run their businesses, and most often being told how to run their businesses by individuals who could never hope to work for them in a normal world. It’s the equivalent of Goldman Sachs facing a requirement to hire a failed math student for a position on the arbitrage desk, or Saban being forced to play at quarterback someone who was a backup in high school.

After which one imagines that most executives blanch at regulation simply because the very idea brings new meaning to superfluous in a largely free economy. If readers doubt this, they need only drive down any busy, or not-so-busy city street. If one restaurant has a surly staff, another a less than clean kitchen, and another has lousy food, there are countless other restaurants on the same street aiming to meet the needs of the underserved.

Is a local business treating you poorly, or seemingly taking your business for granted? No problem, online stores like Amazon are experimenting daily in search of ways to improve your shopping experience. Considering the internet more broadly, any attempt by a vendor to overcharge you will quickly be exposed through easy searches made by you online. The internet is pricing transparency personified, plus it’s the personification of quality control. Thanks to this source of copious information, bad vendors will be exposed in seconds. In short, regulations cause CEOs to break out in hives simply because they’re a worthless, superfluous, but very expensive add-on to what free markets already do exponentially more effectively.

But wait a second some say, regulations are about safety, or about the protection of businesses from themselves. Implicit here is that regulators exist to see around the proverbial corner in order to help businesses avoid the consequences of their worst instincts. Except that if they could see around corners, they would be extraordinarily rich investors, not salaried regulators. Or they’d have actual, much higher-paid jobs within the companies they regulate. Except that they don’t. Remember, they’re regulators not because they’re good at what they do. They’re regulators because they generally can’t.

All of which brings us back to the true problem with regulation: it’s a problem of low-quality talent being foisted on corporations thick with the best and brightest. Worse is that the low-rated talent has power to dictate how corporations operate. Is it any wonder the word “regulation” gives CEOs hives? Too bad John D. Stoll doesn’t know why.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks.

The Standard Bearer For The Spirit of American Conservatism And Ideas Of Civilization – Gertrude Himmelfarb

January 8, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

As written in the January 1st Poetic Justice Warrior Year in Review, and taught by psychologist Jean Moroney:

Focusing on positive values requires effort, and is the first big step to rational action. Left alone, it evolves into the economic way of peaceful human progress. Avoidance of disvalues is rooted in fear, can be destructive, and threaten your values. Left unchecked, it devolves into the political way of authoritarian control.

Two days earlier, on December 30th, we lost an important exemplar of individualism’s virtues, the prolific historian of ideas, and Poetic Justice Warrior Gertrude Himmelfarb. Best known as the champion for England’s Victorian era, so named after the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 through the end of the 19th century, Himmelfarb boldly described the motivational system of disvalues as,

For Rousseau and Mandeville, the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity. They were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Himmelfarb’s “moral instinct” is analogous to volitional focus on positive values – they require principled action. As she explains about 20th century moral equivalency, “Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.”

The Roads to Modernity

In her 2004 book subtitled: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Himmelfarb argues for the classical liberal virtues of reason, self-reliance, and compassion and compares each country’s different conceptualization for achieving them. For example, the French tradition advanced by philosopher Rene Descartes claims superior knowledge for power-seeking elites. Their hubris justifies their destruction of institutions they deem irrational. In contrast, according to economist Richard Ebeling in his 2010 review of her book, “the British tradition of individualism had little confidence in the ability to plan society. Far better to decentralize decision-making in the private competitive market so as to limit the potential damage from error and abuse.”

Citing Austrian economist F. A. Hayek’s description of French individualism as a “fatal conceit” fueled by “hyper-rationalism,” Himmelfarb was also an ardent proponent of . . .

The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a piece of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.

Context is also essential for the student’s dignity, as school teacher Lisa VanDamme relates about hers, “They have learned the overall stories and scope of history to understand some of the basic principles on which freedom and human flourishing depend.” Like historians and students, entire societies will flourish or decivilize depending on their depth of soul. A dignified society, as Himmelfarb explains, is the product of positive values guiding principled action,

Without will, without individuals, there are no heroes. But neither are there villains. And the absence of villains is as prostrating, as soul-destroying, as the absence of heroes.

Despite the label as an American conservative, Ebeling adds, “She seems not to see the extent to which the welfare state (some aspects of which she clearly supports) is fundamentally inconsistent with her ideal of free and virtuous people.” This would explain why British socialists like former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Gordon Brown championed her social prescriptions, “I have long admired Gertrude Himmelfarb’s historical work, in particular her love of the history of ideas.”

On Looking Into The Abyss

Ideas Have Consequences says Richard Weaver in his iconic book of the same title, and so says Himmelfarb. With our gift for reason, the world is intelligible, we can make identifications proven by empirical evidence, form propositions, and add to our knowledge. As Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand teaches, “The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” Or lives and generations lost. For Himmelfarb, an individual or society jumping into the abyss of subjective values is suicidal,

Postmodernism is denial of objectivity, of the reality of the past, of the possibility of arriving at any truths about the past. It induces a radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies even the ideal of truth.

For Bea Kristol, as Himmelfarb was known to her friends, the alternative to postmodern nihilism (ideas rooted in the denial of reality and positive values) are bourgeois Victorian virtues.

In 19th-century Britain, Victorians spoke the language of morality because they believed in the reality of virtues as the guiding principles of public as well as private affairs. In this sense there was a basic consensus on social affairs.

Himmelfarb defended the Victorian era against charges of hypocrisy by explaining that “Victorian virtues were based upon firm ideas of right and wrong.” She argued they were universal ideas that people of all socio-economic classes aspired to. Working class families readily put these values into practice and improved their lives and their communities. The evidence is overwhelming – quality of life rose, fertility rates and population increased, illegitimacy and crime rates fell, and sanitation and health care systems improved.

Coincidental to this, and essential to Himmelfarb, was the emergence of an impressive network of privately organized social safety nets for people who were unable to help themselves. As the Wall Street Journal reports,

Dr. Himmelfarb deplored the idea “that society is responsible for all social problems and should therefore assume the task of solving them.” The Victorians’ approach was “hardheaded, rational, pragmatic – and at the same time moral and humane.”

Accordingly, this did not apply to those unwilling to help themselves; instead there were the workhouses deplored by social activist and novelist Charles Dickens.

The Spirituality of Man

Yet Himmelfarb vigorously opposed the idea that people are merely programmed to react to their socio-economic condition and were slaves to their environment. To her, this denies our ability to control our behavior, shape our environment, and exercise our free will. Here she teaches us about today’s decivilizing cultural Marxism,

It is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness independent of material conditions. It denies a will capable of shaping history. It denies an individuality not reducible to class. It denies the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is more than the “bourgeois” freedom to buy and sell. And it denies the spirituality of man.

As fellow historian Myron Magnet explains,

The idea of a gentleman changed over the 19th century from a class term to moral term. “Integrity, honesty, generosity, courage, graciousness, politeness, and consideration for others” could distinguish a middle-class Victorian, or sometimes a laborer, as a gentleman.

And journalist Jay Nordlinger relates, “To read a book by Gertrude Himmelfarb is to be in the company of a civilized woman: erudite, understanding, eloquent, and civilized. How gratifying.” Poetic justice for a poor, little, Jewish girl from Brooklyn whose family escaped Russian tyranny.

To Achieve Change, Take Tiny Steps Towards New Habits. And Celebrate Disproportionately.

January 7, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

We don’t aspire to be a self-help site, but this piece from the Wall Street Journal made us happy and we thought we’d share it.

The new year is an ideal time to observe how people try to change their own behavior. Upsurges of enthusiasm in early January are generally followed by flagging commitment in February. Nearly everyone wants to make some kind of life change: eat better, lose weight, exercise more regularly, sleep and relax more. But the alarming levels of obesity, sleeplessness and stress seen in the world—and in my Stanford University behavior-research lab—show a painful gap between the changes people want and what they actually do.

For the most part, we tend to blame ourselves for not being willing to work hard enough to adopt new habits. But to be effective, change doesn’t have to be hard at all—and shouldn’t be. Tiny adjustments that come easily and make us happy are the ones that work best. It’s our approach to self-improvement that needs to change.

It turns out that there is a formula for any successful shift in behavior. This applies to everything from flossing your teeth to running a marathon. To instill a habit, the first thing you need is motivation: Pick a behavior that you want to do rather than one you merely feel obligated to do. Second, you need to be able to do it: Make the change simple and small at first. Third, you need a personal prompt: Identify a way to reliably trigger the behavior. Finally, you need to celebrate your new habit, so that your brain associates it with positive feelings.

My research team has tested this approach with more than 40,000 people over the past decade. For instance, an IT expert named Sukumar had been trying yearly since the age of 26, with no success, to lose the paunch that he was growing while sitting behind his desk. At age 43, he needed a different way to get started. So, at first, every time he brushed his teeth, he would do two push-ups, then hold a “plank’’ position for just five seconds. Rather than minimize these relatively incremental accomplishments, he celebrated them, which made him happier. Once his habit took root, it grew naturally. Now 51, he does 50 push-ups and a five-minute plank each day. He has lost the paunch, changed his self-image and enjoys his strenuous workouts.

When you start small, you can quickly move on to experiencing the rewards that motivate you to do more. I advise people to start with changes no bigger than Sukumar’s two push-ups and progress by small steps from there. Take a busy mom named Amy, who needed to manage distractions and stay focused on essential tasks. The habit she initially designed with our help was just to write one must-do task on a Post-it Note and stick it on her car dashboard, prompted by each day’s kindergarten drop-off. She didn’t even have to do the task itself at first; the initial habit was all about setting priorities. But she quickly felt successful and could move on to doing the single task and then others, and ultimately used the same principles to build a successful business.

It isn’t primarily repetition over a long period that creates habits; it’s the emotion that you attach to them from the start.

Such experiences tell us a lot about changing behavior. First, don’t think you have to create motivation. Choose habits that you already are eager to adopt. Second, go tiny. Why? Small is successful and sustainable because it is simpler. Next, design a prompt. We respond almost automatically to hundreds of behavior prompts each day that we barely notice (for instance, when you feel a few drops of rain on your arm, you open your umbrella); no behavior happens without some kind of prompt. Maybe you’ve been wanting to use the meditation app that you downloaded last week, but without a prompt, you forget to try. The best way to prompt a new habit is to anchor it to an existing routine in your life, whether it’s flushing the toilet, turning on the coffee pot in the morning or buckling your seat belt.

As you try each new habit, celebrate immediately. Cause yourself to feel good in that exact moment, whether it’s an inward “Good job!” or an outward fist pump. You deliberately reinforce the habit by tapping into the reward circuitry of your brain, causing it to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed. The more intense the positive emotion, the faster your new behavior will become automatic. Think about all those times that you could have changed but didn’t, and here you are—changing. Isn’t that worth celebrating?

It isn’t primarily repetition over a long period that creates habits; it’s the emotion that you attach to them from the start. Data from the most recent 5,200 people to complete a five-day course of our program showed that more than half were able to instill habits in five days or less.

When people work together as a family, business or community to celebrate and create change, the effects can be even more transformative. One of my favorite projects was at a research hospital where the challenge was to tackle the problem of nurse burnout, a large and growing issue in health care. As we taught the course for four weeks via live online video, I was able to see each nurse on my screen. Some were in their pajamas at home, flopped on the couch, eating takeout food, wiped out. Others sat at desks staring into their computer cameras with faces full of fatigue.

I heard firsthand just how difficult it was for them to do basic things like drink enough water, eat regularly, and even get a full night’s sleep. So we worked together on creating healthy habits like “After I open my computer, I will take a sip of water,” or “After I answer the call light, I will take a deep breath.”

These super-small habits started to make a big difference. The nurses began changing together. They also started celebrating each other—a quick clap for a fellow nurse who took a drink of water, a “good for you!” after someone took a deep relaxing breath. Data showed statistically meaningful improvements related to their daily stress levels. In a follow-up survey three months later, the improvements were still in place, and more than three-quarters of the nurses reported that they had created other positive changes using the same methods.

It’s easy to underestimate the power of tiny change. But some of the most profound transformations start from small adjustments—from suffering to less suffering, from fear to hope, from feeling overwhelmed to being empowered. So set aside the conventional wisdom about self-improvement: There’s no need to work toward big, ambitious goals. By going tiny, you can discover for yourself the changes that will change everything.

Dr. Fogg is the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. This essay is adapted from his book “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything,” just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Our Sheltered And Blinkered Elite Are Prone To Misleading Groupthink.

January 7, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate, and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable—even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

In 2018, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the committee’s then-ranking minority member, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., each issued contrasting reports of the committee’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign team and the misbehavior of federal agencies.

Schiff’s memo was widely praised by the media. Nunes’ report was condemned as rank and partisan.

Many in the media went further. They contrasted Harvard Law graduate Schiff with rural central Californian Nunes to help explain why the clever Schiff got to the bottom of collusion and the “former dairy farmer” Nunes was “way over his head” and had “no idea what’s going on.”

Recently, the nonpartisan inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, found widespread wrongdoing at the DOJ and FBI. He confirmed the key findings in the Nunes memo about the Steele dossier and its pernicious role in the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In contrast, much of what the once-praised Schiff had claimed to be true was proven wrong by Horowitz—from Schiff’s insistence that the FBI verified the Steele dossier to his assertion that the Department of Justice did not rely chiefly on the dossier for its warrant application.

When special counsel Robert Mueller formed an investigatory team, he stocked it with young, progressive Washington insiders, many with blue-chip degrees and resumes.

The media swooned. Washington journalists became giddy over the prospect of a “dream team” of such “all-stars” who would demolish the supposedly far less impressively credentialed Trump legal team.

We were assured by a snobbish Vox that “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team is full of pros. Trump’s team makes typos.”

Yet after 22 months and $32 million worth of investigation, Mueller’s team found no Russian collusion and no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction during the investigation of that non-crime. All the constant media reports that “bombshell” Mueller team disclosures were imminent and that the “walls are closing in” on Trump proved false.

Mueller himself testified before Congress, only to appear befuddled and almost clueless at times about his own investigation. Many of his supposedly brightest all-stars, such as Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and Kevin Clinesmith, had to leave his dream team due to unethical behavior.

In contrast, Trump’s widely derided chief lawyers—69-year-old Ty Cobb, 78-year-old John Dowd, and 63-year-old radio and TV host Jay Sekulow—stayed out of the headlines. They advised Trump to cooperate with the Mueller team and systematically offered evidence and analyses to prove that Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. In the end, Mueller’s “hunter-killer team” was forced to agree.

When the supposed clueless Trump was elected, a number of elites pronounced his economic plans to be absurd. We were told that Trump was bound to destroy the U.S. economy.

Former Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman insisted that Trump would crash the stock market. He even suggested that stocks might never recover.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Trump would bring on a recession within a year and a half.

The former head of the National Economic Council, Steven Rattner, predicted a market crash of “historic proportions.”

In contrast, many of Trump’s economic advisers during his campaign and administration, including outsider Peter Navarro, pundit Stephen Moore, former TV host Larry Kudlow, and octogenarian Wilbur Ross, were caricatured.

Yet three years later, in terms of the stock market, unemployment, energy production, and workers’ wages, the economy has been doing superbly.

The point of these sharp contrasts is not that an Ivy League degree or a Washington reputation is of little value, or that prestigious prizes and honors account for nothing, or even that supposed experts are always unethical and silly.

Instead, one lesson is that conventional wisdom and groupthink tend to mislead, especially in the age of online echo chambers and often sheltered and blinkered elite lives.

We forget that knowledge can be found at all ages, and in all places. And ethics has nothing to do with degrees or pedigrees.

Today’s Technology Enables Entrepreneurs To Reach So Many More People With Their Brilliant Innovations. That’s Why There Are Billionaires.

January 6, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Andy Kessler helpfully reminded readers that we were still hailing cabs when the 2010s began. It should be added that the act of hailing in days past was not infrequently done in hopeful fashion. Frustration arguably informed the act even more than hope. Think about that for a second. For city and suburb dwellers alike, cab scarcity used to very much be a source of immense aggravation that didn’t end happily.

New Yorkers were known to keep empty luggage at the office as a lure for cabdrivers when it was raining, or even when the sun was shining (the luggage created the impression of a passenger requiring a high-fare driver out to the airport). In Washington, D.C. proximity to streets heavily trafficked by cabs used to be a factor in residential choices. In poor parts of U.S. cities access to taxis was frequently non-existent. Now people just tap a button on increasingly ubiquitous smartphones and a driver arrives; usually soon after.

Thinking about smartphones, according to a report in the Washington Post from Monday, global ownership of these gadgets was, as of decade’s close, “only” 67%. “Only” is operative here simply because some technologists had predicted universal ownership as of 2020. Oh well, 67% still represents a miracle. If readers doubt the latter, they need only revisit an ad featuring the great comedic actor Rob Huebel from the early 2000s. Back then, showy cellphone (smartphones were still a future concept for the most part) use in public was still seen as obnoxious, and a sign of an insecure person trying to show off his wealth.

Speaking of communications, Richard Rahn’s column for the Washington Times referenced a work colleague who paid $2.50/minute to call family members in Ukraine 25 years ago. According to Rahn, now “she can make that call almost for nothing.” Rahn adds that while it required 171 work hours to purchase a transatlantic plane ticket in 1970, nowadays roughly 23 hours of toil purchase the same ticket. Perhaps left out by the economic commentator is that few were in the position back in 1970 to direct 171 work hours toward frivolities like transatlantic flight, let alone domestic. Lest readers forget, life’s basic necessities consumed much of one’s paycheck fifty years ago, while nowadays airports are thick with people of all income classes flying domestically and internationally; these people invariably talking on or tapping on mobile phone/computers that would have been unimaginable when the 1970s dawned.

All of the above and more came to mind amid the flurry of opinion pieces marking the end of the 2010s. As they came to a close, countless op-eds were released that celebrated the last ten years. Among other things the 10s were apparently recession free, technology progressed in exciting ways (see above), and by most accounts it was the best decade ever.

Thinking about the best decade ever, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that inequality of wealth soared amid the good times. The two are related. When individuals are prospering, life as we know it logically gets better and better. Never forget that immense wealth in a free society is nearly always a consequence of entrepreneurs meeting the needs of consumers in brilliant ways, and frequently meeting needs (see the first paragraph yet again) that consumers never knew they had.

That’s why it was so odd (but not surprising) to read Robert Samuelson’s typically mistaken read on wealth. In his Monday column for the Washington Post the Keynesian economist lamented “lopsided prosperity,” and in doing so missed how essential lopsided wealth is to societal wellbeing. When wealth inequality is rising, it’s as though we all live next door to Jeff Bezos, and others like him.

In the past, technological limits meant that there were limits to how much the world’s workers could benefit from the brilliance of the vital few, and by extension enjoy the world’s plenty. Along these lines, visitors from the east coast to the west coast used to drink Coors beer with each visit just because the “Banquet Beer” was a rarity. Coors was then a regional brand serving the needs of Americans on the west coast, but with enhanced distribution techniques that become greater by the day, Coors can increasingly be found where there are beer drinkers.

Considering Bezos, imagine if he’d been the world’s richest man in 1970 versus 2020. His genius surely would have been apparent, he would have greatly enhanced living standards, and he would have graced global magazine covers. But he would have also likely been quite a bit less than a billionaire. While much of the world might have been familiar with him, few would have been directly affected by his genius.

So why is the above true? Was the world fairer in 1970 such that the wealth pie was much more evenly divided? In truth, the world was much less fair. It was because relatively primitive technology meant that someone possessing Bezos’s brilliance could meet the needs of exponentially fewer people. Getting right to the point, there was no internet in 1970 making it possible for anyone with computer access to purchase the world’s abundance. Not only did income not stretch very far back then (see Rahn), there were exceedingly few ways to purchase the world’s goods and services.

Fast forward to the present, and what was non-existent in 1970 is now ubiquitous. Never forget that the original computers cost over $1 million in the ‘60s, and by the ‘70s they were still viewed as too expensive to ever exist as in-home technology. Thanks to the proliferation of personal computers that resulted in centimillionaires and billionaires, Jeff Bezos had his opening to create a global shopping business that people could access on their computers. A communications revolution that similarly minted mere billionaires made it possible for computer owners to purchase goods and services on Amazon from around the world. This led to arguably the world first centibillionaire in Bezos.

Thinking about all this through the prism of Bezos today versus 1970, he’s exponentially richer today because he’s able to serve exponentially more people exponentially more effectively. Bezos didn’t take wealth; rather he created it. Technological advances made it all possible.

Amazing about this is what’s ahead. They say that 5G technology will lead to the arrival of businesses and services previously unimagined. Those businesses will increasingly be staffed by “robots” such that an entrepreneur in the world’s farthest reaches will be able to expertly serve all income classes thousands of miles away in the world’s most heavily populated cities. If the technological change that took place in the 10s wows you, imagine what’s going to reach you in the 20s and beyond.

Crucial here is that as the world is shrunken even more in a figurative sense by technology, the amount of wealth created thanks to the technology promises to soar to previously unfathomable heights. The Jeff Bezos of fifty years from now will make today’s seem relatively poor by comparison, at which point future decades will make the just passed “best decade ever” seem rather ho-hum and dated by comparison.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, and Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks.