Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Only Capitalism qua Capitalism Saves the Planet From the Slavery’s Equality

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The Declaration of Independence was signed and executed during an armed revolt against a despotic monarch. The document listed numerous transgressions by the King against the natural rights of his citizens, leading to the de facto forfeiture of his sovereignty. While the member States were to exercise self-government under the Articles of Confederation, that failed after a few years, and a federal-style republic was formed under the Constitution.

A primary reason for the revolt was religious freedom, and their spirit of independence, self-reliance, and industry eventually created a vibrant middle class of shop keepers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, industrialists, and bureaucrats. Social mobility was finally possible, and lower class laborers enjoyed a relatively higher standard of living.

With an advantageous geographic location for international trade, it became the wealthiest and scientifically advanced society in the world. Once a luxury reserved for elite aristocrats, leisure time became commonplace. Of course, this was the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s and early 1700s. Coincidentally in 1683, having been falsely implicated in a plot to kill King Charles II, English philosopher John Locke exiled himself to Amsterdam for five years.

While there, Locke surrounded himself with the intellectual heirs to the rationalist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Despite its conflicts with Locke’s empiricism, he was impressed with Spinoza’s political and religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. As events would unfold 45 years later, François-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire) also escaped persecution, but this time from the French monarchy’s government elites.

Voltaire landed in London because the Glorious Revolution, led by English parliamentarians and an invading Dutch fleet in 1688, had installed a constitutional monarchy. Upon his return to France in 1733, Voltaire published his Letters Concerning the English Nation and reported,

Go to the London Stock Exchange, you will see representatives of all nations gathered for the service of mankind. Jew, Mohammedan, and Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and give the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt.

As Libertarian historian Wendy McElroy explains, Voltaire’s insight on the economic way over the political way . . .

Was nothing short of revolutionary. It reversed the accepted policies on how to create a harmonious society. Traditionally, nations enforce a system of values to ensure peace. Voltaire argued the opposite. Diversity and freedom created a thriving and peaceful society.

This evolution of ideas led to a revolution of the economic mind in 1776; the year when Adam Smith published his classic work,  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and met Benjamin Franklin. Eleven years later, Franklin co-founded and was elected president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1789, it issued a statement that read in part,

The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, presents a serious duty incumbent on us, to instruct, to advise, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments, and to procure their children an education.

Here, Franklin had identified a solution to a major obstacle to the abolition of slavery. The Revolutionary Mind was fearful of violent decivilization that would destroy the American experiment. If so, that would prevent the ultimate goal of self-ownership for all Americans.

Yet, to fully comprehend the nature of the institution of slavery; one that was nearly universal and continues in fascist societies elsewhere in the world today, it is essential to give it context. As Brad Thompson explains about 18th century America in Chapter 5 of his 2019 book America’s Revolutionary Mind, titled Equality and Slavery,

In a monarchical society defined by inequality, statuses, and rank orders of dependency and unfreedom, slavery was distinguished by being only the most degraded status.

In feudal societies, submission was nearly universal. Even in America today, the political elites who think in quantities, who count things in a static world and project, are determined to manufacture degraded status for nearly any identity group. This they call empowerment! Yet, it is unthinkable for today’s progressives to welcome a dynamic world, or to let their dependents in on the secret that they can own their productive happiness. That would render government elites irrelevant.

The unknown ideal, the ultimate solution to social domination, and its horrid extreme – slavery – is the self-evident morality of capitalism. It is the socio-economic system that bans force from all voluntary, human interaction. Simply working backward, free markets are rooted in rational self-interest as proven by Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, their foundation is the morally derived principle of rights as proven by John Locke and John Adams, and their axiomatic truth is in the primacy of existence as proven by Francis Bacon and Aristotle.

Freedom from force is the radical challenge that America’s Founders had accepted, that today’s social justice warriors refuse to accept, and Thompson frames succinctly,

The brutality of slavery was more easily denounced than overcome. A self-evident contradiction did not provide a self-evident solution to the problem.

Allergic to real solutions, today’s politicians pander with nonsense like unity and public service, and all of it is as un-American as borscht. What unites Americans is the spirit of independence that is fueled by personal integrity. In other words, self-ownership, productiveness, and the ultimate role of trading values produced by free individuals. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is our highest moral principle.

Yet today’s economic debate is dominated by progressive economic collectivism vs. conservative economic collectivism. The progressive side’s leaders include Saul Alinsky’s politics and John Keynes’s economics; the conservatives include William F. Buckley’s politics and Friedrich Hayek’s economics. Neither side acknowledges the morality of capitalism qua capitalism.

For Keynes, immoral “animal spirits” requires heavy government intrusion. For Hayek, amoral “spontaneous order” requires universal basic income. While Keynes’ is a demand-side construct that cruelly ignores the volitional, independent minds of the supply side, Hayek qualified his supply-side advocacy to Buckley in a 1977 television interview,

Because we are utilizing more information, more facts than anybody, the outcome for a particular individual is necessarily unpredictable. An outcome that is unpredictable and undesigned by anybody cannot be just.

When the collectivist solution of serving others for the undefinable common good or the consumer becomes a higher moral principle than independence, productiveness, and profit, then submission is inevitable.

It is self-evident that consumption destroys wealth, and that free markets do not reduce individual values to a common denominator like aggregate utility. Entrepreneurs design values, and it is the exceptional minority of producers, including free and industrious African-Americans, that lift a society to the level of their productive genius. This is Say’s Law of Markets, or as Thompson concludes,

The great achievement of the American Revolution was to launch forces that would lead over time to the reconciliation of moral theory and moral practice

 

It’s Time to Stop Believing These Political Myths We Are Fed.

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Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Myth 1: The Bill Of Rights Protects Americans’ Constitutional Rights.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus.

Myth 2: The Rule Of Law.

The Rule of Law is another myth impaled by 2020’s dire developments. Courts have repeatedly struck down sweeping restrictions. Federal judge William Stickman IV invalidated some of Pennsylvania’s restrictions in a September ruling: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” After the Michigan Supreme Court effectively labeled Governor Gretchen Whitmer a lawless dictator, she responded by issuing “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted. How many governors and mayors have you seen on the television news being led away in handcuffs after their arrest for violating citizens’ rights this year? None.

Myth 3: Government Health And Science Spending Is Good For Citizens.

Another myth that 2020 obliterated was the notion that politicians spending more than a hundred billion dollars every year for science and public health would keep Americans safe.

The Centers for Disease Control utterly botched the initial testing regime, sending out bogus tests to state and local health departments and taking a month and a half to do what the Thai government achieved in one day. The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach, notwithstanding the pandemic.

Myth 4: Public School Teachers Are Good People.

The benevolence and compassion of public school teachers was another myth that 2020 obliterated. Teacher unions helped barricade school doors the same way that segregationist governors in the 1950s and 1960s refused to obey federal court orders to admit black students. The Chicago Teachers Union proclaimed: “The push to reopen schools is based in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

Black and Hispanic students suffered much larger learning losses due to school shutdowns, leading former Education Secretary John King to warn of a “lost generation of students.” Despite a deluge of studies that showed that schools posed little risk of fueling the pandemic, teachers insisted that they were entitled to both their salaries and to stay at home as long as they considered necessary.

Myth 5: The Rulers And The Ruled Share Common Interests.

This was part of the collapse of the broader myth that the rulers and ruled have common interests. Among other splits, the response to the pandemic divided Americans into those who work for a living, and those who “work” for the government. Government employees in most states and at the federal level have been the Untouchables, continuing to draw full pay even when they were no longer even required to show up for work. One exception to this trend is government tax collectors, who continue commandeering as much as ever from citizens and property owners regardless of the collapse in public services in many places this year.

Myth 6: Social Media And The Internet Bring Us Free Information.

Another myth that perished in 2020 was that social media and the Internet could be a powerful propellant of free information. Instead, the biggest players pulled the most strings to suppress criticisms or dissent from the latest Covid policies promulgated by officialdom. On March 18, Twitter announced that, in response to Covid-19, it would ban tweets guilty of “denial of expert guidance” or “misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities.”

The World Health Organization initially overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold but they remain Twitter-approved. Facebook recently launched far more aggressive policies, including directly contacting anyone who liked or commented on a piece that was later ruled erroneous by Facebook guardians and is refusing any ads that discourages people from getting vaccinations. Will they ban WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan for declaring on Monday that there was “no evidence to be confident [vaccine] shots prevent transmission” of Covid? Google sought to suppress any doubts about lockdowns: “Most users in English-speaking countries, when they google ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, will not be directed to the declaration itself but to articles that are critical of the declaration,” a Spiked-Online analysis noted.

Myth 6: The Consent Of The Governed.

This year’s presidential election put a helluva dent in the credo that politicians rule with the “consent of the governed.” The pandemic provided the pretext to radically change voting procedures, spurring 65 million mostly unverified mail-in ballots. The New York Times warned in 2012 that “fraud in voting by mail is… vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention.” Many states solved that problem by “defining down fraud” and expunging the verification procedures previously used to routinely invalidate 20% or more of mailed-in ballots. The controversies around mail-in ballots, questionable software, ballot harvesting and other practices mean that a record number of Americans will doubt Joe Biden’s legitimacy even before he takes his oath of office.

Myth 7: Americans Cherish Personal Freedom.

Perhaps the saddest casualty of 2020 is the myth that average Americans cherish their personal freedom. Politicians continually shifted the rationale for lockdowns – from flattening the curve, to ending “community spread,” to reducing cases to near zero. Regardless of the proclaimed rationale, most people submitted without a fight, and usually without even a whimper. Politicians and bureaucrats fanned mass fears which quickly ripened into hatred of anyone who did not comply with the latest edict.

States and cities across the country set up snitch lines that were soon deluged with complaints of people outside without a mask, meeting friends, or having more visitors in their homes than could fit in a phone booth. Many, if not most, people quickly acquiesced to the “new normal” where any government hack who recited the phrase “science and data” became entitled to rule their lives with an iron fist.

As the Harvard International Review warned, “The very methods that liberal democracies are currently using to effectively fight the virus are the same tactics that authoritarian leaders use to dominate their people. The tools that have been temporarily deployed in the fight against a once-in-a-lifetime disease may become permanent.” That was written on May 23, more than 15 million Covid cases ago – proof of the failure of lockdowns and pervasive restrictions to make Covid-19 vanish. But the miserable batting average of officialdom will vanish into the Memory Hole if politicians launch a campaign to make Covid vaccinations mandatory, complete with boundless vilification of anyone who balks at the injection.

Myth 8: We Live In A Self-Governing Republic.

Perhaps it has long been a myth that we live in a self-governing republic rather than a Leviathan Democracy where citizens merely make cameo appearances every few years at the voting booth. It is still possible that the catastrophic and pointless losses imposed by Covid crackdowns will finally awaken enough people to their growing subjugation. But the most dangerous myth is that Americans will finally become safe after they cease making any efforts to leash their rulers.

These 5 Principles Signal Guaranteed Government Failure.

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The Presumption of Government Failure

I would add a few more conditions to the very useful list Don Boudreaux drew up. These are:

1. the principle of proportionality

2. the principle of consistency

3. the principle of the “unseen” and unintended consequences of this intervention

4. the principle of the impossibility (or great unlikelihood) of rational economic calculation by government planners

5. the “precautionary principle” concerning state intervention

The principle of proportionality is that all risks should be treated according to the degree of their severity and their likelihood of occurring. One of the things that became clear very early on in the covid epidemic was that different age groups were affected very differently by the virus, and that some groups’ risk of serious illness or death was statistically insignificant (children and young adults), while others were at considerable risk of death (those over 70 who had other severe health problems). As with every other government regulation, a one-size-fits all policy is crude and unjust and usually causes more harm than good. Hayekian “local knowledge” is needed in order to address this issue and this is something government is most unlikely to be able to provide. Furthermore, the effort and cost we should spend to counter a risk should be proportional to that risk, and in the case of old and sick people near the end of life, they and their families should make that decision not the state.

The principle of consistency is that like risks are treated alike. It has struck me as absurd that people would overreact to a risk which is less dangerous than other things the risk of which they have accepted for years or have only taken minimal steps to mitigate or avoid. In the case of covid, for most people it does not rank at the top of risky activities (such as driving a car, or walking down a dark street in the inner city) or the most common causes of death (over eating and drinking, lack of exercise, suicide) which they routinely engage in or accept. To be consistent, if the state is allowed to ban risky behaviour it should start at the top of this list and work its way down. If more people will die from heart disease or car accidents, for example, than covid, then the state should start by regulating or banning what food we can eat or liquids we can drink, or how much exercise we should have each week; or impose a “lockdown” on car usage to reduce car accidents; only then should it address the problem of covid by making the wearing of masks compulsory and imposing draconian “lockdown socialism” to restrict movement or public gatherings.

The principle of the “unseen” and unintended consequences of this intervention. According to this principle, it is almost certain, though not entirely predictable in all its details, that there will be Bastiat-ian “unseen” consequences to any state intervention. These may range from “economic” (increased costs, distortions in production and consumption), to “political” (the politicians who enact the legislation come to like their increased power and may well become corrupted as Acton predicted), or “moral” (individuals become increasingly used to and dependent upon government to “do something” to make them “safer”, and voluntary solutions are not undertaken as a result), to “medical” (resources which would have been devoted to assisting those who will die in large numbers of other diseases such as malaria, TB, diarrhea, or aids, are now diverted to finding a rushed vaccine for the new corona virus), and the now increasingly recognized “domestic” consequences (lockdowns increase death and injury within the home from depression, drug abuse, domestic violence, suicide).

The principle of the impossibility (or great unlikelihood) of rational economic calculation by government planners applies just as much to government public health and hygiene planners as it did to Stalinist central planners. Thus, it is up to advocates of government intervention to demonstrate how the central planning of the health economy in particular and the broader economy in general can avoid the fatal problems identified exactly 100 years ago by Mises in his essay “Economic Calculation under Socialism” (1920). For example, how is the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” economic activity even possible in an economy as complex as ours? How do you avoid the problem of the overproduction of ventilators (which turned out not to be needed and in fact harmed the patients who were forced to use them), or the overproduction of temporary “Nightingale hospitals” in England or the underused naval vessels in New York harbor?

The “precautionary principle” concerning state intervention is that great caution should always be applied to permitting any acts of intervention by the state. We as libertarians and free market economists know that government intervention is coercive and thus violates individuals’ rights to liberty and property, that it often fails to achieve its objectives or even produces results the opposite of those it intended, that by the “ratchet effect” the state increases in size and power with every crisis and never returns to its previous level, that its actions often produce “collateral damage” including loss of life, etc. Thus, according to my new libertarian “precautionary principle” we should avoid at almost any cost allowing the state to intervene to “solve” problems. That is of course, if we value liberty, peace, and prosperity, and this gets to the nub of the problem, since it is now quite obvious that most people rank “safety” far ahead of liberty in their list of preferences. This has been the tragedy of 2020 which has made this preference abundantly clear.

I would argue then that all of the above “principles” inevitably leads us to conclude that there should be “the presumption of government failure” to complement “the presumption of liberty” when assessing whether or not the state should intervene in public health, or in any other matter.

Some Of The Things We Said And Wrote In 2020.

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For your browsing over the end of 2020 / start of 2021 holiday, here’s a selection of posts that we think are indicative of what we’re trying to say.

1. Entrepreneurship Has All The Answers You Need

Individuals seek meaning and purpose in their life, beatitudo. We identify meaning and purpose in entrepreneurship.

2. The Ethic of Entrepreneurship

Meaning and purpose include other-oriented ethical behavior: the ethic of entrepreneurship.

3. How Entrepreneurship Is An Epic Calling

Meaning and purpose via an ethical path make entrepreneurship a calling – an epic one.

4. Economics Is Truth and Light, Beauty and Awe, Hope and Compassion

The entrepreneurial ethic is an embedded component of the truth and beauty of economics.

5. PJW Spotlight: George Reisman

Our original series Poetic Justice Warriors contrasts SJW thinking by highlighting some of today’s better thinkers.

6. PJW Spotlight: Johannes Vermeer

As well as the thinkers – and artists – of earlier eras.

7. Why Ayn Rand Laughs

We picked out Ayn Rand as one of the thinkers we admire, aiming to let readers evaluate for themselves.

8. PJW Spotlight: Murray Rothbard

We also liked Murray Rothbard and his philosophy of liberty derived from natural law.

9. Individualism Is The Best Philosophy For Society

Our foundational idea is that individualism, based on natural law, is the best philosophy for society.

10. The Scientific Method Of Inductive Reasoning Proves The Moral Foundation Of Individualism

We crossed from 2020 to 2021 with our new ongoing series Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind written by Mark Shupe.

Government Should Not Regulate Business. Businesses Should Regulate Themselves And Their Customers.

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Business regulations are of two kinds: government-imposed regulations on businesses and business-imposed regulations on employees and customers. From the standpoint of liberty and property, the first kind of regulation is always bad and the second kind of regulation is always good, even when the regulations are bad.

Let me explain.

First of all, there are government-imposed regulations on businesses. These can take many forms.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires employers with 50 employees or more to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to “eligible employees” because of the birth or adoption of a child or for the serious illness of the employee or the employee’s spouse, child, or parent.

Most people are aware that the Obamacare individual mandate dictating that every American not covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or private health insurance must purchase health insurance or pay a penalty was eliminated in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and then declared unconstitutional. However, the Obamacare employer mandate is still in force. It dictates that all employers with 50 full-time or full-time-equivalent employees or more must offer them “affordable” health insurance that provides “minimum value” or pay an annual tax penalty of $2,000 per employee.

There are also minimum-wage laws that dictate that an employer cannot pay an employee less than a certain amount per hour even if the employee agrees to work for that amount. The Fair Labor Standards Act also requires that employers pay a “covered employee” overtime pay of one-and-one-half-times the regular rate of pay, even if the employee agrees to work overtime for his regular rate of pay. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) actually administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws.

Most employers with at least 15 employees must comply with anti-discrimination laws enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC mandates that employers cannot discriminate in hiring or promotions on the basis of race, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Manufacturers must comply with labeling laws on everything from mattresses to canned goods.

Businesses that employ more than 100 people are required to report each year to the EEOC how much they pay each employee, broken down by race/ethnicity, job category, and gender.

Businesses must also comply with environmental regulations, safety regulations, antitrust regulations, advertising regulations, licensing, and permits.

And then, of course, there are the various taxes that businesses must collect for federal, state, and local governments: sales taxes, excise taxes, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, unemployment tax, withholding tax.

Government regulations on business are a tremendous burden and a costly drag on the economy. According to economist Dan Mitchell,

  • Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
  • The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.
  • For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.

And that was just a few years ago. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), “The aggregate total of regulations issued since 1976 (when the Federal Register began itemizing them) has increased from 195,189 at the end of Obama’s tenure to 204,802 now.” (And “now” was before the coronavirus pandemic.)

Then there are business-imposed regulations on employees and customers. These are generally misunderstood. Should they be allowed? Should they be limited? Should they be enforced by government? Are they constitutional? Two recent incidents relate to this subject.

When the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was the focal point of the news earlier this year, some employees of Whole Foods Market in Canada came to work wearing insignias and clothing in support of BLM. In response, Whole Foods Market prohibited all employees from wearing such items. But then the company went a step further. It prohibited the wearing of Remembrance Day poppies during Veterans Week. “The poppy represents those who’ve served, fought, and died for Canada, and it’s deeply personal to everyone here,” said Lawrence MacAulay, Canada’s Minister of Veterans Affairs. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who termed the ban “disgusting and disgraceful,” said that his family would be boycotting Whole Foods Market. But he also announced that “he would seek legislation in the province to ban employers from prohibiting staff from wearing poppies during Remembrance Week.” Other grocery stores in Canada took advantage of the public outcry directed towards Whole Foods Market. Some posted photos of employees wearing poppies. Whole Foods Market then reversed its poppy-wearing policy and issued a statement: “Our intention was never to single out the poppy or to suggest a lack of support for Remembrance Day and the heroes who have bravely served their country.”

But it’s not just Whole Foods Market in Canada that is in hot water. In the United States, Whole Foods Market was sued in July by employees in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, California, and Washington when it barred them from wearing BLM face coverings while on the job. The company said in a statement that employees “must comply with our longstanding company dress code, which prohibits any visible slogans, messages, logos or advertising that are not company-related, on any article of clothing.” The plaintiffs allege that “the company has allowed other messages on workers’ attire, including rainbow pins and flags, and sports team names and logos.” The lead attorney said that Whole Foods Market “‘selectively and arbitrarily’ enforced the dress code to specifically suppress the Black Lives Matter message.”

The other incident concerns business regulation of customers. And it is more than just one incident. It actually affects millions of Americans every day. Since the advent of the coronavirus “pandemic,” many businesses have begun requiring not just their employees, but their customers as well, to wear face masks while patronizing their place of business. Now, much of this is because of government mask mandates that exist in many states, counties, and cities, but not all of it. In some places where there are no mask mandates, businesses have instituted their own.

Should they have the right to require their customers to wear face masks? Of course they should, but not because (so they say) masks help to limit the spread of coronavirus, are recommended by the CDC, keep everyone safe, or are just a minor inconvenience. Businesses should have the right to require their customers to wear masks for the same reason that they should have the right to require their customers to wear plaid shirts, dress pants, or blue suede shoes. No one has the right to shop at a particular store. Just as no store has the right to any customers.

In a free market, before a business makes any regulations, it must take into account whether a particular attire or conduct regulation — or any regulation — will upset employees or alienate current (or potential) customers. Mistakes can cost them employees or customers, or both.

It is never the business of government to regulate business. But it is perfectly acceptable for businesses to regulate the attire and conduct of employees and patrons. We may not like working for or shopping at businesses that have certain attire and conduct regulations — just as we may not like the prices they charge, their return policies, their hours of operation, the cleanliness of their restrooms, their employee benefits, or the snacks available in their employee break rooms — but in a free society it is businesses that decide those things and employees and consumers who decide if they will go along with them or work or shop somewhere else. In a free society, the government wouldn’t be involved in any way.

Barstool Sports Is Helping Struggling Small Businesses Far More Effectively Than The Government.

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There is overwhelming evidence that government lockdowns are ineffective at containing the coronavirus. Yet city and state governments continue to employ the economically crushing tactic amid rising COVID-19 case counts even though it means forcing millions more out of work.

Heavy-handed politicians have pummeled small businesses the hardest of all this year. Many are teetering on the edge of fiscal solvency. Nearly 100,000 independent businesses have already closed for good, and one estimate predicts more than 40 percent may close by the end of quarter four. Instead of offering those owners a lifeline by reopening, politicians are giving them a final push over the edge with more lockdowns—attempting to, inadequately, justify it with an inefficient, wasteful, and second corrupt stimulus package.

To be clear, the pandemic would have seriously hurt the economy no matter what, but government lockdowns have exponentially worsened the financial pain. Even worse, politicians did this while also flouting the rules themselves and unnecessarily increasing COVID-19 deaths by mandating that nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients. So, if there are Americans still looking to the government to help them after all we’ve seen this year, it’s time to give up the ghost. These people are not coming to save you.

But while our politicians are out to lunch (quite literally, and in the very establishments they’re trying to ban for the general public), actual leaders are stepping in to fill the void.

Dave Portnoy, the founder and president of popular media company Barstool Sports, has vocally opposed the shutdowns. But beyond criticism alone, Portnoy is rising to the occasion and using his reach to provide real assistance for small business owners.

But while our politicians are out to lunch (quite literally, and in the very establishments they’re trying to ban for the general public), actual leaders are stepping in to fill the void.

Last week, Portnoy launched a fund to bail out small businesses and alerted his 1.8 million Twitter followers to the cause. It seems he is spending this money out of his own pockets, a heroic and commendable endeavor, and challenging others to join him in the cause.

They say when a strong man takes a stand the spines of others are stiffened, and that certainly seems to be the case here. Social media influencers across Twitter began donating to Portnoy’s fund, many of them unsolicited.

Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation Entertainment, contributed $50,000 despite concert venues being one of the hardest hit industries in the pandemic. And there were countless others like him. Dana White, President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, contributed generously. Gary Vaynerchuck of VaynerSports joined in. The list goes on.

Everyday Americans are stepping up too, giving generously out of what they have to help others. Across the board, all have been motivated to action by Portnoy’s leadership.

As of this writing, Portnoy has raised an impressive seven million dollars and counting.

His timeline is now filled with heartwarming stories of the people whose livelihoods he has saved. These are the stories of hard-working Americans. People who were simply seeking to do the right thing, offer a service, and provide for their families. Watching their reactions is both heartwarming and infuriating. These are our fellow citizens and they’ve been victimized by our government.

This is the America you can be proud of.

Our government lets us down repeatedly. Our politicians fail us. They tread on our liberties, they bet against us. And yet we still rise.

Americans are generous people. In fact, we have been ranked number one in the list of most generous countries for the past decade. Now just imagine what we could do for one another if the government weren’t seizing—and largely wasting—a huge chunk of our income each year.

The moral of the story is that we do not need the government to come save us. When left to our own devices, Americans will rally to help each other—and do it far more efficiently than the government ever could.

Corporate Socialism: Intertwined Economic And Cultural Control By Government And Corporations.

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Michael Rectenwald has introduced a new terminology for us to consider as a description, and to some extent an explanation, of the political, economic and cultural situation in which we currently find ourselves: corporate socialism.

As part of his context setting, he tells us that his use of the word socialism embraces only one of two different meanings it may have. One meaning is the utopian idea of income equalization, whereby all citizens receive equal benefits from the state, and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is the governing mantra. The second meaning, which inevitably accompanies any economic movement towards the first, is top-down, not-to-be-questioned authoritarianism, whereby there are people in authority competent enough and sufficiently empowered to tell you what your needs are and what your abilities are. It’s this kind of top-down authoritarianism Rectenwald has in mind in the coinage “corporate socialism”.

Corporations are not asserting their authority over citizens without government approval or permission or participation. Quite the opposite, the corporations and the government are inextricably intertwined in the use of the political power of command. Here’s how the intertwining operates.

  1. Governments have decided that they do not want to own the means of production. That strategy turned out disastrously in the Soviet Union. Governments recognize that there has to be a market in what’s produced, reflecting, at least to some degree, what consumers prefer. Otherwise, rebellion.
  1. However, they have discovered and established their nexus of control in how goods and services are produced. When they impose conditions on commercial operations related to global warming controls, energy use, wage levels, health care benefits, diversity and identity considerations, safety, licenses, labeling and packaging, security, information gathering and sharing, and all their other interventions, governments are determining how firms operate for everything that they produce. The size, shape and function of cars, the organization of telecommunications networks, the operation of search engines, the structure of the health care industry, all these and many other elements of the economy are uniquely determined by legislation, regulation, and government bureaucracy rules.
  1. The enforcement mechanism is compliance. Firms must assign a significant proportion of their personnel, administrative procedures, technology, reporting and systems to compliance – keeping on the right side of government-imposed rules, which are deliberately complex, opaque and open to confrontational interpretation. Charles G. Koch in his book the Science Of Success reports that Koch Industries felt the need to set up an entire operating unit devote to “the public sector”, i.e. compliance with government rules. Banks like JPMorgan Chase spend billions of dollars on, and allocate thousands of employees to, compliance activities. Absent a major investment in compliance, firms leave themselves open to fines, lawsuits, sanctions, property seizure (e.g. shutdowns) and many more kinds of expensive penalties. 
  1. The consequence is that only the largest corporations are able to operate profitably under the government’s regulation and enforcement regime. Only their scale is enough to amortize compliance costs over a sufficient volume of transactions and a sufficient revenue volume to render it economically tolerable. 
  1. And then government favors the large compliant corporations – those who are doing their bidding – with large government contracts that make them even more co-dependent. As just one example, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are jointly engaged in a multi-billion dollar Defense Department contract.

Google will build security-and app-management tools for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, deepening the Silicon Valley giant’s military ties …. Tools and a console built with the company’s Anthos application management platform will allow DIU to manage apps on either of the cloud services heavily used by the Pentagon: Microsoft Azure, which won the hotly contested JEDI cloud contract, and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, heavily used by DoD researchers, from a Google Cloud console. (www.defenseone.com).

Of course, US Treasury and Federal Reserve operations run through the large banks, the Department of Education determines what technology, services and content are used in public schools, housing regulators determine how builders construct houses, and, to curry government favor, large corporations in these industries comply.

To what extent is this authoritarian socialism? 

The goal, says Rectenwald, is “eliminating producers whose products or processes are deemed either unnecessary or inimical to the globalists’ desiderata for “a fairer, greener future.” Naturally, this would involve constraints on production and consumption and likewise an expanded role for governments in order to enforce such constraints”.

The producers who are eliminated are generally small businesses who are less able to afford compliance – and may be less politically inclined to do so. Government requirements, at the state and local level,  to comply with COVID regulations have exacerbated the elimination trend. Authorities have, says Rectenewald,  “seized the opportunity to cull from the economy the underbrush of small and medium-sized businesses in order to make compliance simpler and more pervasive”.

Who are the perpetrators of this shared compliance scheme?

In a book titled The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham made the case that the socialist revolution of the type that took place in Russia would inevitably be succeeded by a managerial revolution, in which a technocratic elite would take control. As technology and systems become ever more complex, these technocrats believe that production can’t be entrusted to “workers”. Production functions and structures must be shaped and controlled for the “workers’” own good.

Today, the technocrats emerge from our elite government-controlled universities where they are indoctrinated into progressive ideas and, whether they choose employment in industry, government or consultancies and think tanks, they jointly populate a networked system of command and control whereby progressivism can be imposed, embedded and implemented.

Burnham called this arrangement managerialism, a replacement for capitalism. It’s a one-party system of control via a managerial elite. Managerialism is a class structure, with the controlling class embedded in Washington DC in government administration, lobbying, quangos and consultancies, and in large corporations. The managerial elite get to positions of control so that they can fix society, improve us Americans, stave off the global warming we’ve so foolishly triggered, save us from COVID, dictate the conditions in which we work, manage our education and the news and communication we receive.

Politics and economics become directly interfused. The state does not recognize the limits contemplated for it in capitalism, or in the Constitution for that matter. The economic arena is now also the arena of the state. Consequently, there is no sharp separation between political officials and so-called captains of industry. The captain of industry is, by virtue of his function, at the same time, a state official. Managerialism has swept the West not only in business and government, but also in universities, the military, and even churches and synagogues and their leadership. 

And this control starts to change the culture. The managerial elite are not content to just control politics and economics, but also take aim at the culture as a whole. It is at the cultural level that the ultimate battle in society between the elite and the normal people takes place. The normal people start to see every aspect of their lives infringed upon by the managerial elite. Managerialism has already totally changed the American culture. It’s changed the composition of American culture through a wide increase in immigration since 1962, and it’s also changing our mores. There’s been a huge transformation, for example, in the embrace of all sorts of sexual lifestyles that used to be anathema to the religious conception of the founders of this country, creating new legitimatized identities and protected classes of people. These and other elements of cultural transformation are the results of the managerial class controlling society. 

According to Burnham, this is totalitarian, a managerial state. Democracy is a show for the normal people to let off political steam from time to time, but it does not affect the elite’s one-party system or undermine their command and control platform.

So this is our new political, economic, and cultural situation. Call it corporate socialism, or call it managerialism. Either way, it’s tending towards totalitarianism.

The Law of Causality Solves America’s Obsession With Inequality

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In the third chapter of author Brad Thompson’s book America’s Revolutionary Mind (titled Self-Evident Truths), he tells us “the concept of truth identifies a kind of relationship, between a proposition and certain facts of reality. More specifically, truth is the end to which self-evident is the means.”

In fact, America’s tradition of Equality (the fourth chapter’s title) – equal justice under objective law – began during the pre-Revolutionary War period. “The Americans conducted their debates with Great Britain during the years of the imperial crisis very much like a criminal or civil case. Truth, including moral truth, is possible, necessary, and desirable.” In his 1689 Essay, John Locke defined truth as a proposition whose subject and predicate relate to each other without contradiction. As Thompson explains,

Grounded on perceptually self-evident axioms, moral truths can be discovered that are as certain as mathematical truths, but they require thought and attention. The freedom to think (collect, weigh and judge evidence) is a requirement of human flourishing.

This is the Law of Identity in action; aka the Law of Causality – an action is caused by the nature of the entity that acts, nothing acts in contradiction to its nature. The first self-evident truth, all men are created equal, is what Thompson calls species equality. It is perceptually self-evident that men are not horses or birds, and consequently, no man is born to rule another by nature. By the process Locke calls demonstration, subsequent truths are conceptual, and form a continuum known as the conceptual hierarchy.

The moral and political truths presented in the Declaration can be self-evident only after they are discovered and presented through a process of reasoning and demonstration. Starting with an axiomatic truth, three self-evident corollary truths were deduced.

Because reason is the primary attribute of man, and yet inequality of physical strength, esthetics, cognitive skills, and family resources are the natural state of human existence, reason itself is under attack in 2020 American culture. The popular bromide of these nihilists, the ones who reject moral truth, is “there are no absolutes.” The phrase itself is an absolute. As a self-evident contradiction whose purpose is to force artificial equality, it implies let the consequences be damned.

And ambition. However, in chapter four Thompson writes, “18th Century American society was the most egalitarian society in history. The New World lacked the glaring economic and social inequalities that defined life in the Old World. Because land was so much more available in America, economic opportunity and wealth creation were open to virtually all people willing to be rational, industrious, and economical.” 

In other words, to square each person’s equal ownership of reason and free will with the unequal distribution of several other qualities, America’s Founders made the essential distinction between qualitative and quantitative attributes. Thompson writes,

In Jefferson’s understanding of equality, measurements have been omitted. Following Locke’s innovation that all men are born tabula rasa, whatever their natural differences may be, they are not so great as to confer a natural title to rule over any individual by nature.

More broadly, measurement omission is essential for the entire process of concept-formation, aka thinking. There is the forest and there are trees. This is an example of unit-economy. One does not need to know how many trees are required to define a forest. The concept of species-equality is no exception. Concept-formation differentiates men from animals who are limited to perception and instinct. Reason expands our range of consciousness to an unlimited scale.

While today’s social justice warriors may agree with “Jefferson’s revolutionary generation did not think that all men were equal with regard to moral virtues such as rationality, honesty, integrity, fortitude, courage, justice, and productiveness,” they are determined to do something about it!

Yet, absent moral principles, force is the only means for their ends. Because productiveness is the virtue dependent on the ones preceding it in this list, and the only one that is routinely measured objectively, it is the virtue that is marginalized most easily.

The other six virtues take effort to understand – and perform. So for anyone who wants to force equality into measurable units, and reverse the law of causality, the first thing to do is demonize the unit-economy of productiveness – money, prices, and profit. Then glorify the animal-level perceptions of race and sex in primitive defiance of what Declaration and US Constitution signer James Wilson said of “the role of inequality in human affairs,”

It is fit for the great purposes of society that there should be great inequality among men. In the moral, political and natural world, diversity forms an important part of beauty; so of utility likewise. Hence the necessity of great variety, even great inequality in the talents of men.

What Wilson has done is weave diversity into the fabric of American originalism, and explain “mutual dependence supposes mutual wants: all the social exercises and enjoyments may be reduced to two heads – that of giving, and that of receiving: but these imply different aptitudes to give and to receive.” Here, like everywhere, the law of causality is at work. The beauty offered by diversity of talent and ambition is predicated on the equality of rights, derived from species equality, and the unit-economy of concept-formation.

Also unique to human life is language, whose definitions of words give simple and complex concepts their identity. The most commonly used tool for those who wish to reverse the law of causality is to alter definitions, particularly those of words like equality, rights, diversity, and justice. In their hubris, they believe that reality is defined by their imaginations, but that is impossible. Existence exists. You can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality forever.

Regardless of today’s progressive bromides, money remains the keystone of civilization, prices possess more information than all economic planners combined, profit is the mother of all poetic justice, and to quote the prolific novelist turned philosopher Ayn Rand, “a word is worth a thousand pictures.”

 

 

Once The Government Gets Involved In Any Market, Rampant Price Inflation Follows.

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In his book Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb says a bubble is much like a stock that traders keep buying because others are doing the same thing.

“This usually happens when a company or product has a compelling narrative around it that isn’t backed up by data,” Goldfarb writes. “They’re easy to invest in, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future value, and it’s often about a lot of novice investors.”

The student loan bubble checks all of these boxes. Americans have been hearing about a student loan “crisis” for over a decade, and there’s a reason for that. Forty-three million Americans hold $1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. The average debt per borrower is $37,127. Since the late 1970s, tuition has risen at a rate three times that of inflation.

Not only is a college degree getting more expensive, it’s doing so while arguably becoming less valuable.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 43 percent of graduates are underemployed in their first job. Of those, two-thirds remain in jobs that don’t even require a college degree five years later.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post found that only 27 percent of graduates work in a job related to their major. And estimates show that the rate of return on a degree has been decreasing since the Great Recession.

Already, over 1 million people default on their student loans every year. Some studies estimate nearly 40 percent of borrowers could follow their lead by 2023, leading many to warn of the coming student loan bubble.

One trait all bubbles share is an obscured understanding about the value of a commodity relative to its actual worth. In this instance, it’s why you see people paying $100,000 for a degree in graphic design that might pay them $40,000.

Sometimes, the debt is even more. Just ask Shaun Dunn, a 38-year-old 3-D designer who racked up more than $400,00 in student loan debt after attending the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

“I just feel they were dishonest, saying you’ve got this great future in front of you,” Dunn told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year. “But I feel we were ripped off. Bamboozled. Tricked.”

As of February, Dunn had no job, owed $431,607, and was bankrupt.

So, given these circumstances, why do we continue to see young people paying small fortunes to earn these degrees—especially those that offer little prospect of earning potential?

It goes back to Goldfarb’s point on the importance of a compelling narrative in the making of a bubble. Americans have been told the only way to upward mobility, respectability, and the American Dream is through a college degree. We sell this narrative to 18 year-olds (novice investors) and we make it really easy for them to invest in the model (government loans). If we wanted to create a bubble, I’m not sure you could have found a better way to do it.

So what happens if the bubble bursts? In the 2008 financial crisis, millions lost their jobs, their retirement savings, and their homes. That crisis bears many similarities to this one. Students take out and are given loans with little attention paid to their prospective ability to repay the debt.

And what was already a hot mess is reaching a boiling point in the midst of COVID-19 as the government continues to shut down businesses and create skyrocketing unemployment.

This is a crisis for millions of Americans, albeit one temporarily on hold as all federal student loan payments have been paused during the pandemic. There is, of course, an element of personal responsibility here. But these Americans do deserve some sympathy. These are people who were largely trying to do the right thing. They intended to work, not to be leeches on society. Many were taken advantage of and misled by higher education institutions, and they were poorly educated by our public schools that fail to teach basic financial literacy.

We cannot continue to shrug our shoulders at this situation. Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions would only exacerbate the problem.

For years, progressives have been calling for the “cancellation” of student loans, and they’ve been calling for free tuition in higher education. And lately, the calls for loan cancellation have hit a crescendo as Senator Warren, President-Elect Joe Biden, and many other elected officials have floated the idea.

There are two problems we all want to address. The first is that college has become too expensive, and the second is that people with college degrees increasingly can’t find good jobs.

Instead of targeting the root cause of these two problems, cancelling student loans and taking full government control of higher education would merely devalue college degrees further. It would also allow higher education institutions to continue jacking up the price of a commodity whose actual value is diminishing—all on the taxpayers’ dime

These are the kinds of ideas that created the mess to begin with and are therefore the policies we need to move away from.

In the early 1900s, most professions did not require a college degree.

But in 1944, Congress passed the G.I. Bill, extending tuition and living assistance to veterans. This action exploded enrollment with over 8 million veterans signing up. The sudden boom led to states expanding college services with resources they had in a booming post-war economy.

Next came the National Defense Student Loan program, which did for civilians what the G.I. Bill did for veterans. The Higher Education Act of 1965 then set-up federal scholarships and low-interest loans for students. Finally, in 1978 Congress passed the Middle Income Student Assistance Act, which made all undergraduates eligible for subsidized loans.

A former education secretary warned that government aid for students would lead directly to an increase in college costs (known as the Bennett hypothesis) and his predictions came true. The Federal Reserve found that for every dollar in student aid, tuition increases 65 cents.

Ultimately, costs at public universities rose 213 percent between 1980 and 2018.

Progressives often try to blame these tuition increases on state budgetary cuts, claiming schools have had to raise their rates in response. But the claim doesn’t wash.

In fact, nine states have increased their per-student funding in the past 10 years and across all of them, tuition still increased. Furthermore, a Harvard study comparing higher education programs that accept federal aid to those that do not found that tuition at aid-accepting programs grew much faster.

All evidence points to government-subsidization as the real culprit behind rising tuition costs. And this is exactly what basic economics teaches us to expect.

The Basic Economics

The law of demand says that at higher prices, buyers will demand less of a product. And the law of supply says that at higher prices, sellers will supply more of a product. These two laws interact to determine the actual price of goods in a free market.

Normally, colleges would see the demand for their product drop if they raised their prices too high—which they have. Very few people could afford $30,000 for one year of school, and private lenders would be unlikely to lend that amount to borrowers for most majors. Therefore, in a free market, schools would have to drop their prices if they wanted to attract more students and stay open.

This isn’t happening because politicians used the federal government to interfere in the market. As is always the case with the government, they break it—you buy it.

There are many free market solutions to the student loan bubble that are equitable, grounded in sound economics, and within reach.

Employers can simply quit requiring college degrees for many positions and implement skills-based tests in their place. We can elevate trade schools and inform children on alternative career pathways. State lawmakers can remove regulations put in place to intentionally block new competitors from entering the market. Students and colleges can choose pathways that lower the costs of college. And the federal government should consider cutting the interest on student loan payments to give borrowers the ability to pay more of their principal.

But the reality is there’s no incentive for our society to pursue these things as long as there’s an endless sea of taxpayer dollars flowing to the colleges. In order for meaningful change to occur, and for higher education to actually become affordable, the federal student loan program must end.

In his book, Inside American Education, famed economist Thomas Sowell said,“The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise.”

We can’t begin to really clean up this mess until we first cut the water off. Then, we could talk about true free market reforms.

Entrepreneurs Always Challenge The Status Quo – In Business, Politics, Regulation and Institutions.

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Entrepreneurs refuse to accept the status quo. Their function is to create new economic value for their customers, and thereby to profit for themselves, both financially and psychically. They do this by introducing new products and services to the marketplace, designing and implementing new processes, adding value to others’ inventions by turning them into market-wide innovations, and offering new pleasures and satisfactions and solutions that no-one knew of or imagined.

The pursuit of new is a refusal to accept the status quo. That includes any and all existing market conditions and structures, any monopolistic incumbent firms, any regulatory barriers, any capital shortages, any “it can’t be done” pessimism.

We think of entrepreneurs in economic terms, market movers dealing in goods and services, taking dollars and cents in exchange. But the entrepreneurial mindset and the entrepreneurial process can be applied in many more contexts where the status quo requires a challenge and change is called for. Functional entrepreneurship is a process that can be described as a series of steps:

  • Development of entrepreneurial belief. An entrepreneur develops and continually adapts and polishes a belief about the status quo that no-one else holds. The belief is that the status quo is inadequate, wrong, or susceptible to improvement. For whom? For customers – i.e. not for the entrepreneur herself but for others. The status quo is under-serving others, and the entrepreneur is determined to fix that error. The entrepreneur, of course, expects to get something back in return, which could be psychic fulfillment (a sense of purpose and meaning from being the status quo buster) as well as profit (which is the financial signal to the entrepreneur to keep going). It all starts with dissatisfaction and the belief in the possibility of eliminating it.
  • Alignment with customers: As the entrepreneur develops the belief, she or he continuously aligns with (potential) customers. Am I getting this right? Does what I believe align with your preferences? If I change things in the way I am thinking, will you endorse the change? You are the customer, and you are my guide. You have the final decision.
  • Implementation: Given supportive feedback from customers (“the market”), the entrepreneur moves ahead with the new initiative – designing, building, and marketing it. It’s offered to the market as a value proposition (“I think you might like this – here’s why”). The market (i.e. customers) responds yes, no or conditionally (“I’d like it better if………). The entrepreneur receives the feedback, reshapes the value proposition and re-offers it until the customer confirms “Yes! That’s it!”

This mindset and the BAI process – Belief, Alignment, Implementation – can be applied not only in business but in any context or setting where there is dissatisfaction with the status quo on which an entrepreneur can build a belief and a customer can express a preference. As a result, we can imagine a wide range of fields in which the entrepreneurial mindset can be applied to society’s benefit.

Institutional Entrepreneurship

Many of the institutions in our society have reached all time lows of disrespect. Representative democracy is being widely questioned, and the institution of Congress has a very low approval rating (18% job approval – and moving lower – according to Gallup Poll in mid 2020). Also in the Gallup Poll, half of Americans revealed “somewhat negative” or “very negative” ratings of the federal government. We are losing confidence in our money, and the Federal Reserve, the institution charged with preserving its integrity and value, yet does the opposite. Similarly, we re losing respect for educational institutions that prefer to indoctrinate our children rather than educate them.

In all these instances, there are entrepreneurs who have developed the belief that they can bring improvements to a corroded status quo. Even democracy can be innovated. Or, alternatively, we could re-think the entire founding of the US. Entrepreneurs are the ones who initiate these changes.

Regulatory Entrepreneurship

Regulation is the context in which entrepreneurs work. The more thoughtful entrepreneurs question whether the context is unchangeable, and they find innovative ways to make change. Uber and AirBnB are recent multi-billion dollar examples of what’s possible. Uber is what contracted automobile transportation looks like when entrepreneurs question the regulation that keeps the restrictive taxi monopoly in place. According to Josh Johnston Airbnb is just what hotels look like without hotel regulations. Entrepreneurs can out-think regulators.

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is a term that is often misused to mean entrepreneurial initiatives that are conducted without a profit motive, aiming for a higher target of good for society that entrepreneurial capitalism can’t achieve. The true case is that all entrepreneurship is for social good, because society is simply another word for entrepreneurs’ customers, and entrepreneurs want them to do well. Entrepreneurs offer society more and more good things, while trying to use less and less of society’s resources (i.e. lower costs), thereby freeing them up for other social uses.

A great example of profit-directed social entrepreneurship is the initiative called Entrepreneur Zones, the brainchild of Dale Caldwell of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Rothman Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. With Entrepreneur Zones, Dr. Caldwell aims to solve problems of urban poverty, family instability and academic underachievement by establishing an environment where local residents can start and grow businesses and make them thrive, in n environment of shared purpose, supportive investment, training, mentoring and relaxed regulation. The goal is to improve society by making a profit, generating jobs, and creating the social environment in which families can pay their bills and their kids can do well in school.

Cultural Entrepreneurship

In November 2020, Frank Newport of Gallup wrote A Letter to Elected Representatives, From the Average American, based on what average Americans had told Gallup in surveys. One of the statements is this: “I have lost faith in many of our culture’s institutions in recent years”. The term cultural institutions can include many things from religion to the healthcare system. Gallup reports that Congress has by far the lowest confidence of all institutions, of course, but confidence in many of our other institutions is redoing too. The next lowest after Congress is big business followed by the news media (TV and Newspapers), the criminal justice system, and organized labor, then banks and public schools.

We can see entrepreneurial improvements emerging for all these institutions. Home schooling and private schools; fintech replacing many bank functions; reformers trying to change the criminal justice system; internet news outlets offering alternatives to mainstream news media. Consumers get to choose which of these innovations they’ll support. Entrepreneurs will continue trying to secure that support through integrity, earning trust, and giving great service, which is where so many of our institutions fail.

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are society’s resources for continuous improvement of the status quo.

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