Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

The Ethic Of Entrepreneurship.

/in /by

What if the generalized approach to life was something like this: my most fulfilling and most profitable pathway is to first help other people – make their life better – and thereby help myself to a better life.

This is not the generalized approach today. It’s more common for people to think that they live in a system that they have to fight against, and that they help themselves by gaming it for advantage. That’s the mindset behind student loans, credit card debt, welfare, and many more common life strategies.

It is the ethic of entrepreneurship to choose the outer-directed course. To start from the point of view of identifying other people’s wants, and to undertake to address those wants with marketplace solutions: goods and services designed specifically for customers’ wants. The customer’s satisfaction is the object of the entrepreneur’s activity, creativity, investment and commitment to getting the commercial formula right, i.e. identifying the right benefit and the right cost so that the customer feels value.

A great part of the entrepreneur’s ethic of customer service and satisfaction is embracing the uncertainty of the market. Economists use the term “uncertainty” to indicate that hoping for a good result in the future – perhaps setting your heart on it – is unwise, simply because the future is unpredictable. It can’t be known, and so it’s improvident to wish for it. Entrepreneurs accept this uncertainty; they embrace it. They’re not discombobulated by it. They take on that stress for others who don’t have the calling. They provide a calming influence that’s beneficial for everyone in society. Customers don’t need to experience uncertainty; they’re certain of a supply of everything they need or demand, because multiple entrepreneurs are competing with each other to serve customers better. The entrepreneur’s uncertainty is the customer’s surety.

Similarly, the entrepreneur is undisconcerted by change. Many of us feel we are living through a period of change that has exhibited more volatility than we’ve seen in a lifetime. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, make change their metier. Every element of change is, for them, an opportunity. “Bring it on!”, they say to change. They make lemonade when change delivers lemons. For evidence, look at the flood of new businesses being formed during the coronavirus pandemic. While politicians are forcing businesspeople to close their current businesses, and are forcing workers into unemployment, they are unable to repress the entrepreneurial spirit.

Change may be continuous or discontinuous, happening gradually or hitting us over the head with a massive, seemingly instantaneous radical change to our circumstances (like the one we are currently living through). Possessors of the entrepreneurial spirit respond with a question: what new unmet needs are emerging and how can we help people to meet them? The solutions they imagine and produce may range from new ways to provide jobs to new ways to communicate and collaborate to new ways to provide safety and re-ignite confidence and energy. The judges of how accurate the entrepreneurs are in their imagination, design and production are customers. They declare their decision by buying or not buying and the entrepreneur moves on to improve or take a new direction. Entrepreneurs bring us dynamism with their adaptive responses to customer wants and needs and purchase decisions.

What is this entrepreneurial spirit? It’s an ethic, a commitment to serve others. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods describes entrepreneurial business as “an expression of love in action”. Entrepreneurs are servants, who prioritize the needs of others”, says Mackey. They are following a heartfelt impulse to help.

And, although the term “entrepreneur” can sometimes be interpreted as implying a standout individual who leads a dynamic company by exercising her or his own charisma and leadership, Mackey writes that businesses “depend on interacting networks of actual people – engaging, refining, inventing, imagining, sharing, and building on one another’s work.”

All of us can adopt the entrepreneurial spirit, especially when we exercise it collaboratively with others in a team. That’s the entire concept of the economic principle of the division of labor. We all find and identify our own special contribution – the knowledge and skill that we alone possess and are capable of exercising on behalf of others – and then we deploy it in a joint effort with others towards the shared goal of serving customers, first producing collaboratively with others so that we can, later, consume individually based on our own preferences.

How do entrepreneurial team members contribute? Based on the personal resources they bring. There are unlimited ways. One point to note from John Mackey’s book Conscious Leadership is that IQ is not a good measure of contribution and we are wrong to try to measure it quantitatively. Focus on IQ and other measures of “intelligence” or educational achievement can obscure the “multiple kinds of personal competence” that individuals can bring to teams and productive networks.

Thus the cultivation of the entrepreneurial ethic is good for all individuals, good for collaborative production and innovation, good for family, friends and neighborhoods, and good for society. We should be elevating this ethic in the minds of our children and not permitting teachers’ unions and left-wing educational authorities and institutions to teach that capitalism is evil. 

The Scientific Method of Deductive Reasoning Proves the Moral Foundation of Capitalism

/in /by

Near the end of Chapter 1, the author of Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind, Brad Thompson, makes an important distinction among two fundamental concepts,

Laws of nature are moral principles discovered by reason that help us achieve fundamental values. Rights of nature recognize certain requirements of human nature. These laws protect the rights of individuals, from which the laws of nature are deduced.

He goes on to say that “Locke describes these qualities not as moral principles but as facts of human nature that indicate certain moral principles. Locke has transitioned from what is (freedom and equality) to what ought to be (self-ownership). Which means that property is naturally just.” This is the perfect segue into Chapter 2 – Declaring the Laws of Nature.

Today, it doesn’t require amazing cognitive skills to see that ‘Laws of Nature’ is one step removed on the deductive reasoning ladder to ‘Independence’. Yet for Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots, it was a radical achievement. As Thompson writes about the Declaration’s first paragraph, “It’s purpose is to declare to the world. It’s principle is defined by the Laws of Nature. And it’s action is defined by the necessity to dissolve. In sum, reason is the means and nature is the the standard by which men must distinguish between freedom and slavery.”

In his Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson best relates the efficacy of reason,

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. They are the natural enemies of error. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. Truth can stand by itself.

The importance of Jefferson’s assertion is boundless. If “knowledge and objective truth were open to all men” (as Thompson states about Locke’s epistemology in Chapter 1), and error naturally flees when “reason and experiment have been indulged,” (as Jefferson avers in Chapter 2), then any despot’s grip on political power is no stronger than the weak minds that sanction their own victimhood!

To America’s Revolutionary Minds, King George III and his mercantilists were running an 18th century protection racket; as were the Soviet Communists running a 20th century crime syndicate. In America today, its known as progressivism. Thompson informs us in Chapter 2, “To know what injustice and despotism are, one must also know what justice and freedom are.” Today’s progressive public education and media elites deny this.

In all cases, the fundamental principle at stake is individual property rights, whose primary fact is self-ownership. In contrast, all despots promote some form of collectivism, whose primary fact is duty to tribe, church, community, or party. Thompson continues, “Quite possibly the greatest achievement of the American Revolution was to free men to follow the dictates of their own minds.” Jefferson elaborates,

Men enjoying in ease and security the fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, would be more easily governed than with minds nourished in error and debased by ignorance, indigence, and oppression.

In 1775, the Continental Congress composed its Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and Jefferson then wrote about surrendering reason: man “has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. Gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”

Fifty years earlier, in 1725, the co-editor of Jefferson’s Declaration, another Enlightenment hero named Benjamin Franklin wrote,

How exact and regular is the natural world. How wisely in every part contrived. All the heavenly Bodies are regulated with the utmost wisdom! And can we suppose less care to be taken in the order of the Moral than in the Natural System?

According to Thompson, Franklin “implied that the Americans were following the moral law of nature while the British were following the law of armed force.” He also adds, “Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries understood that there are two basic ways to deal with men in political society: either by faith and force or by reason and freedom.” These two concepts, reason and freedom, are the essential, codependent variables for the only morally defensible socioeconomic system for humanity – Capitalism.

To continue this line of thinking, Thompson again invokes John Adams, who “thought it possible to reason backward from effects to causes and then forward again to the principles that might guide human action.” He also recruits Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, and whose 1785 treatise titled Reason, The Only Oracle of Man makes reference to his Book of Nature. Thompson summarizes Allen saying, “all entities in nature are interconnected.”

It is this absence of force among interconnected human entities, united only in personal liberty, that is the essence of capitalism.

Consequently, following the great thought leaders of the Enlightenment, “eighteenth century Americans saw a direct relationship between the physical laws of nature and the moral laws of nature as they apply to human action.” It is no coincidence that the great Austrian economist and classical liberal philosopher Ludwig von Mises titled his signature achievement Human Action.

Mises was perhaps the world’s leading 20th century economist for government non-interventionism, objective law, free markets, price theory, and entrepreneurship. Yet a century before Mises was born, in 1775, John Zubly of Georgia presages the necessary conditions for capitalism to flourish,

The will, minds, tempers, dispositions, views and interests of men are so very different, and sometimes so opposite, that without law, which cements and binds all, every thing would be in endless disorder and confusion.

Thompson adds, “Zubly assumed that law and liberty are ‘perfectly consistent, well regulated liberty of individuals is the natural offspring of laws.” Also, it was common for 18th century Americans to publish editorials under pseudonyms, and writing in Boston’s Continental Journal, “Benevolus” is summarized saying, “The most common violation of of the laws of nature is the theft of property.”

He concludes Chapter 2 with a powerful summary about the Revolutionary War period, one that through deductive reasoning, guarantees the individual property rights inherent to self-ownership and voluntary trade free of force,

Americans believed there are moral laws of nature that transcend the laws of men. Such laws must be discovered through reason. They describe cause and effect relationships, between man and nature and between man and man. They prescribe principles of action, and such laws are fixed, absolute, universal, and eternal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Government’s Repression Of Small Business Occurs With The Full Approval And Support Of Big Business.

/in /by

This year, fear of a deadly pandemic triggered the ruling class to spread authoritarian lockdown orders.  The god of science, like a burning bush, told them to remove their sandals and deliver policies of regression.  A paranoid public was quick to comply.

Humans have been battling viruses since well before the wheel was invented.  According to archaeologists, a fast moving epidemic roughly 5,000 years ago wiped out a prehistoric village in what is today northeastern China.  Dead bodies were stuffed inside a dwelling – the Hamin Mangha – that was later burned down.

Another mass burial, the Miaozigou site, took place about the same time and in the same general area.  Together these discoveries suggest there was a rapid outbreak of an acute infectious disease.  An epidemic ravaged the entire region.

Refusing To Give In To The Absurd Dictates Of Politicians And Experts Is The Only Path To Victory.

/in /by

Lest you were hopeful that some semblance of normal life will return in 2021, either due to the development of vaccines or the pandemic fizzling out on its own, the New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever.

As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.

While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever. Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it.

One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.”

I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention. These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives.

This is a dogma that should be resoundingly rejected. As I (and many others) have written before, there is no reason to assign SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a killer virus, or to view it as significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).

Back to our 700 epidemiologists. Unfortunately, because of their profession – expertise in the incidence, distribution, and control of disease within a population– there is a danger that their ideas will be endowed with undeserved authority. Although not expressly stated, that is, presumably, the article’s objective: to encourage readers to conclude that, if this is what the experts are doing, perhaps I should, too. That is why the Times did not run an article about how 700 lawyers or baseball players or receptionists are living now.

I urge readers not to pay attention to the ideas propagated in that article. These epidemiologists are no better equipped to weigh the competing values that inform how one chooses to live during the coronavirus era than individuals are to make their own choices. To the contrary, we should entirely discount these epidemiologists’ opinions on the topic, as it appears that immersion in the world of infectious disease control has robbed them of perspective.

If you are under 70 and in reasonably good health, there is no reason to rearrange your existence and sacrifice activities that are crucial to your happiness and flourishing in the name of virus avoidance unless, perhaps, that was your lifestyle prior to 2020. And if the concern is others, one could devote resources to saving some of the twenty-five thousand people succumbing to starvation each day or the million children who die annually of malaria, with considerably less disruption to one’s life. It is puzzling that these epidemiologists, so concerned with the spread of coronavirus, have not chosen to devote their time and money to these causes.

Thankfully, more and more people appear to be reaching the same conclusion (including many of the politicians who have been exhorting people to stay home and shaming them for refusing to do so), as evidenced by the fact that only four percent fewer Americans traveled long distances for Thanksgiving than they did last year, and there has been increased resistance to illogical, disruptive measures such as closures of schools, playgrounds, and outdoor dining.

Of course, we are far from triumphing over the oppression inflicted upon us by politicians and so-called experts, but refusing to give into their absurd dictates is the only path to victory. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.

Jenin Younes is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law and is an appellate public defender in New York City.

Firms Don’t Want Low-Paid Workers. They Want High-Paid Workers Who Help Them Make More Profits.

/in /by

In 1981, Magic Johnson signed a 25-year, $25 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. The deal was massive for its time. The Lakers rewarded Johnson with an eye on keeping him with the team forever, but eventually the contract proved rather pedestrian. Management wound up writing new, more lucrative contracts for the Laker legend.

Johnson’s first post-rookie contract proved small because NBA team revenues were eventually so large. When Johnson entered the League, playoff games were still shown in tape-delayed fashion at 11:30 pm. Johnson and Larry Bird brought the NBA into prime time in a literal and figurative sense. Player salaries soared as a result. As Warren Brookes once put it, “we are blessed by the genius of the relatively few.”

Fast forward to the present, and last week the Lakers signed forward Anthony Davis to a five year, $190 million contract. They also signed LeBron James to a two-year deal worth $85 million. As the NBA’s fortunes have risen in modern times, so have those of the players. Imagine what kind of contract Magic would command today.

And while the numbers are smaller, Amazon recently announced a $500 million bonus for its front-line workers who’ve been extraordinarily busy over the last eight months. The retailer paid out a similar amount in June. The pay per employee is more in the $300 each range, but it’s plainly Amazon’s way of letting its employees know they’re valued. And that they’ll be rewarded when the company does well.

Amazon isn’t the only business rewarding its employees. According to the Wall Street Journal’sMaria Amenrtal, Walmart has distributed $1.1 billion to its “associates,” while Target raised its starting pay for employees to $15/hour. Amazon announced a similar starting minimum in 2018.

About the bonuses and wage increases mentioned, let there be no illusion as to the why behind them. Businesses are in the business of profit, and well-compensated workers are a certain driver of profits. Translated for those who need translation, self=interested company executives chose to pay company employees more.

The simple truth is that low-paid workers are incredibly expensive. They are because they frequently don’t appreciate their jobs, and as a consequence don’t take the work seriously. All of this frequently results in bad experiences for customers.

Worse, low-paid workers have a greater tendency to quit. This is true in the NBA, and it’s also true in retail. The Lakers rewarded Davis and James with big contracts because they didn’t want to lose either to free agency. The same thought process is plainly at work inside Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers. If they don’t overpay their employees, and if they don’t occasionally give them bonuses, they’ll soon enough not have enough employees. It’s expensive in the near-term to be stingy. So is it in the long-term.

Indeed, the Lakers, like Amazon and the rest, are thinking long-term in paying out the big dollars now. They want to win. They know that the path to regular victory is paved with talented employees. And so they compensate their employees handsomely with the long-term in mind.

Crucial about the pay described is that it’s rarely evident inside corporations or industries that are doing poorly. As I point out in my 2019 book They’re Both Wrong, in the 1970s the NBA wasn’t very successful. As  mentioned previously, so limited was fan interest back then that playoff games went “live” in tape delayed fashion late at night. Funny about the ‘70s is that print media was thriving then. NBA reporters flew in first class while NBA players flew in coach. Those same players courted print media members because those in thriving media enjoyed generous expense accounts such that they could spend lavishly on players. How things have changed.

In modern times print media is gasping for air, and its members are usually in coach if in the air at all. On the other hand, NBA players fly in chartered jets.

The first lesson of the above is that when corporations thrive, their employees are rewarded. It’s that simple. This basic truth should be remembered the next time some dope utters a nonsensical line about how corporations must be taxed more. What shrinks the funds of businesses also shrinks the fortunes of those in the employ of any business.

More important, the anecdotes about the Lakers, Amazon, Walmart and Target are a reminder of how just how nonsensical all the talk about stagnating U.S. wages these last few decades is. Can economists, journalists and pundits even pretend to be serious anymore? Stagnating wages in the richest country in the world?

If so, as in if American earnings have been flat for decades, why the influx of immigrants during those same decades? Why have the world’s producers worked feverishly to meet the needs of a U.S. market that’s been suffering flat wages? Most of all for the purposes of this piece, how could a country full of the world’s most valuable companies have such undercompensated workers?

The answer to the half-awake is that American workers aren’t undercompensated, and they haven’t endured wage stagnation. Implicit in such a view is that companies and teams become great by routinely ripping off their employees. No, not even close.

Amazon et al easily discredit what never made sense. Please read the news, but do the reading with a skeptical eye.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, and Vice President at FreedomWorks. AP Photo Marcio Jose Sanchez

Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News? Because Our Negativity Bias Demands It.

/in /by

“Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” is a working paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

The authors found that media coverage of Covid-19 has been much more negative in the U.S. than in international media. They found, “Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals.”

Covid-19 is a serious matter, but that doesn’t explain the negativity. The authors found, “Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new Covid-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience.” Fox News is almost negative as CNN. “Stories of increasing Covid-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining.” Media coverage has been impervious to good news.

Significantly, the authors of the NBER study found consumers demand negative news. They write, “Consistent with the existing literature…our results suggest that U.S. major outlets publish unusually negative Covid-19 stories in response to reader demand and interest.”

News stories are negative because so many of us have a negative mindset. People seek stories of hopelessness because stories of despair reflect their state of mind. Many don’t want their fearful mindset to be interrupted.

Being attracted to negativity is not a recent phenomenon. The reasons why the fear response in 2020 has been stronger than usual merit our serious consideration.

Negativity Bias

Have you noticed how much more an adverse event affects you than a positive event? In their journal article “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman report on the well-researched principle of negativity bias, “In most situations, negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events.”

In another journal article, “Bad is Stronger than Good,” famed psychology professor Roy Baumeister writing with colleagues, observes:

“Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good… Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”

No wonder many are drawn to and seem hypnotized by negative Covid-19 news. Baumeister and coauthors write, “Events that are negatively valenced (e.g., losing money, being abandoned by friends, and receiving criticism) will have a greater impact on the individual than positively valenced events of the same type (e.g., winning money, gaining friends, and receiving praise).”

There has been hopeful news about Covid-19; mortality rates are low among not at-risk populations. Yet, when those not at-risk project their existential fear of death onto Covid-19, fear will remain strong.

You won’t be able to think your way out of a negative spiral. The rational part of your brain takes a back seat to negativity. In their book The Power of Bad, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney write, “Research tracking workers’ moods during the day shows that a setback has between two and five times as much emotional impact as a positive event. Emotions make us less rational, and therefore more susceptible to the power of bad.”

And once you’re primed to focus on the negative, your mind keeps looking that way in the future. Baumeister and Tierney give this example:

“If, say, they’re given identical weather forecasts for London and Madrid, a 10 percent chance of rain in each city, they’ll typically think it’s more likely to rain in London. It makes no sense mathematically, but the rain seems likelier in London because it’s easier to envision wet weather in England than in Spain. The more familiar a scenario is—the more images of it that we’ve seen or imagined—the more likely it seems.

What about seeking positive news online? Negativity bias will likely hijack your attention to focus on negative information:

“People planning a vacation spend more time studying negative reviews and are more influenced by them than by positive reviews, and people are swayed even by negative reviews that don’t identify any specific problem. An analysis of sales trends at Amazon and Barnes & Noble revealed the familiar negativity effect for both fiction and nonfiction books: A 1-star review did more to hurt sales than a 5-star review did to boost sales.”

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman observes, “We all know that a friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action.”

Rozin and Royzman put it this way: “One of the best generic descriptions of this relative power of negative contamination is embedded in an age-old Russian adage: ‘A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar.’”

There are asymmetries in building and destroying social norms and institutions. In his essay “Individualism: True and False,” Friedrich Hayek warns, “While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.” Corrosion of the rule of law during Covid-19 will not be easily reconstructed in the post-Covid era.

Human Social Behavior

Why were our reactions so much more negative during 2020 than during the 1968 pandemic or the 1957 pandemic?

Robert Prechter might be one of the most important thinkers whose work on social moods you may not have encountered. His socionomics (not socioeconomics) theory has some answers that explain why the reaction to Covid-19 has been so different from past pandemics and why the NBER study found people are demanding negative news stories.

Prechter has tracked trends of rising and falling optimism across societal periods. Prechter points to a rising social mood as associated with hope and, at the peak, hubris. A declining social mood is associated with fear and, at the nadir, despair. His findings are counterintuitive, challenging, and yet illuminating. Currently we are in a period of declining social mood.

In his book The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics, Prechter explores his hypothesis that it is endogenous mass psychology, social mood, that governs events. Prechter theorizes that the “trends and extent” of social mood help “determine the character of social action, including the economic, political and cultural.” To argue, as we typically do that events drive mood, Prechter explains, is to confuse cause and effect.

Surely, some may reason, 2020 has been a year of despair because of unexpected, exogenous events. People have died from Covid-19. Public policies intended to mitigate Covid-19 have undermined well-being. To argue that feelings of despair set the conditions for both negative news bias and support for draconian policies imposed by politicians might seem disorienting.

In their 2007 Journal of Behavioral Finance article “The Financial/Economic Dichotomy in Social Behavioral Dynamics: The Socionomic Perspective,” Prechter, with his colleague Wayne Parker, explains how the basic human impulse of herding is at work. They write, “Under conditions of uncertainty, people tend to herd.” This herding is “unconscious, non-rational,” and “follows endogenously regulated fluctuations in social mood.”

What does that have to do with me? I’m rational, I don’t herd, you might think.

In The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, Prechter explains why you may avoid herding but the vast majority won’t:

“In general, social mood change need not necessarily involve every individual. A person is drawn into the unconscious, unreasoning, psychologically interdependent social dynamic when he allows himself to be influenced primarily by the emotional state of others rather than by independent research, adequate knowledge and other rationality. Most people are too busy and unmotivated to fulfill such a tall order. Even those committed to rationality find these requirements difficult to fulfill even in tailor-made situations and impossible to fulfill in all situations.”

Don’t underestimate, Prechter writes, “the [power of the] sum of people’s shared impulses,” to overwhelm “the power of logical yet often conflicting entreaties from various individuals.”

Prechter explores how emotions are governed by the more primitive limbic system of the human brain. He explains the limbic system wants what it wants now. In contrast, the rational part of the brain, the neocortex “plans in terms of achieving long-range values” and needs “time to mull over what is going on or what the consequences of the action will be.”

Prechter explains that the emotive limbic system can disarm the rational neocortex. Further he explains, challenges to “the limbic system’s feelings… are typically met with fierce resistance, even if that challenge comes from reality itself.” Prechter advises us not to underestimate the “power and speed” of the limbic system.

Fear will produce powerful emotions demanding we be protected from Covid-19 at any cost. Even in the face of evidence of economic destruction, herding will generate continued support for lockdowns. Due to negativity bias, the aversion to getting sick is much more compelling than a positive vision of a robust economy accompanied by individuals taking steps to boost their immune system while also protecting the most vulnerable members of society.

Composing a More Beautiful Melody

If the social mood is waning, Americans will be more susceptible to beguiling nonsense from authoritarian and hypocritical politicians. Lessons from Greek mythology might offer a lifeline.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens would lure sailors to doom with their beguiling songs. Unable to resist the call, sailors would crash on rocky coastlines.

Odysseus resisted temptation by ordering his crew to stuff their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast. No matter how hard he begged, Odysseus instructed his crew to ignore his pleas. The crew did, and Odysseus’s ship avoided the Sirens’ call.

As effectively, Orpheus saved Jason and the Argonauts’ ship by composing an even more beautiful melody. Faced with an attractive alternative, the Sirens had no power.

When we no longer view ourselves as victims of external events, we take more responsibility and act accordingly.

Tying America to the mast would mean returning to the limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Gene Healy, in his book The Cult of the Presidency, explains, “When the president raises the battle cry, he can usually count on substantial numbers of American opinion leaders to cheer him on.” Healy wrote his book before Covid-19, but his work and the work of Robert Higgs explain why government expands during every crisis.

A more beautiful melody would be the songs of liberty that remind us how human beings flourish and what free people can achieve. Such songs must be plentiful and unforgettable, or the sirens’ calls of authoritarians will rule the day during a social mood winter.

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.

An Entrepreneur Who Dares To Celebrate Capitalism.

/in /by

Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey didn’t endear himself to a good portion of his customer base when last week he spoke the truth about socialism and called capitalism “the greatest thing humanity’s ever done.” But he is right. We owe our prosperity to free-market capitalism. If ours was instead a “progressive” system of government preferred by many of Mackey’s patrons, we’d be much worse off.

Speaking via video to American Enterprise Institute President Robert Doar about his new book “Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business,” Mackey said “we can’t throw out capitalism and replace it with socialism, that will be a disaster. … It doesn’t work.”

Who would know this better than a successful businessman? A member of The Squad, that hard-left group of congresswomen who truly have nothing of worth or decency to offer? Joe Biden, who’s lived off a government paycheck (and likely the ill-gotten gains of corruption) all but a few years of his adult life? Sen. Bernie Sanders, “the enemy of every entrepreneur” who “has made a public career out of vilifying corporations, free markets, and the wealthy”?

Not all Whole Foods customers are wealthy, woke, granola-crunching political progressives who have posted “We Believe” signs in their yards and vote Democrat. But that’s the stereotype and there’s a reason stereotypes exist: They are quite often accurate.

Our experiences tell us the typical customer at one of Mackey’s stores is more likely to support Biden, Sanders, Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than President Donald Trump or even a Sen. Rand Paul or Sen. Ted Cruz. So they probably won’t notice the yawning gap between Mackey, who through capitalism has developed a stimulating and often rewarding shopping experience, as well as created immense wealth and nearly 100,000 jobs, and Biden, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Warren and others of the left who have created nothing of value and are forever busy scheming to limit choices, redistribute the wealth of others, and tear down free markets.

This is both a shame and a failure of our culture that has come to be dominated by the left. Rather than credit capitalism for the growing abundance we have around us, the Democratic Party and the media, and about half of America which blindly follows them, tell us capitalism is broken, exploitive, unjust, racist, an environmental toxin, a failure that is in need of repair. And only they know how to fix it. They rant, rail and roar while enjoying opulent lives that the kings and queens of even a century ago could not imagine.

When Mackey tells Doar that “business has to make money,” and if it doesn’t, “it will fail,” he is stating what is obvious to most of us. But much of today’s political class sees businesses as sources of funds to be drained to serve leftist purposes. This is plainly unsustainable. As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said, “the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money” because no wealth is produced, only transferred.

Without capitalism, the American economic pie would stop growing, forcing our advanced society to return to a primitive state in which we fight over the pieces rather than expand the pie. The left knows this and rather than destroy capitalism, a fantasy working its way inward from the fringe, it would rather capture it. This is exactly what the Great Reset, which we wrote about Tuesday, seeks to achieve.

Though the World Economic Forum is exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to advance its “reset,” it’s been actively trying to saddle break and then ride capitalism for some time. Three years ago, it predicted that by 2030, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” That “You’ll eat much less meat” since it will be an “occasional treat and not a staple,” because doing so is good for “the environment and our health.” That fossil fuels will be “history” and “Western values will have been tested to the breaking point.”

We’re not being cynical to point out that these are less “predictions” than they are goals for an organization that has visions of centrally planning the global economy.

Goals, we might add, for the rest of us. Because those who are resetting the world will own things, including the lives of the governed. And the “resetters” will eventually come after those Whole Foods customers who performed perfectly their roles as useful idiots to an agenda that’s hostile to free markets and liberty.

“No Excuses” Is A Good Way To Go Through Life.

/in /by

We admire Jason Whitlock as a fearless analyst of issues that the rest of media, mainstream and social, don’t seem to be able to get right. He refers to his own outlook as drawn from his father’s Booker T. Washington approach to life.

People bound for success run from excuses. People bound for failure look for them.

Modern political liberalism, particularly its racial orthodoxy, is the science of excuse-making, the training of black minds for failure. Wokeness is the Doctorate of Race Philosophy. Black Lives Matter is the online, social media university awarding PhDs in Race Philosophy. Jack Dorsey’s “Black Twitter” algorithm serves as the faculty, teaching athletes, entertainers, journalists, bloggers and broadcasters the doctrine of Critical Race Theory.

I do not reject the legitimacy of CRT, the notion that some American institutions are constructed to advance the cause of white supremacy. I just happen to believe we’ve identified the wrong construction company.

Conservative Construction does not run academia, the mainstream media, the music industry or Hollywood. For the last 60 years, Liberal Construction has run all of those industries, and those industries are at the forefront of brainwashing black people into believing we should spend every waking hour looking for excuses and examples of offensive verbal interaction with white people.

(You might be asking, “What about the criminal justice system?” That is a flawed system rigged against the poor. The issue has been racialized to ensure the flaws are never properly addressed. I’ll expound on this point at another time.)

Liberal Construction, in partnership with Nike and China, is in the process of executing a “backflip takeover” of the sports world, which had been Conservative Construction’s strongest influencer of American culture.

Not anymore. The Colin Kaepernick Kneeling Trojan Horse has turned sports into the victimhood Olympics, the most powerful venue in popular culture to preach critical race excuse-making.

Right now, there’s a class being taught at Vanderbilt. Derek Mason, the school’s black head football coach, was fired this week after his team started 0-8 in his sixth season. Yesterday, longtime college football reporter, Ivan Maisel, wrote a long piece that ESPN.com promoted on its homepage: “Derek Mason’s firing further exposes college coaching’s lack of diversity.”

It’s the standard, finger-pointing piece that insinuates that racism explains the lack of diversity and, to a lesser degree, Mason’s failure. Maisel begins his story lamenting the fact that he and others have written the exact same story year after year.

It’s the definition of insanity. I like and respect Maisel. He is well-intentioned and well-sourced. His piece subtly covers some provocative ground, especially when he uses several paragraphs to point out the role donors/boosters play in naming a new football coach.

Ivan Maisel is not the problem. It’s the institution of sports journalism that won’t allow Maisel to go hard at the root problem. The liberal-run institution of journalism does not allow probing of real problems facing black people. That is prohibited. It might lead to actual solutions. It might provoke black people to wake up every day looking for solutions rather than excuses and meaningless verbal offenses.

If you want to see more black head coaches, the black millionaire football alums at Power Five schools must gain influence at their alma maters by consistently donating large sums of money.

You have to pay the cost to be the boss. Everything else is just posturing, virtue-signaling and excuse-making. You have to be involved financially and physically to exercise influence at a university.

Providing whiny quotes to a reporter accusing your university of racism as it relates to the head football coach does not win you influence or promote change.

Let’s look at Derek Mason. He spent four years at Stanford. He replaced James Franklin, who is black. Franklin parlayed back-to-back 9-4 seasons into the head job at Penn State. In seven seasons, Mason won 27 of 82 games. He never finished above .500.

Derek Mason’s journey at Vanderbilt does not further a racism narrative in college football. Mason was given a fair opportunity, and he failed. No excuses.

I used to make excuses. My parents didn’t allow it. Their generation made too many sacrifices to tolerate my excuses. My father never knew his father. He suffered racial indignities that left real scars. They lived through racial oppression that limited their freedom, their educational opportunities. Their generation won me freedom and opportunity.

I tried to quit the Ball State football team early in my second season. I didn’t like my offensive line coach. I thought I was treated unfairly. I had a long list of excuses. My mother hung up the phone and told me to have a good life living with my father. My father hung up the phone and told me to have a good life living with my mother.

A month or two ago, I shared a story about my offensive line coach in high school, Lee Dilk. I injured my elbow in a game as a sophomore. Before he sent me back into the game, he sternly warned me that the injury was not an excuse for poor play.

We all love excuses — white, black, brown, yellow, whatever. People who love us, respect us, want the best for us, take the excuses away.

The Liberal Construction Company does not love, respect or want the best for black people. That’s why liberals promote excuses for any black failure and disavow any excuse for white failure. If you can control a group’s expectations, you can control their level of success. A generation of black people have had their expectations diminished by Critical Race Theory. It’s a mental slavery, a Jim Crow for the mind.

I’m not in denial of the existence of racism. I just reject using it as an excuse, and I refuse to fall for the clever marketing of racism’s primary proponents.

The Scientific Method of Inductive Reasoning Proves the Moral Foundation of Individualism

/in /by

Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind is an original series from the Center for Individualism. It will run through February 2021 and cover professor Brad Thompson’s 2019 book subtitled: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Just as our Poetic Justice Warrior series is rooted in the virtues of Reason, Purpose and Pride, this project will celebrate the scientific method rooted in the Reality and Reason that established objective Rights for the Ages.

The first chapter of America’s Revolutionary Mind, the 2019 book by C. Bradley Thompson, is an impressive survey of the Enlightenment scholarship that guided America’s Founders. Its concrete manifestation is the Declaration of Independence, “the existential embodiment of the Enlightenment’s highest ideals.” Because Thomas Jefferson’s marvelous document is built on a reasoned, conceptual structure, so is Chapter 1, as Thompson explains,

The core ideas that grew out of the Enlightenment launched by Bacon, Newton, and Locke can be summed up in three words: nature, reason, and rights.

This intellectual breakthrough cannot be overestimated. John Locke, and in his footsteps, John Adams and America’s other courageous political philosophers, were doing something that had never been imagined. They integrated the metaphysical world, human consciousness, and moral behavior into an unassailable socioeconomic system. One that maximizes human vigor, because,

The universality and timelessness of nature’s laws could be discovered through proper reasoning. That method, wrote Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, challenged men as rational creatures to employ those faculties.

Thompson continues by writing that “Bacon’s method proceeded by examining experience. Nothing could be accounted as real in nature that was not as observed fact or relation among facts. Knowledge and objective truth were open to all men.” This is also a radical assertion. It not only gives us a basic framework for critical thinking, it proclaims that every conscious human being with an active mind is not only a font of knowledge and productivity, but as a secondary benefit, a contributor to a society’s well-being.

Knowledge was no longer the monopoly of priests and potentates with political power. The only requirement for truth was to reduce abstract ideas, in a gradual process of inductive reasoning, to their self-evident concrete observations,

The new science viewed nature as an autonomous realm defined by the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality. Following Newton, enlightened thinkers saw the universe as an ordered machine that could be understood rationally.

In 21st century America, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that benefits everyone. This was made possible by 20th century entrepreneurs (Engelbart, Washington) and economists (Mises, Hazlitt, Simon, Sowell), and 19th century industrialists (Rockefeller, Tesla) and capitalists (Say, Bastiat, Douglass). We stand on the shoulders of these giants as James Madison and John Adams stood on the shoulders of John Locke, who in turn stood on Bacon’s and Newton’s,

In the same way, Locke attempted to grasp human nature and the operation of the mind. Locke assumed there are moral laws of nature to be discovered and revealed. The light of reason had opened men’s eyes to the rights of man.

Thompson summarizes the Enlightenment’s development of ethical thinking with, “More complex ideas of morality and law are put together from simple ones by the faculty of reason, that is, the mental functions of repetition, comparison, combination and abstraction. The goal of such knowledge was to guide man in determining what he ought to do as a rational and voluntary agent for the attainment of any end, especially happiness.”

This is another revolutionary achievement – determining what man ought to do is the elusive connection between the objective world of science – what is, and the previously subjective world of ethics. In Thompson’s words, the Enlightenment was “an era of philosophic and scientific thinking that provided a new way to see the world and man’s place in it.”

Locke’s epistemological goal was moral: in a world inundated with religious mysticism, his intention was to show that man’s rational faculties were in fact capable of discovering and knowing objective moral laws.

Brad Thompson summarized this theme in Chapter 1 by saying, “This moral code is as certain and absolute as mathematics and the Newtonian laws of nature. A demonstrative science of ethics was the Holy Grail of Enlightenment thinking. The great ambition of Enlightenment philosophers was to establish a demonstrative and secular science of ethics.”

Yet in 21st century America, despite the marvelous socio-economic achievements and the technological revolution made possible by Enlightenment political philosophy, the secular science of ethics is under assault under the guise of ‘social improvement.’ As postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault declares, “Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.”

For the authoritarian wannabes whose goal is your submission to their government authority, the first step is to cancel Enlightenment thinking and demonize its amazing progress. That’s what we are experiencing today. Critical thinking has been replaced with floating concepts (food security, climate change, systemic racism, reimagined anything, diversity and inclusion) that are disconnected from context and reality. This has become the essential curriculum for progressive, government monopoly school systems.

As Foucault explains, “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.” That can mean whatever you like, because “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” This ambiguity is why our America’s Revolutionary Mind project is more necessary than ever,

Locke attempted to grasp human nature and the operation of the mind. Moral truths would be self-evidently true. He gives two examples: ‘Where there is no property, there is no injustice. No government allows absolute liberty.’

Thompson expands on the critical thinking process when he informs us that, “these propositions are logically necessary based on the relationship of the key terms to one another, Locke opened a new moral vista for the Western world with this radical first premise: men are morally self-owning, which means they are fully sovereign over their own lives. Locke is the first political philosopher in history to make the individual the primary unit of moral and political value.”

To help reinforce and sustain yourself as the primary unit of moral and political value, aka an American, please feel free to join us on Facebook at Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind.

The Entrepreneurship Formula To Returning The U.S. Economy To Its Before-Covid Glory.

/in /by

At the end of October 2020, third-quarter economic growth increased by a record 33.1 percent as American small businesses reopened their doors and workers returned to their desks and stations. The nation was on the right path to return to its before Covid economic dynamism where everyone who wants a good job can get one — the birthright of all Americans.

Yet we still have a ways to go before we have recovered from the Covid-19 economic crisis. How can the country turbocharge the economy so that economic opportunities return to and surpass the era before Covid-19?

By promoting entrepreneurship, which creates jobs, higher wages, economic growth, and the products and services that make the U.S. the nation with the highest living standards in the world. Like alchemists, entrepreneurs turn basic natural materials into something golden — namely, goods and services that people value. At a macro level, this process creates countless economic opportunities.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, U.S. entrepreneurship was firing on all cylinders in 2019. Americans were choosing to open small businesses at historic rates that were significantly higher than just a few years before. I saw this entrepreneurship first-hand at my business. Thanks to the pro-entrepreneurship climate, I was able to expand, hire, and raise wages, benefitting my workers and the local community.

The benefits of this entrepreneurship trickled down to all Americans. The Census Bureau recently reported that in 2019 median incomes grew at the historic rate of 6.8 percent. So much for the mantra of “stagnant wage growth.” Wages grew even faster for minorities and low-income workers, proving once again that an entrepreneurial climate helps those with the least opportunities the most. Meanwhile, the poverty rate fell to a 60-year low.

So how can we return to this entrepreneurial climate before Covid? By pursuing public policy conducive to entrepreneurship, including tax cuts, deregulation, and access to credit.

The last few years have seen a lot of this entrepreneurship fuel. In 2017, the biggest small business tax cuts in history were passed, giving entrepreneurs like me more funds to invest in our businesses. Small businesses should be allowed to reinvest their earnings back into their businesses to create jobs and better products and services. The tax cuts have allowed us to do that.

The recent reduction of burdensome regulations such as counterproductive and byzantine labor law mandates regarding employee classification allows entrepreneurs to focus on their work and their employees, not paperwork.

And eliminating the worst aspects of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms allowed small businesses to find more funding opportunities to get their ideas off the ground. This access to credit stands to especially help women and minorities, who — as Kauffman Foundation research indicates — have the least access to credit.

And how can we enact more of these pro-entrepreneurship reforms to buoy our economy back to its recent heights? By electing political candidates who make a commitment to these entrepreneurship principles. Politicians often have difficulty understanding the needs of entrepreneurs because they have never worked in the private sector, let alone ran a business. Voters should look to support political candidates with business experience. These candidates understand how public policy affects paychecks. They can foster the entrepreneurship climate that’s needed to return the U.S. economy to its former glory.

In other words, a strong economy is a simple formula: Greater entrepreneurship, which is created by pro-entrepreneurship public policies, which is created by electing pro-entrepreneurship politicians. Make no mistake: The success of the U.S. over the next few years depends on how well it follows this formula for success.

 

Joseph Semprevivo is the owner and manager of Joseph’s Premier Real Estate in Vero Beach, the former New Mexico State Economic Development Commissioner and a partner of the Job Creators Network Foundation.

Write for CFI