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A Majority Of People Around The World Believe That Journalists, Governments And Businesses Are All Purposely Trying To Mislead.

January 23, 2021/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

Americans are losing trust in leaders across every area of their lives — and the information coming from every source of their news, according to the 21st annual Edelman Trust Barometer, out Wednesday, which measures trust in institutions globally.

Why it matters: The sobering report shows that people crave facts more than ever, but most have bad habits and a growing distrust of everything from journalists to vaccines and contact tracing.

Details: Across every type of institution — media, government, business and NGOs — trust has fallen to historic lows, according to the report.

Business is the only institution that is now perceived as being both ethical and competent enough to solve the world’s problems.
CEOs are the only societal leaders trusted to tell the truth and fix problems.

The trust deficit has gotten so bad that people don’t know who or what to believe anymore, and they don’t even trust themselves to get facts right.

A majority of people around the world believe that journalists, government leaders and business leaders are all purposely trying to mislead people by spreading misinformation.
Most people have terrible information hygiene, and admit that they don’t actively verify information, avoid echo chambers or share things without first vetting information.

The big picture: The 2021 Trust Barometer, titled “Declaring Information Bankruptcy,” offers one of the bleakest pictures of societal trust globally in the past two decades, thanks in large part to the coronavirus pandemic.

The data shows that even the most powerful countries — like the U.S., China, Germany and the U.K. — are experiencing a record trust deficit, especially in government.
Trust in government in the U.S. has crashed following the 2020 election, especially among Republicans.

That trust gap has real-world consequences. Only 59% of people in the U.S. say they are willing to take the vaccine if it becomes available to them within a year. Those who are unwilling to take the vaccine tend to have poor information hygiene.

What to watch: The data suggests that two of the biggest global economies — the U.S. and China — have fallen below India as now the most trusting country in the world.

“Neither the U.S. or China have the trust capital they need to be global leaders in this time of multiple crises,” per the report.

How Do We Heal A Divided Country? Entrepreneurship.

November 17, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

The results of the 2020 presidential election suggest that the U.S. has never been more divided politically. The major party presidential candidates received more than 70 million votes each. The distribution of votes clearly indicates the country is almost evenly divided between support for Republican incumbent President Donald Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden. Unfortunately, the close election has led to a legal fight that is creating a more intense and sustainable divide in the country.

This divide is particularly dangerous for our democracy because it has resulted in widespread mistrust in the ability of the U.S. to come together as it has so many times in the past. The most disturbing thing about this divide is that it goes much deeper than the support of the two candidates. The citizens of this country are split on the way to handle critical issues like health care, poverty, education, the environment, the economy, climate change, Supreme Court appointments, abortion and the handling of the pandemic. There is a disbelief in the ability of the leaders of the “other” party to effectively address these issues. The good news is that entrepreneurship policy has the potential to cross the political divide and effectively address many of the most critical issues facing society.

Supporters of both campaigns agree that small business entrepreneurship is one of the reasons the U.S. has become the richest country in the history of the world. The small businesses that hire local residents have been the backbone of local economies in large cities, small suburbs and rural farms. These mom-and-pop family businesses provide many of the jobs in America and enable people to feed their families. Unfortunately, the pandemic has devastated small businesses in both Democratic and Republican communities. The Main Street businesses in suburbs have been hurt as badly as the small businesses in urban communities and the family farms in rural communities.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U-6 measure of employment, there are more than 11 million people currently unemployed. The closing of small businesses because of the pandemic has led to a 47% increase in U-6 unemployment from the same period in 2019. The next president has to focus on increasing employment by making the support, revitalization and sustainable success of small local businesses a major focus of his public policy. When communities have a thriving small business economy, there are more middle class jobs. Research suggests that these jobs ultimately lead to higher quality health care, better housing, a cleaner environment and even higher student achievement.

Urban, suburban and rural communities that have sustainable small business jobs have lower rates of crime, homelessness, poverty and a cleaner environment. Many large businesses have increased their profitability because they were allowed to remain open during the COVID crisis while small businesses have been closed. Major technology businesses have also grown exponentially because of the increased online sales. The success of many large businesses and struggles of small businesses has resulted in a growing income divide between the wealthiest 5% of Americans and the bottom 50%. The wealth of people who are shareholders in large corporations has grown exponentially, while the income of entrepreneurs and small business employees has dropped significantly during the pandemic.

The most impactful way to address this disparity (in a manner that appeals to both Trump and Biden supporters) is to provide tax incentives (such as a reduced capital gains tax and immediate depreciation of capital investment) to wealthy individuals and organizations willing to invest in small businesses in geographic areas currently designated as Opportunity Zones. I call this the “Entrepreneur Zone Program” or “EZP.” In this program, individuals or organizations that invest in or provide low-cost loans to small urban, Main Street and farm businesses in these zones will receive significant tax breaks to compensate them for taking the risk of supporting these businesses.

To accelerate small business employment, the government could provide entrepreneur grants and issue small business bonds through the Small Business Administration specifically for the businesses in federally approved entrepreneur zones. These programs would not be a burden on taxpayers and potentially lead to an injection of billions of dollars into businesses (in both conservative and liberal communities) that desperately need a lifeline to survive. This lifeline would result in more middle class jobs throughout America.

We are in the midst of a crisis in this country that we have never experienced before. Establishing bipartisan public policies supporting small businesses in Democratic and Republican communities is one of the most effective ways to get the U.S. to become more united and survive this exceedingly difficult period in our history.

Dale G. Caldwell is a professor and the executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Rothman Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Decline In The Institution Of Journalism Has Dragged Us Back To The Eighteenth Century.

March 23, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Journalism has not always been understood as a formal profession, but in the course of the twentieth century it went through a transformation that left it with all the characteristics of one, and with links and similarities to many other core professions. Like those other professions, journalism in our day confronts a crisis.

Journalism is not in crisis in every respect, of course. Demand for its offerings is strong, as public interest in current events, and politics in particular, has soared in this era of political turbulence. The supply of journalism is plentiful too, and its quality—while obviously variable—is surely on par with any golden age of reporting we might point to. The economics of journalism in the information age has been brutal, but some journalistic outfits large and small have gradually been finding effective ways to deal with it. The freedom of the press, which has not always been secure in our country, is in no real jeopardy now, or even in much question or dispute. So what’s the problem?

The crisis now confronting American journalism is a crisis of public confidence—a crisis of integrity and trust. President Trump has frequently given vent to the attitudes underlying this loss of trust. “The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty. Purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate. Sad!” So Trump wrote on Twitter on June 13, 2017. This was a thoroughly characteristic statement of his regarding the press—unusual neither in tone nor in substance. That the president of the United States would speak about the profession like this and that he would do so on a social media platform that affords him direct access to many millions of Americans on his own terms are marks of the peculiar situation of journalism, and especially political journalism, in contemporary American life.

The trouble, moreover, is not so much about trust in individual journalists, or even about trust in particular publications, networks, or platforms—though some come in for more criticism than others. Rather, it is a matter of trust in American journalism as a whole, or at least trust in so-called mainstream journalism as an institution, understood as part of the array of institutions that compose the American establishment.

American journalists have never been at ease understanding their work as part of such an array of institutions. Journalism in a democracy always prides itself on its ability to hone a certain civic skepticism, to hold leaders to account, to uncover important facts hidden from the public, and to enable citizens to assess government officials. In this sense, American journalism sometimes imagines itself to be countercultural or an anti-establishment force like the muckrakers of old.

There are, of course, elements of this way of thinking and operating in the work of contemporary journalism. But journalism in America underwent a multi-decade process of institutionalization, over the first half or so of the twentieth century, that fundamentally transformed its character. By the latter decades of that century, political journalism had largely come to be practiced by highly educated cultural elites in America’s major cities, and many of the most prominent media enterprises came to be owned by large corporations or the very wealthy. Journalists fell into the habit of applying their skepticism mostly toward critics of elite institutions and challengers to elite norms, and their work had come to be implicitly protective of what might be called an establishmentarian status quo.

Yet most political journalists never came to conceive of themselves and their work in this way and so were not prepared to defend themselves against a rising tide of anti-institutional sentiment. That tide has continued to rise in this century. American journalism, like most of our major institutions, has been subject to intense social, cultural, and economic pressures that have undone some of its institutional forms and character—undermining its ethic and its social standing and increasingly subjecting it to competition from a range of upstarts. America’s media giants are still largely populated by highly educated elites and largely owned by major corporations or extremely wealthy individuals, but they are now engaged in a struggle for dominance with less-established competitors of various types.

No one imagines that the major newspapers or television networks have some inherent claim on our trust or attention. In this sense, American journalism offers an instance of a larger pattern in our national life, as public trust in nearly every profession has plummeted in recent decades while the culture has grown far more variegated, fragmented, and diverse. But the crisis of American journalism is especially acute because journalism conveys information that is only valuable to the degree it is deemed reliable, so a crisis of confidence presents it with a distinctly challenging problem.

Perhaps above all, the media landscape now resembles the circumstances of journalism in the early republic—when barriers to entry were relatively low and the media environment was teeming with mostly small voices. One telling artifact of that era is a brief essay published anonymously by Benjamin Franklin in 1789 called “An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz., The Court of the Press.” Like much of Franklin’s writing, this short essay is at least partially satirical. But it advances a very serious point: that anyone with access to a printing press can make wild, unfounded accusations and destroy the reputation of anyone he might choose to target. The press has great power with no clear limits on its use, Franklin worried. It is in this sense like a court without law. “It may receive and promulgate accusations of all kinds against all persons and characters among the citizens of the State, and even against all inferior courts,” he wrote, “and may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, etc., with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court’s direction.”

This court, Franklin noted, is not governed by any clear rules: The accused is allowed no grand jury to judge of the truth of the accusation before it is publicly made, nor is the name of the accuser made known to him, nor has he an opportunity of confronting the witnesses against him, for they are kept in the dark as in the Spanish court of Inquisition. Nor is there any petty jury of his peers, sworn to try the truth of the charges. The proceedings are also sometimes so rapid that an honest, good citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accused, and in the same morning judged and condemned and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a rogue and a villain. Yet, if an officer of this court receives the slightest check for misconduct in this his office, he claims immediately the rights of a free citizen by the constitution and demands to know his accuser, to confront the witnesses, and to have a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

The danger of this pseudo court abusing its power is thus immense, Franklin suggested. The press has the power to purvey lies—fake news, we might say—or (to recall President Trump’s terms above) to spread “purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate.” At the core of this complaint is the assertion of an absence of standards. As Franklin understood, this was a function not of the concentration of media power but precisely of its dilution. The power of the press in his time, Franklin wrote, was available to anyone who, “by education or practice in scribbling, has acquired a tolerable style as to grammar and construction, so as to bear printing; or who is possessed by a press and a few types.”

Anyone could become a menace in the court of public opinion, and his victims would have little recourse. “For if you make the least complaint of the judge’s conduct,” Franklin wrote, “he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you; and, besides tearing your private character to flitters, marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.”

To Franklin, there seemed no real remedy to this problem except placing constraints upon that liberty of the press. “If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please,” he wrote. “But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law, and shall cheerfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.”

That remedy has, with good reason, generally been ruled out of bounds in our politics, at least beyond very narrowly constructed libel laws. Franklin wrote just over a year before the Bill of Rights was ratified, but he was well aware of the abiding commitment to the freedom of the press in American public life—a cause he had championed himself at times. He seems to have intended to raise the question of how the power of journalism to abuse its subjects might be contained.

The Left’s Long March Through The Institutions Is Now Pretty Much Complete, And It’s A Disaster.

May 19, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

There’s little debate that modern-day American universities, public education, mainstream media, Hollywood and political advocacy groups are dominated by Leftists. This is no accident, but part of a deliberate strategy to pave the way for communist revolution developed more than eight decades ago by an Italian political theorist named Antonio Gramsci.

Described as one of the world’s most important and influential Marxist theorists since Marx himself, if you are not familiar with Gramsci, you should be.

The Italian communist (1891 – 1937) is credited with the blueprint that has served as the foundation for the Cultural Marxist movement in modern America.

Later dubbed by 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions,” Gramsci wrote in the 1930s of a “war of position” for socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside in an attempt to compel it to redefine itself.

Gramsci used war metaphors to distinguish between a political “war of position” – which he compared to trench warfare – and the “war of movement (or maneuver)” which would be a sudden full-frontal assault resulting in complete social upheaval.

A Shift in Strategy

In the 1998 book “The Antonio Gramsci Reader,” edited by David Forgacs, Gramsci’s development of a new form of strategy for ushering in the socialist revolution is made clear.

Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917 “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”

As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.

In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.

Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 which made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different, must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.

His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a different tactic. A tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations as the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.

“The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of maneuver which before used ‘the whole’ of war, etc.,” he wrote.

Gramsci argued that a ‘frontal attack’ on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation – with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.

War of Position vs. War of Movement

It is important to bear in mind that Gramsci’s ultimate goal is still socialism and overthrow of the capitalist order. His contribution was to outline a different strategy for this to occur.

As described by Forgacs, “War of movement is a frontal assault on the state whereas war of position is conducted mainly on the terrain of civil society.”

Gramsci argued that a war of position is necessary in advanced capitalist societies where civil society has become a “very complex structure” which is resistant to “incursions” such as economic depressions that would otherwise weaken the current power structure in terms of ideological support. In other words, civil society provided a support system for the current political structure and those in power that could help it withstand otherwise negative shocks like economic recessions.

Gramsci believed that in advanced capitalistic Western societies, the prevailing ideological support system for a capitalistic economic structure and bourgeois values would shield the current ruling class from any organized opposition.

As a result, he believed it essential to study in depth “which elements of civil society correspond to the defensive systems in a war of position.”

Gramsci’s Analysis of ‘Civil Society’ and Hegemony

Gramsci defined civil society as the “ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private.’”

More directly, he described civil society as that sphere of social activities and institutions not directly part of the government. Primary examples included political parties, trade unions, church organizations and other popular voluntary associations.

Gramsci noted that dominant social groups in civil society organized consent and hegemony – they assumed a leadership position by the consent of members. Their leadership role includes fostering an ideological consensus among their members. Gramsci envisioned that these groups would organize their opposition to the existing social order.

Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State – which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.

“In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.

In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.

Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as being organizations needing to be invaded by socialist thinkers.

The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses – led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.

As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.

The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses, in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provided to the current capitalist state.

Gramsci further emphasized the role of a political party to assume leadership and philosophical direction of all these civil society alliances. Additionally, and critically, one of the main goals of the party would be to place foot soldiers in the revolutionary war of position in actual state institutions as well, such as legal institutions, police, councils and influential bureaucracies. There needs to be established, argued Gramsci, a foundation of socialists upon which to run the apparatus of the state once its overthrow was complete.

Priming Conditions for the Frontal Attack

As Gramsci described it, a war of position involves a “passive revolution” of sorts; transitioning from the dominant bourgeois order to one of socialism without any violent social upheaval.

For social transition to occur, the “necessary conditions” in society must have “already been incubated,” according to Gramsci. Here he is referring to a new collective will among the masses, coincided with having the right people in strategic positions among civil society and state bureaucracies.

Gramsci pointed to the example of the Italian fascism of his time as an example of passive revolution. As he noted, economic fascism “consists in the fact that the economic structure is transformed in a ‘reformist’ way from an individualistic to a planned economy (command economy).” This ‘intermediate economy’ could serve as the starting point for the next transition to total state control of the means of production, a transition that could occur “without radical and destructive cataclysms of an exterminating kind.”

Economic Fascism takes a step toward collectivization of the means of production without seizing them from the capitalists, Gramsci argued. Fascism serves to “accentuate the ‘plan of production’ element” of the economic structure, making it easier to transition to complete collectivization. This shift helped to facilitate widespread acceptance of the notion of greater centralized control over production, without actually wresting control over the means of production from the capitalists or eliminating profit. Yet.

Once all these conditions are in place – i.e. a new collective will, ideological control over institutions of civil society, revolutionaries in strategic positions in the state – the time would be right for the final and conclusive “war of movement.”

This full-frontal war of movement to overthrow the existing state and social order will be assured to not only be successful, but permanent. For according to Gramsci, “in politics, the ‘war of position’, once won, is decisive definitively.”

The Left’s “long march through the institutions” is a deliberate attempt to create conditions right for the final overthrow of our private property society. Their success spells disaster.

We Invent New Institutions Every Day. Let The Old Ones Die.

October 30, 2017/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

It’s awfully tough to get rid of institutions. Institutions are organizations, customs and norms of behavior that mediate between individuals and society in a way that promotes social order and works for everyone. Over time, they decay, and they become corrupted and, eventually, they cease to serve the purpose for which they were conceived.

Our Decaying Institutions

Think of the US Congress, conceived as an expression of representative democracy. Almost no-one today believes that any elected official that sits in Congress represents anything except their own interests and those of the special interest groups that pay for their election and re-election.

Think of banking, conceived as a mechanism to promote economic growth by collecting savings and directing those savings to entrepreneurs who would utilize them in the creation and expansion of productive businesses. Today, banks operate a fraudulent scheme called fractional reserve banking, by means of which one savers’ funds are loaned multiple times, creating an untenable situation where multiple entities have claims on a single deposit. Meanwhile, banks make money trading stocks and bonds and derivatives for their own account, diverting money from the productive economy to the unproductive financial sector.

Or think of education, conceived as a knowledge transfer from generation to generation, to nurture in young minds the accumulated wisdom of society and the intellectual spirit to search for new ideas. Now, education is a government propaganda mill, designed to keep each successive generation mutely compliant with the establishment rules.

The Grounds For Optimism

The temptation is always to be pessimistic, to believe that the decline and decay in institutions is inevitable and irreversible, and leads to social and civilizational collapse. It’s easy to feel that we are living through the decline and fall of the Roman empire.

That’s wrong. Humans, acting entrepreneurially, are creative, ethical and optimistic. They believe in a better future, and they act to try and achieve it. We can do this irrespective of the institutions that now suffocate us, and independently of those of our peers who have been sucked in to the bureaucracy and the redistributionist, regulatory state.

The Emerging New Institutions.

As evidence of the possibilities, think of the new institutions that are emerging in spite of – or perhaps because of – the failure of the existing ones. Some examples include:

Crypto-currency.

Money is the greatest economic institution. It facilitates the exchange economy, in which each of us finds our highest and best role in the division of labor, identifies the best way to serve our fellow man, and trades our specialized product for all the other things we need. We make that trade through the institution of money. Money evolved over time to become more and more convenient and easy to use without losing the trust required to maintain its utility and value. But then governments claimed a monopoly on making and circulating money, and corrupted the institution forever. Money has been de-valued – sometimes becoming effectively worthless, as in the Weimar Republic of yesterday and Venezuela today – and stripped of all integrity. Governments are able to dilute its spending power at will, create more of it whenever they need to spend more, which is every day, and drain money of most of its market-tested integrity. It is now a political artifact of central banks, and a crony capitalist scheme in which those closest to the government (big banks and big financial firms) enjoy the commercial use of newly issued money first, and make above-market profits as a result of their politically favored position.

But now, we are witnessing the emergence of crypto-currencies. These currencies represent a new institution of money, not controlled by governments and central banks, and relying entirely on the market for their value. There is built-in transparency and integrity through cryptography and verification protocols; supply is constrained. The market will be the decider of which currencies are acceptable to people.

The new crypto-money was created by pioneering individuals, who conceived of the idea and the technology, and built the eco-system within which the new money can be exchanged. A new institution has been born.

The Gig Economy.

Employment is an institution. For a long time, we have been instructed that employment is a dependency relationship; we work at the pleasure of the firm that employs us, and no longer. Our earnings are defined by the pay scale the employer attaches to our job or the position we temporarily fill.

A new institution is emerging to replace this dependency-based earnings metaphor: economic self-determination. What the media dismissively call “the gig economy” is, in fact, individuals abandoning dependency and taking control of their own earnings revenue streams. An entrepreneurial individual can map their desired earnings for a long period of time into the future, and navigate their way to those earnings as an independent contractor, designer, artist, project specialist, professional practitioner, or any one of many self-directed and self-resourced choices. They can assemble the requisite skills and knowledge, build a personal brand, join a project team of their choice, and cultivate the relationships to support their life plan. Their earnings are not governed by the whims of a superior in a bureaucracy and they do not have to suffer the indignities of personal reviews and lay-offs. It’s a better institution.

Start-Up Companies.

The institutions we know as firms or corporations can become sclerotic, bureaucratic, defensive and non-innovative. A system for starting new ones was never really institutionalized until the advent of venture capital and the start-up ethos, beginning in post World War II America. Venture capital helps at multiple stages of company development – initial idea generation, the start-up phase, the ramp-up phase, and the monetization or exit phase. It is the start-up phase that has caught the popular imagination. But venture capital is the most productive capital in the economy because of all four phases, generating both big returns for successful investors, and economic growth and improved products and services for society. The institutionalization of the start-up and associated developmental methodologies is one of the great achievements of modern capitalism. It was the result of far-sighted pioneering and tolerance of uncertainty among early pioneers – another example of institutional entrepreneurship.

Home Generation Of Energy.

Our governments want us tied to the energy distribution grid fed by their energy generation plants. Depending on which country you live in, the energy system may be state-owned or state-regulated, but, either way, it is definitely not a free market institution. Energy utilities are government-instituted monopolies; they are insulated from competition and do not practice market pricing.

But no institutions are totally immune to market-driven reform. In the energy field, individual consumers can now take energy generation into their own hands. They can install generators and propane tank systems and, most recently, solar panels for electricity generation. Solar panels will soon take the form of solar roof tiles, so that any hone owner can be their own power plant. And efficient batteries for storage will soften the impact of the daily solar cycle on home energy management. Home generation of energy becomes its own institution.

Home Schooling And Self-Education.

The state’s near-monopoly on education may be the most dangerously decayed institution. How can a society expect a legion of innovative modernizers to emerge from an education mill designed to suppress original thought? The state should have no role to play in education, and yet its role is completely institutionalized and almost total.

Once again, we can rely on innovators to demonstrate the possibility of alternative approaches, and observe as these innovations advance towards becoming institutions in their own right. Home schooling now has a strong and widespread community. Homeschooling curricula and content are available on the internet, and systems like the Montessori Method are moving towards institutional values based on broad and deep studies and experience.

In higher education and skills education, the self-selected, self-administered course content available on the internet is pervasive and high quality. Continuous self-directed learning is a reality for any lifelong learner who seeks it. The state monopoly is not unbreakable.

Self-Scaling And The Internet Economy.

One of the myths perpetrated by the old institutional environment is that the individual is severely limited in the contribution he or she can make or the impact he or she can have. Only with institutional help can the individual become part of a larger entity with broad reach and real impact in whatever endeavor is being undertaken. One of the words used to capture this restrictive idea is scale – the ability to bring large amounts of resources to bear against a particular opportunity.

Today, scale is downloadable from the internet. The cloud makes huge computing power available to individuals at almost marginal cost. Artificial intelligence augments individual capacity, and cognitive computing connects us to almost unlimited knowledge, data and analytics. Global exchange platforms enable us to collaborate and trade for talent and expertise, and buy and sell merchandize and services, worldwide. There is no limit to the individual’s access to the power of scale.

Businesses are building environments to support the individual entrepreneur with scalable infrastructure. Ali Baba can almost instantly provide a digital storefront, e-commerce back end, financing, computing, logistics and legal and accounting services for any size business. You can start tomorrow.

Maturing Technologies Result In Superior New Institutions.

These are just a few of the innovative new institutional pathways being laid out today. More will emerge. The maturing technologies of cloud computing, cognitive computing, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, global exchange and logistics platforms can all provide the individual with self-directed, self-resourcing economic power. If the old institutions decay around us, we need not worry, because the new ones are forming and will serve us much better.