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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Happening In Our Universities Is Not Education, It’s Indoctrination By Government And The Left.

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One hallmark of religions is they often have an institution of higher learning, where the most ambitious and well schooled young people go to complete their religious training and enter the world as leaders of their faith.  In Christianity, we call these seminaries.  A seminary is the place where a devout believer goes before he enters ministry.  Once this training is completed, he is called to go out into the world to minister to his flock and to convert the unconverted.

The Progressive Left has a seminary, too — a finishing school where the ambitious and well schooled are polished to become “ministers” of their religion.  It is the American university system.

The average high school graduate of promise often has no idea what world he is entering.  All he knows is that all of his teachers have encouraged him from kindergarten until the end of his senior year that, if he has the talent and ability, he must go to college.  The reasons for this aren’t nefarious.  He will make more money as a college graduate; he will have a lower unemployment rate as a college graduate; and his general prospects for marriage, mental health, and the chance to retire are greatly improved by college.  College has been, and continues to be, a great benefit — just like the public primary and secondary schools — for these reasons.  But he is also unaware that he is about to enter a world that is even more slanted against tradition and conservatism than his usually left-leaning public school teachers, where conservatives are outnumbered nationally by a ratio of only 6 to 1.

According to the 2016 Voter Study Group, approximately 52% of Americans are conservatives.  Forty-eight percent are liberals.  That’s what America thinks like.  Our young high school pupil grows up being raised by these people, going to church with these people, playing sports with these people, and being in community with these people — the truly diverse America.

Then he goes to college, and he enters an entirely different world.  The ideology is no longer split almost fifty-fifty, as it is in the real America.  Instead, he enters the seminary, a place populated by a sort of priesthood (the professors), whose members teach the religion of Progressive Liberalism — through the content of the courses, through the arguments of the lectures they give, and through the host of campus-sponsored events the university puts on.  Looking at the politics of the university professoriate, it’s hard not to make the connection.

In 2018, the National Association of Scholars published a study by Mitchell Langbert, an assistant professor at Brooklyn College.  The study looked at the political affiliations at 51 of the 66 highest ranked liberal arts colleges and 8,688 of the professors they employ.  His study found that, in aggregate, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of nearly 13 to 1.  That’s quite the change for our young 19-year-old who just got out of the Liberal Sunday School (the public K–12 schools) where Republicans were outnumbered by only 4 to 1.  Broken down into different majors, the numbers are even more pronounced.  In the anthropology and communications majors, Langbert found 164 Democrat professors and not one Republican at these universities.  In religion, Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by a margin of 70 to 1.  These professors are often the ones consulted by the media and used in the documentaries your kids watch about religion in the public schools.  In the philosophy department, Democrats outnumber Republicans almost 18:1; many of these graduates go on to careers in law and make the laws decades later, which almost always fall hardest on the practitioners of traditional religious faith.

The priests and priestesses who teach in the Progressive seminary put their money as well as their mouths where their hearts and minds lie.  According to Open Secrets, “political donations from the education industry largely come from individuals associated with various institutions, such as universities[.] … They’ve typically favored liberals; over the past decade, the worst year for Democrats was a cycle in which their party received 73 percent of the cash.”  In 2018, those working in education gave $9.1 million to Republicans while donating $72.3 million to Democrats — just over 88% of their total contributions.  This probably tells us that not only are Republicans far outnumbered by Democrats, but they are also outnumbered in enthusiasm — if we assume that actually giving your hard earned cash is a measure of active belief and support.

What’s happening isn’t education; it’s indoctrination.  It’s not necessarily a conspiracy, and I suppose more often than not it’s not always even malevolent.  But it doesn’t change the deleterious effects of hearing only one side persuasively argued.  For a student majoring in anthropology or communications at one of these elite universities, it is possible to go four whole years without encountering a single Republican professor.  Elaborating on the study, we know from it that “despite the variability, none of the 51 colleges had more Republicans than Democrats.  According to the survey, over a third of them had no Republicans at all.”

Will this student know traditionalist or conservative counter-arguments?  Will this student feel comfortable challenging his professors?  Indeed, will actual conservatives getting their doctorates be themselves?  They know for a fact that they are outnumbered greatly.  They know how competitive it is to get a tenure-track professorship.  Will they really speak their minds in the cutthroat realm of the university in the name of academic integrity?  Surely, pusillanimity on the part of conservatives is rewarded when you are outnumbered 13 to 1.  Or rather, rational self-preservation is rewarded by you shutting your mouth and not going off script.  Why?  Because for every Jordan Peterson who gets rich when a Progressive mob of inquisitors comes for him, how many unknown Jordan Petersons are there who committed career suicide whom you never hear about because they were open about their traditional beliefs — and as a result, never got hired?

This article was first published at americanthinker.com.

Who Is Responsible For The Propagation Of The Official Belief System? Politicians And Their Captive Intellectuals.

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On May 4, 2019, we published Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s pithy summary of the belief system that is pressed upon us. Today, he explains who does the pressing.

Who are we to thank for this nonsense, whom does it benefit, and how is it that we are fed daily with it by the official media?

Here I want to hint at the answer only very briefly. It has two parts. One has to do with the institution of a state, and especially of a democratic state, with its occupants and representatives. And the other has to do with the intellectuals.

The state is a monopoly of legislation and law enforcement. In all conflicts, including those which it or its representatives are involved in, the state or people appointed by the state decide who is right or wrong. The predictable result is: the state is always right, in everything that it does. Whether robbed, plundered, killed, lied to and threatened in the name of the state – or summarized in single sentence: when force is exerted on other people and violence is used against other persons – everything can and everything will be painted by it and its agents as just, and assigned with another, deceptive and attractive name. This makes the institution of the state naturally attractive for all people who would like to rob, plunder, kill, lie, and defraud other people, that is, use violence against others. Above all, it is these kinds of people who therefore try to infiltrate and take over the institution of the state. And if, as under democratic conditions, the entrance in and the occupation of the state stands free and open for everyone, that is, when it becomes a downright competition for votes between power thirsty crooks, then it is to be expected, that the persons who will get to the top of the state are those who possess the greatest talent of rhetorically covering up their own predatory, treacherous and murderous intentions and selling these as good deeds to the voting masses. In short: The best demagogues, the best pied pipers, and corrupters get to the top.

Though when one looks at these democratically elected politicians and members of parliament, who day by day impose their obvious megalomaniac will though law or decree on millions of people, one can only marvel. Because these people are as a rule not some kind of formidable, impressive alpha males or females, but an epitome of mediocracy or merely a collection of losers, idiots and failures, who have never in their entire life produced a product or rendered a service which someone would have voluntarily bought with his own money.

And faced with these tragic figures, who grandiosely claim to be “our” highest representatives, the question then arises, whether such light-calibrated people are even in the position of conceiving by themselves the entire nonsense which they tell us every day, and furthermore, whether they have what it takes to come up with the diverse justifications and rationalizations for this nonsense which they everywhere feed us.

There one surely has a considerable doubt! And that leads me directly to the second part of my answer to the question of the originators and beneficiaries of the above described “politically correct” view of the world and the nature of things: the intellectuals, or put more precisely, those intellectuals who occupy themselves with social, economic and philosophical questions and problems, and their connection to the state and its leaders.

As in the case of the politicians, so is there in the case of the intellectuals hardly a person who through her intellectual work, her writings and speeches – for these are what she produces – could secure a comfortable livelihood and income. The market demand for such products is low and is furthermore subject to large deviations. Only a small number of intellectuals would succeed in making a profession out of their writings and speeches. The vast majority of actual or alleged intellectuals would be advised to conduct their scientific interests as a mere inner vocation and to earn their livelihood elsewhere, by the practice of a normal civilian profession. But this naturally contradicts the feeling of self-esteem of an intellectual, and all those who view themselves as such. The intellectuals are convinced of the importance and value of their work like no other group and are accordingly resentful when the alleged appropriate high social recognition fails to materialize.

What is then left for them instead? They are usually not suitable for politics, for they are typically too honest and wonkish, too shy, awkward, introverted and particularly antisocial. And for this reason, they mostly lack the desire for power, which is precisely what makes a politician.

But the intellectuals are naturally smart enough to know that even if they are not made to be politicians, they nevertheless need the politicians to get the money required for a comfortable living. And they obviously also know what they must offer as a service in return so to get the biggest possible cut of their pillage: namely well-sounding justifications for continually expanding the powers of the state, and “bold” visions and programs with noble, well-intentioned goals, for example, that of “equality of all people” which cannot ever be achieved, no one can ever achieve, but precisely because of this one never has to give up on, but can repetitively revive and ceaselessly renew.

And so it comes to an unholy alliance: that of the early, monarchical times between church and crown, and that of today, in the American age, between democratic politicians and intellectuals. The result? Never before were there so many politicians and above all so many alleged intellectuals who live and indulge in luxuries at the expense of an ever-decreasing number of productive persons. And never before, in order to stay among the intellectuals, have the numerous and large universities, as the publicly funded and supported citadels of intellectual power and influence and the breeding ground of future politicians and intellectuals, produced so much horrific intellectual nonsense and contributed to the misleading of the public as in our times.

In light of this fact, what can one do? Not much, I am afraid – except to repetitively and openly call out the whole hoax. This means that for one thing, to recognize and describe the politicians for what they really are: a band of liars, crooks, robbers, murderers, and associates to murder; and treat them accordingly with contempt, scorn, and ridicule. But also their intellectual masterminds and assistants, without whom the politicians could never carry out their evil work, must be targeted, and as the first step toward a return to normalcy and sound human understanding, to common sense, it is imperative to push for the financial draining of the universities. Not only should all centers for Blacks, Latins, women, gender, and Queer-studies, and everything else that there is of this previously unheard of exotica, be closed, but also the social science departments altogether, starting with political science and history, through sociology and up to economics and social and economic statistics (whose statistics also serve the goals of uncovering ever new “inequalities” and to call for redistribution or reeducation!) And likewise should the profession of the academic literary studies and criticism and, as much as it hurt me to say, the profession of the academic philosophers as well be thinned out. And the people who believe, that they know how one controls the climate, one should issue them a certificate of illness and send them for treatment in a psychiatric clinic.

Freed from the intellectual pollution which is currently produced by the universities, there would appear once more the possibility of a rise of a class of new and better intellectuals, characterized by firm stance and authentic understanding of reality.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe via lewrockwell.com. Lightly edited for length and translation from German.

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