Posts Tagged → free market
Choices: Principles vs Institutions
Humans create institutions to institutionalize our values, religious practices, hopes and aspirations, cultural identity, etc. Our institutions are created in order to make permanent and carry our values forward, a sort of vehicle. Schools, libraries, government agencies, religious institutions, family foundations, charitable foundations, unions, associations, etc, every single one created with a mission to implement certain principles.
Over time people naturally identify with a particular institution, become a champion of it, and a stakeholder to it. Again, private schools, public school PTAs, library associations, the National Ukrainian Club, various church and synagogue umbrella groups, Democrat Party, Republican Party, etc, you know those particular institutions in your own life, because they reflect your values.
What happens when the institution no longer represents or reflects the founding principles that breathed life and cause into it?
Examples abound: The United Nations works against the western democracies who founded it and currently pay for it. The Democrat Party has become a wild communist orgy of anti-Americanism; the Republican Party has forsworn its abolitionist roots and has become a bunch of establishment do-nothing fuddy-duddies; the National Rifle Association accretes multiple layers of bureaucracy into everything it does, instead of spending its limited money pursuing individual freedom; school teachers unions become outlets for destructive radical politics, far outside the mainstream of American families; a local church or synagogue is poorly run by a small group of self-reinforcing, self selecting, like-minded establishmentarians who cannot and will not respond to changes in their respective demographics…
The one that got me thinking about this subject is the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, a sportsmen’s group I had a long relationship with, which then attempted to take a hard left turn into climate alarmism and gun regulation back in 2020. In one quick weekend of fake votes and heavily manipulated elections, the PFSC leadership torpedoed the institution the leaders said they loved. Their far-left politics alienated their base, and the group has not yet recovered its former standing.
With PFSC, I took a hard and public stand, and while I succeeded in stopping the old group from becoming leftist stooges of the charitable foundation trust fund sector, I also lost a lot of friends. People who were loyal to the PFSC they remembered, and who they wanted it to still be. Some blamed me for damaging PFSC’s public reputation, while I blamed PFSC’s leadership for making unpopular decisions its base rejected. For sure the messenger got shot!
In 2020, PFSC’s leaders jettisoned the principles on which PFSC was originally founded, and a great portion of their natural base stopped believing in the institution.
Recently I stepped back from a formal leadership role in a local house of worship, as the venerable institution begins to crumble onto itself. Leaders there, who fondly remember this house of worship from their childhood, cannot make the tough decisions necessary to keep it alive, and in fact keep making decisions that guarantee few or no young people will join it and keep it going. This particular institution is beginning to greatly deviate from its own founding principles, and its base, its natural adherents and admirers, no longer recognize it.
One last example: The US Environmental Protection Agency was a place I badly wanted to work in while I was in college back in the mid 1980s. When I finally got to work at the USEPA, I realized that a great deal of the basic principle that had undergirded its founding had been long since tossed overboard. In place of the simple principle of a clean environment came a whole regime of anti-capitalism, anti-America regulations. After seven years as a policy staffer at USEPA, I could not wait to get out. I now think the agency needs a whole new name and a very clear mission change.
So should we be loyal to the hollowed out shells of institutions that now exist mostly in facade, gutted of what they once stood for, hopeful that they will somehow regain their former glory, or should we seek to create new institutions that are more representative of the principles that enervated the originals we so dearly loved and identified with?
Change is a constant, evolution is healthy, and institutions that do not change to some degree become stale, immobile, static, and fragile. But those that deviate from their founding principles are destined for a much faster devolution, because most people just simply stop believing in them.
The competitive free market will cause new institutions to spring alive, bringing hope and aspiration anew to old principles, replacing the old institutions as they dry up and wither away. For me, I am of two minds: Stay loyal to the old institution until that is no longer possible, on principle, and then help found a new one, on principle.
Is DEI really gone with Claudine Gay’s departure from Harvard?
So embattled plagiarist and Mein Kontext-touting DEI diversity-hire Claudine Gay resigned from her crazy person high perch at Harvard University on New Year’s Day 2024. Good. Apparently Harvard University’s board decided that setting their reputation on fire to save this incompetent buffoon was not such a good idea.
Interesting how those “reasonable man in the street” trade-off decisions work when unfettered free market forces are at work, right? I mean, Harvard could have decided that Claudine Gay was the ultimate symbol and pinnacle of American academic achievement, notwithstanding all of her now oh-so-public failures of scholarship and loooow moral character, and then staked the school’s reputation on their choice to keep her in place forever after.
But what Harvard faced with Claudine Gay as president was receiving eternal dismissive sneers of 90% of the America that Harvard deigned to sneer at. Being on the receiving end of moral judgment and intellectual mockery is not where Harvard’s caretakers see the institution or themselves, and so they had to cut loose the anchor that was dragging them down into the depths. Bye-bye Plagiarist President Claudine Gay, you will not be missed.
Is her dismissal the sign that normal, healthy, honest, hard working, tax-paying, meritocracy-loving America has been waiting for? You know, the beginning of the end of the evil DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) fad that bizarrely swept across America? DEI, the racist, mean spirited, violent, anti-intellectual, Neo Nazi anti-meritocracy belief system touted as the utopian solution to all of the ills that America never experienced, was what Claudine Gay represented and symbolized most. And with her sudden departure, DEI has taken a big hit.
Others are pointing out the delicious irony of Claudine Gay having in effect been “canceled,” because she, Ms. Gay, was the ultimate canceler of innocent people at Harvard. She of low quality and even lower achievement was the destroyer of their hard-earned careers and lives, and the brutal enforcer of the arbitrary and subjective standards for which DEI is best known and despised.
If Harvard University had at one time been best known for rigorous intellectual debate and achievement, and academic scrutiny, Der Fuhrer Ms. Gay took the school back to the Stone Ages with her implementation of DEI’s racism and savage cruelty. It was one way or the other, and Harvard was definitely going backwards at rocket speed under her watch.
Whether or not DEI is now on the chopping block remains to be seen. My sense is that rumors of its sudden demise because Harvard’s Wicked Witch of The East is now gone are greatly exaggerated, because if there is one thing the Left does not like doing, it is going backwards in their Long March against Western freedoms. Claudine Gay may be gone at Harvard, but look to this so-called “school” to select someone just as horrible as Ms. Gay, or even worse, to make their point that they and they alone now own Harvard.
Digital currency’s iron slave chains
Oh, the irony of a bank that is now insolvent in part because it illegally gave unsustainable amounts of highly regulated investor money to the domestic terrorist group “Black Lives Matter,” due to the weird political and anti-historic narrative that present day huge cash transfers (so called reparations from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves) are required from all other Americans to American blacks alone, above and beyond the past seventy years of gigantic taxpayer funded welfare programs and affirmative action preferences that ignored merit and rewarded skin color and that have benefited American blacks almost exclusively at enormous financial cost to America.
It is illegal to give away bank assets, or structure investing strategies, if it damages the bank’s ability to fully ensure its fiduciary duty to its shareholders and clients. The sole purpose of a bank or investment firm is to maximize its clients’ financial benefits.
This failure of Silicon Valley Bank has already created a ripple effect in the banking industry that is threatening a whole host of banks, including industry giant Credit Suisse. So it is not just one bank, but many that are being destroyed by Black Lives Matter. Turns out one of the primary reasons so many banks are in big trouble is because they contributed some 73 BILLION DOLLARS to Black Lives Matter and related spin-off organizations. None of these donations were legal, because they put the banks’ balance sheets in jeopardy, but as we know already from the related failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fund (which now appears to have been created primarily to launder money and funnel it into the Democrat Party and BLM), illegal massive political donations due to the need to virtue signal is a Big Thing.
What is not ironic but scary about these bank and investment fund failures is the crisis opportunity it is creating for advocates of digital currency. And digital currency means just one thing: Slavery. Slavery through government control of how, when, and where you spend your own money.
Digital currency has nothing to do with convenience. No one really cares about that. I mean, how inconvenient is it really to pull a twenty dollar bill out of your wallet or purse and pay for gas, groceries, or lunch out with a business colleague? Paper money and coin is not only plenty convenient, it is the hallmark of a free person making free market decisions. No one else controls how much of your own money you decide to spend.
On the other hand, digital currency will always be directly controlled by the government. No matter what empty promises are made about digital currency’s privacy, there is only one reason for it to exist, and that is to put government bureaucrats in charge of your own finances. And as soon as you have digital currency, the government can turn it on or turn it off, take it away with the push of a button, or block it from being transferred to a person or business because someone in government does not like what you are trying to buy. Like maybe a gun, or a gasoline powered car, or firewood, or clothing made by a particular manufacturer.
Government control of your spending choices is slavery. You will not be able to make your own decisions. This arrangement is being pushed by the same exact people in government (the current administration) who wanted to monitor every withdrawal and expenditure above $600.00 that you and I make, and who wanted to limit your bank account, and who now have the Internal Revenue Service digging deeply and illegally into every financial decision we make, looking for the smallest of discrepancies to then come down like a ton of bricks upon each of us.
Digital currency is government gone wild, driven by bad people who do not like your freedom. These are people who really truly believe that they know best how you should spend your own money, and they are now trying to use government to set up everything so that you are hemmed in on every side and can only do what these bureaucrats tell you you can do.
It is difficult to tell how many Americans are catching on to this situation. So many Americans wrongly believe that America is too big to fail, even while America is failing right under our feet and under our noses, right in front of our faces. The Silicon Valley Bank failure is bad enough, and its reasons for failing are bad enough. But the ripple effect and bigger outcomes from its failure are really, really bad. Incredibly bad. Much worse than just a handful of banks going insolvent. The use of this growing banking and “financial crisis” to implement digital currency so that we go from being a free people to an enslaved people is the worst part of it.
Say No to digital currency. Say Yes to your freedom to decide how and where and when you will spend your own money. Resist and push back against the evil people who are seeking to take over your life by controlling your financial decisions. Or, don’t resist, and then don’t complain when you find yourself suddenly enslaved to totalitarian government in heavy chains of iron.
And if you are thinking ahead about your own freedom and ability to be self-reliant and independent, then you will be growing a substantial garden, keeping some chickens, and thinking of ways you can participate in a barter system that keeps government hands off of you.
The beautiful power of a free market guitar
A lot of the recent discussion and reporting about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is how hard the participants there are trying to centralize decision making, to aggregate power into as few hands as possible, and to control the choices that individual people have available to them all around the world. This effort to concentrate power and decision making in the hands of elites runs opposite and directly against the democratic forms of government that many people around the globe have fought and died to achieve.
Places like India, France, Britain, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course my home country of America, have all offered their citizens a maximum amount of personal freedom and opportunity. People living there can make all kinds of choices about what they want to read, to say, to wear, to eat, what kind of job they want to try, what kinds of products they want to try and create and sell. And that last part, the creating and selling part, is really at the heart of democracy. Because free markets offer choices not just in economic spheres, but which naturally blend into our own personal lives.
When a person, you the reader here, for instance, feels personally fulfilled by fully following your natural talent and curiosity, and by fulfilling your creative spirit, often also followed by greatly improving your physical living conditions, then you become a maximally happy person. This pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that America exists, and it is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. A nation filled with happy people is a miracle, because it is so rare in human history. So we see that free markets create the most happy, most fulfilled individuals, who are creative, educated, and opinionated.
And we also see with the WEF that the wealthiest people on Planet Earth are now scheming and trying to take that happiness away. The WEF people do not want “little people” individuals to make their own decisions. Instead, they want centralized decision making for all of us, by a very small number of ultra wealthy people. They do not support democracy or free choice or you having an opinion that threatens their power.
I want to share a neat related video with you. To me it is powerful because it touches on this subject of an individual who follows his dream to make the best guitars possible within the free markets that the world allows. He succeeds within the international guitar market, but because of a natural resource constraint – the almost complete loss of ebony trees, necessary for making guitar necks and frets – he takes a big risk, makes some big sacrifices, and ends up playing an even bigger and more positive role in the world.
Bob Taylor, of Taylor Guitars, uses careful market-driven management of rare ebony trees and their surrounding forests to create the conditions necessary for conserving the vast African rainforest jungle those trees grow in. When the local people no longer need to poach ebony trees to sell on the black market, they become protectors of the ebony trees. Economics and free markets keep ebony trees alive, and growing for the future, as well as the richly diverse jungle habitat in which ebony trees grow. This is powerful stuff only achievable by free markets.
The same dynamic is also at play with trophy hunting in Africa, where wealthy hunters pay much more to kill wild game than that same animal is worth as bush meat to the local populations. Because the locals get the meat from the trophy animal (99% of the trophy animal is immediately donated to locals, the hunter and the safari camp getting the other 1%) anyhow, and they also get the hunting and tourism-related jobs from the international visitors who want to see and hunt wildlife, the incentive shifts away from poaching and market hunting to the locals then protecting and conserving the wild game they once saw only as a meal. Again, powerful natural resource conservation as a direct result of free markets.
Long live free markets, personal choice, personal accountability, and personal reward for hard work and risk taking. May the World Economic Forum fail in its effort to end our choices and to make us “own nothing.”
Here is the Taylor Guitar video. I hope it speaks to you like it speaks to me.
(and here is the ten years later video, which is about ebony tree planting and husbandry)