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Posts Tagged → wealthy

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)

Why rich guys like McCormick, Oz, and Bartos make such bad senators

The old adage “Follow the money” for figuring out who benefits from crime and betrayal applies also to political candidates. People who want your vote can have only a couple of reasons for asking for it: Personal power (bad reason), money (bad reason), and influence over public policy (great or bad reason, depending upon the candidate).

Personal power should never be associated with any individual elected citizen in a representative democracy or constitutional republic. That is the essence of power corrupting nearly everything it touches.

Making money from official positions in government is obviously corrupt, because the sole purpose and role of any official anywhere is to serve The People. As soon as an official uses his or her official position to enrich themselves, they are corrupt.

Finally, having influence over public policy to serve the citizenry’s public interest is the only legitimate reason for anyone to run for office or to serve in the official government bureaucracy. Influence for the sake of The People’s benefit is the gold standard for putting your name in the ring and asking for the votes of fellow citizens. And it is the rare candidate who runs for office on this basis alone. However, there are candidates running for office for this sole purpose, and they alone deserve your support. Because after all, they are probably solely devoted to you, The People.

So, always be skeptical of all candidates asking for your vote right off the bat, and dig a little into how they benefit from obtaining the power of the elected position they seek.

Just yesterday we gained insight into the reason why rich guy candidates like Dave McCormick, Dr. Oz, and Jeff Bartos deserve absolutely zero votes from any regular guy or gal voter.

Did you see how fellow ultra-wealthy guy and gal US senators Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) abandoned their simple commitment to basic law and common sense legal policy by supporting anti-Constitution cultural Marxist Ketanji Jackson’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court?

Both Murkowski and Romney have used their elected positions to enrich themselves while in office, too. Both are in office for all the wrong reasons (same goes for US senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and many others).

Romney and Murkowski did this because rich guys and gals inhabit a very tiny sphere of fellow wealthy people, whose acclaim and support they crave more than anything. They will do anything, vote any way against the interests of their constituents, to win the acclaim and support of their fellow rich people.

Over American history, very few wealthy officials have done good for The People, and most often they only do well for themselves and their fellow socialites. Outside of America’s Founding Fathers, we can count on one hand the number of wealthy presidents who have actually only served The People: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon (who was actually poor as dirt), and Ronald Reagan.

If you think for one second that a candidate like ultra rich Connecticut socialite guy Dave McCormick is ever going to be a Theodore Roosevelt, you are fooling yourself. Dave McCormick is quietly funded by huge Democrat Party donors as well as GOPe donors, all of whom have much more in common with one another than they have differences amongst themselves, hence the term “uniparty.”

To a smaller degree that same can be said for Dr. Oz (a long time liberal from outside PA) and RINO Jeff Bartos.

So, if you want another spineless, liberal, wavering, uncertain, disloyal rich socialite like Mitt Romney or Lisa Murkowski to be elected as a Republican in Pennsylvania, then by all means vote for McCormick, Oz, and Bartos.

And if you are like the vast majority of American voters these days, who are allergic to ultra rich people getting elected to office and then forgetting all about us when they get there, then there is only one true, honest candidate running for US Senate for the right reason: Kathy Barnette.

Kathy Barnette definitely deserves your vote next month, because of all the candidates, she alone has just your public policy interests at heart.

Un-Citizen Kane. Time to go

Nothing is tougher to accept than a corrupt public official, and the higher the office the harder it is to accept. So it is with Kathleen Kane, PA’s Attorney General.

Now the Philly Inquirer has published a significant investigative report on AG Kathleen Kane and her constant intercessions on behalf of known, convicted, and or suspected crooks from the moment she took office.

The first one the public learned about was Kane’s shielding of ultra corrupt politicians from the Philadelphia area. Philly DA Seth Williams took issue with Kane’s dropping of cases against the bad guys, and he battled her for control of the cases. Williams resurrected the charges and successfully implemented his n her job: People paid big fines, went to jail etc.

Now it turns out that Kane has been using her position to drop or stop investigations right and left across the Pennsylvania landscape. Again, these cases were against wealthy, politically connected people. Her staff at the AG’s office strongly disagreed with her. Some left their careers there because of Kane’s ….questionable….decisions.

Last week Kane lost a case at the PA Supreme Court, which allowed a special prosecutor to continue investigating Kane for her obviously corrupt and illegal behavior on OTHER issues.

In the totality, Kane is surrounded by her own bad judgment, bad decisions, illegal decisions, stupid decisions, corruption, really, over which she will now be charged, in addition to lots of petty politics like hiring her own sister into the AG’s office.

It is time for this catastrophe of a human being to do us taxpayers a favor, and resign. Save her and us from even more shame and pain and public expenditure to follow through on the obvious need for justice. Kane is corrupt. Please leave public life, Un-Citizen Kane.