You Should Listen To The Elites Because They're Smarter Than You... Obviously

I’m a pretty average guy. My SAT was 1010, I earned a 2.7 GPA as an undergraduate and 3.0 for my MBA. Since college I’ve launched half a dozen startups, none of which, made it very far… An objective assessment might suggest my intelligence is slightly above average and my entrepreneurial capabilities somewhat below. When all is said and done, I probably balance out as basically average.

That’s troubled me for years…but probably not in the way you think. I’m not troubled that I’m basically average, I’m troubled by what I must be getting wrong vis-à-vis the world around me.

I say wrong because there’s an entire universe out there of people who are by every objective measure exponentially smarter than I am, but who think exactly the opposite of the way I do on practically every single issue. Guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Craig Newmark and so many more.

These guys have more money than God. They all probably scored perfect or close to it on the SATs. They’ve created companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. They’re showcased in magazines like Forbes and Fortune, lionized on TV and are the subjects of books and movies and of course, success memes.

But somehow these guys and most like them are generally hardcore leftists. They’re animated by and put their money behind things like “Climate Change,” “DEI,” and open borders. Most supported the BLM scam and many of their companies regularly censor speech of conservatives. They support things like the Paris Climate Accords, the WHO, and were largely all in on the COVID scam. Most of all, they support Democrats who push for higher taxes, defunding the police and more government regulations, particularly on businesses.

This is where the trouble comes in. These guys are really smart. They’ve succeeded in ways few human beings ever have. They’ve become rich and powerful beyond belief. And they all did it in the United States…yet they support policies that are not only antithetical to traditional American values, but they also actively subvert the framework that allowed them to succeed in the first place.

America may be a flawed place, but it is the place where Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist and countless others were founded and found success. Interestingly, most of them employ large numbers of immigrants, despite their success being rooted in America, not in India, China, or Europe.

Their success was not because of government programs, regulations, or largesse. They succeeded in America because government regulation was relatively low for startups. They succeeded in America because that’s where capital came to find attractive returns. They succeeded in America because of well-trained STEM graduates who brought them a unique set of skills and experiences they couldn’t find elsewhere, because our market is the most dynamic on the planet and the most open to new ideas. And perhaps most of all, they succeeded in America because of our fundamental constitutional rights protecting private property—including intellectual property—and free speech, which foster the exchange of ideas, and because of our fundamental notion of entrepreneurship where anyone can start a business and succeed by creating something sufficiently compelling to entice consumers to freely to pay for it.

These factors don’t exist anywhere else in the world and, as a result, for 100 years, America has created more prosperity and increased the worldwide standard of living more than any nation in all of human history…and it’s not even close. And these mavens all pretend to support increasing prosperity and decreasing poverty.

However, now that they’ve found success beyond imagination thanks to the American system, they’ve decided that the fundamental rules that allowed them to prosper should no longer apply. So-called emergencies like “Climate Change,” “Institutional Racism,” “Gender Equity,” and “Global Inequality” supersede the 18th century anachronisms of the American Constitution and individual rights.

No longer can Americans be allowed to decide how to heat their homes, fuel their cars, or protect their property. No longer can they be allowed to enjoy an American-centric foreign policy or manage America’s economy in a way that empowers Americans. No longer will common miscreants be held responsible for their actions, even as those who challenge mandates are crushed. No longer will students learn objective facts or study the Western canon, but they’ll be taught to change their gender on a whim. Whether it’s algorithms controlling what Americans can say or see, regulations about what they can or must do, or what products or services they are allowed to purchase, these enlightened elites graciously inform us they are applying their intellectual brilliance to make our lives better, and so too the rest of the world. And they should know what’s best because look at how smart and successful they are.

However, these “One World” billionaires’ alleged compassion for the world’s less fortunate is pure fiction. How can you tell? Because their solutions for worldwide inequalities isn’t to encourage struggling nations to adopt the freedoms, protections, and systems that led to their success in America. Instead, they push to erase American borders while championing the policies of Communist China and the increasingly despotic EU while encouraging us to adopt edicts from tyrannical organizations like the UN and the WHO and proffered by Bond villains like Klaus Schwab at the WEF.

And thus my conundrum. If I, with my relatively limited intellectual capacity, can see as clear as day that it was America and her Constitution that drove prosperity’s march for a century and allowed these intellectual giants to succeed in spectacular fashion, how is it that most of them are hardcore leftists whose policies will kill the goose that laid the golden egg? What am I missing? Am I really that dense?

Maybe, but a better explanation might be that these guys believe themselves to be the self-anointed leaders of a new cult. This cult, which replaces traditional religion, has as its God the fiction of Nirvana on earth, which can only be accomplished through the policies of the enlightened elites from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. They know more than you do, have done more than you have, and achieved more than you have and, therefore, are much better equipped to make important decisions for the “less fortunate.”

Naturally, they may not live by or be constrained by the commandments their new religion dictates, but that’s because, while they were smart enough to navigate and survive a world fraught with free-thinking individuals and potential catastrophic failures, you’re not. You’re too busy with your “God, guns and family” to be equipped to see the big picture. Individual freedom makes for bad collective decisions they’d say, but from the elevated perspectives their intelligence and success allows, they can help you people make better decisions and avoid mistakes…

Nevermind that it’s the lessons learned from failures that often lead men to success, or that it’s often after hitting rock bottom that individuals reach their highest peaks. No, none of that matters because they know best, just ask them.

At the end of the day my SAT scores and bank account may suggest that I’m not quite as smart as those guys, but at least now I understand why…I’m a mere mortal, they’re demigods.

100 Days into Mark Zuckerberg's Latest Acquisition

Government sometimes needs help. It can’t do everything… and it most certainly can’t do everything well. Some Americans have stepped up and use their resources and expertise to help government function more effectively.

An example of this is Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to fund “Special Assistant Attorneys Generals.” in the actual Attorneys Generals offices in half a dozen large cities across the country. Those SAAGs are tasked with a specific focus on climate change and act as liaisons between AG leadership and NGO’s and other interested parties. The goal was to step up and move the issue of climate change forward in the face of Congress refusing to move on the threat.

Another more recent effort to address government dysfunction had to do with voting. After the chaos of 2000, the Russian influence scandal of 2016 and complaints about lines and closed precincts after almost every election, it was clear that America’s voting system could use some assistance.

As might be appropriate for the high tech world we live in, it was a master of the Silicon Valley universe who stepped into the breach to provide assistance to the very low tech world of voting; Mark Zuckerberg. He and his wife contributed over $350 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civil Life to pay election workers, drop boxes, foreign language information, train poll workers, rent polling locations and count votes during the 2020 elections.

The result was a far more robust election functionality in the locales where the money was focused. For CFCL it was what you would call a home run. Take Maricopa County Arizona for example. The county, with its approximately 2 million votes – including Phoenix – represents over 60% of Arizona’s electorate. CFCL spent approximately $3 million in the county. The result? Much higher turnout. Donald Trump received 995,665 votes, 250,000 more than he did in 2016 for a 33% increase. Joe Biden garnered 1,040,774 votes, a whopping 340,000 or 48% more than Hillary Clinton did four years before. Zuckerberg and CFCL certainly had an impact.

To see how much, look at the rest of Arizona where CFCL spent 30% less. Trump’s 2020 total grew by 32% (compared to 2016) while Biden improved on Clinton’s total by 38%. In Maricopa County where Zuckerberg spent $3 million the Democrat candidate increased his total by 48% while the GOP candidate grew his by 33%, a difference of 15%. In the rest of the state the difference between 2016 and 2020 was 6%. CFCL essentially boosted Maricopa County’s turnout by 9% compared to the rest of the state.

If a difference of 9% between Maricopa and the rest of the state doesn’t sound like much, remember that billion dollar casino empires have been built on games where the house has much less of an advantage and trillion dollar empires have been built with less than half that.   

That CTCL model played itself out in a handful of states that gave the election to Biden. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. In each state CTCL spent millions of dollars in heavily Democrat counties and drove almost unprecedented increases in voter turnout and troubling vote irregularities.

Today, in this particular case, half the country might suggest all of that is Constitutional. In fact, it’s not.

In the 1960’s the United States was in the midst of an upheaval of monumental proportions where racism and Jim Crow laws were being challenged virtually everywhere. People were being treated differently with the government’s imprimatur. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts were passed specifically to ensure the Constitutional requirement that people were treated equally. MLK’s I Have a Dream speech epitomized the goal of the journey that the United States embarked on over the next few decades.

Fundamentally Americans understood that people should be treated equally, particularly by government. Government has a power over you that no store or school or hotel does. Government can raise your taxes, impact your ability to open a business, dictate where your kids go to school, and most importantly, put you in prison.

As such, Americans expect government to treat everyone equally, and according to a report released by the Amistad Project, Zuckerberg’s CTCL not only didn’t do that, the expenditures were in direct violation to federal law:

This privatization of elections undermines the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election plans to be submitted to federal officials and approved and requires respect for equal protection by making all resources available equally to all voters.

The provision of Zuckerberg-CTCL funds allowed these Democrat strongholds to spend roughly $47 per voter, compared to $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican areas of the state.

While there are most certainly areas of government where private / public partnerships can play a role – things like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and substance abuse aid – none of those things involves the police power of government or determining the representation in the government itself. Bloomberg’s efforts involve the former and Zuckerberg’s impact the latter.

Government is supposed to be objective in the execution of the laws and by allowing private entities to illegally do the various functions of the state, the government is essentially putting its thumb on the scales that keep the Republic balanced. Just as it would be unconstitutional for Exxon to fund the enforcement actions of the EPA, the NRA to fund agents of the ATF or the Proud Boys to do enforcement work for the Border Patrol, it’s equally unconstitutional for billionaires or anyone else unaccountable to the people to be bankrolling election processes and activities.

No doubt had Donald Trump won with similar assistance by a nonprofit funded by Larry Ellison, John Schnatter or the late Sheldon Adelson, the nation would be subject to wall to wall cries that the election was fraudulent and that a Donald Trump was a fascist dictator. And indeed that would have been true. Had GOP aligned “nonprofits” provided training and helped counting votes in predominantly red counties and precincts, Antifa, BLM and Democrats would have “protested” and likely burned Washington to the ground. Instead, as it was, in the face of the clear theft of the most important election of our time a few hundred Trump supporters broke into the Capital and took selfies with the Capitol Police, put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and caused minor mayhem.

And so today as we “celebrate” the first 100 days of the fraudulent Biden administration, it might be useful to sit back and recognize exactly what Mark Zuckerberg's purchase of the 2020 election foretells. Unless this unconstitutional election is somehow set aside, or laws put in place to make sure the theft is never repeated, we will have crossed the Rubicon into a post Augustan Rome where the Imperial Throne is up for grabs to whoever comes up with the most gold for the vote takers and counters. Given that Kamala Harris is the next in line… it wouldn’t surprise me if we didn’t have our own Year of the Four Emperors.

The Profound Rush Limbaugh: ”Have you ever noticed how under capitalism the rich become powerful, and under socialism the powerful become rich?

Love him or hate him, there is no debate about the fact that Rush Limbaugh is a genius. Last week he said the following:

”Have you ever noticed how under capitalism the rich become powerful, and under socialism the powerful become rich? It's amazing when you look at it that way. Under capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under socialism, the powerful get rich. They exploit others. They get rich by taking from others, by using their power. In capitalism, the rich become powerful. It's a minor little distinction. It's one of those little pithy bullet points that is just shy of a profundity.”

I have to disagree with Rush slightly… that statement is indeed profound. Although he characterizes it as a minor little distinction for rhetorical purposes, his context demonstrates exactly how significant it really is.

When you think about it, on the most basic level, it makes perfect sense. In socialist, communist and fascist countries, despite the egalitarian rhetoric, invariably it is the people who control the infrastructure of the state who end up with the biggest bank accounts and grandest (relative) lifesyles. They decide who can do what jobs, who can get what permits, who can open up what businesses. Given that the state controls the avenues through which so much of life runs, is it any wonder that corruption is often rampant? Is it any wonder that while Muscovites were looking for food on barren supermarket shelves Brezhnev gorged himself at his Jurmala dacha? Or is it much of a surprise that while Mugabe has turned Zimbabwe into one of the poorest countries in the world he has accumulated billions of dollars in personal wealth? It comes as no shock that to get anything done in Mexico takes the greasing of palms of government officials all along the way. The reality is, when government controls most aspects of life, from the major to minutiae, they get to decide who is successful and who is not, and often they choose themselves their friends and their families.

Of course everyone wants success, but the difference between state control and free markets is who gets to decide what constitutes success and who gets to enjoy its fruits. With state control it’s the bureaucrats who get to decide while in free markets it is the citizens. One can quickly guess which produced "green" cars no one wants, a healthcare system that doesn’t work or a tax code so complex even its authors can't understand it. 

You may hate Wal-Mart, but no one ever forced you to shop there. Wal-Mart became a half a trillion dollar behemoth not by forcing customers to come into their stores, but rather by advertising what they were willing to sell and for how much. People willingly walk into their stores and voluntarily exchange their hard earned dollars for Wal-Mart’s goods. You may have heard that JD Rockefeller was a “son of a bitch” businessman, and you’d be right. But he earned his money by standardizing the industry and lowering prices on kerosene, gasoline, and a wide variety of other petroleum products as well. Although competitors were sometimes mad, consumers and the economy benefited dramatically. The success of Standard Oil was based on selling products to willing consumers, not on government redistribution. The same holds true today for Intel, Apple and Frito Lay, just as it did for others like Sears and Roebuck, Gillette and Howard Johnson a century ago.

In the United States numerous rich businessmen have converted their success into power. The Koch brothers come to mind. So too does George Soros and Michael Bloomberg. But the difference is, what those guys are selling, we don’t have to buy.

While the US may still ostensibly be a capitalist system, how long that will last is open for debate. Today we are rapidly becoming a command and control socialist country with Washington as the vortex. Government tells you what kinds of bulbs you can buy, who you have to rent your house to and how you can use your property among other things. It takes the money you worked for and uses it to give phones, EBT cards and birth control pills to those who didn’t. Basically Washington has the power, and now it has the money too. The Washington DC area now has 6 of the 10 richest counties in the country. Out of 3,100 counties in the US, 6 of the 10 richest in the Washington DC Metro area! To put that in perspective, Occupy Wall Street was worried about the country being run by the richest 1%. Those 1% guys are pikers, in reality the country is run by .0019% richest, and they live in Washington.

And why does money flow to Washington?  Simple.  That’s where the power is. Because that's where the laws and regulations that restrict your freedom come from. Washington’s bureaucrats don’t solicit explicit bribes like they do in third world countries… but then they don’t have to. They earn twice what private sector workers do, have virtual lifetime employment, and have the "respect" that comes from having the power to destroy a business or an industry with a stoke of a pen. As a result, while some companies spend money in Washington seeking to suckle at the public teat, (defense, agribusiness and green energy industries come to mind) most firms today spend their money on lobbyists not to get dollars from government, but rather to influence legislation and regulations so that they can simply survive.

Capitalism is not yet completely dead in America. Thankfully guys like Mark Zuckerberg, Simon Cowell, Sean Combs and lots of other people whose names we’ll never know are able to create businesses that earn them millions or billions of dollars without stealing a single dollar from any one of us or eviscerating one iota of our freedom. But one has to wonder how long that will last. Today there are 92 million adults in the United States who are not working. From unemployment benefits that last for years to welfare programs that create lifelong wards of the state to regulations and taxes that disincentivize work, one has to wonder what the real agenda of Washington is. Is it to see a resurgent private sector where more Americans can support themselves and their families without government help, thereby inducing a reduction in the size of the army of bureaucrats and lobbyists? Or is it to slowly strangle capitalism so that more and more jobs and lives look to Washington for their preservation, which in turn means bigger government, more lobbyists and of course more money for Washington.

With Mark Zuckerberg getting rich off of us and our data, it’s an even exchange in that we have a free choice in deciding how much of that data we’re willing to exchange. If we don’t like it we can simply delete our Facebook accounts. However, when the Washington establishment uses the police power of government to get rich off of us, we have no options, we can’t simply choose to not pay taxes or simply start another business without Washington’s interference. It’s not possible. What we can do however is work fewer hours, shut down our businesses or take the path that more and more Americans are taking every day; to simply give up working altogether and look to Washington for our every need. My guess is that Rush would probably say that is exactly what the left's agenda is. And as usual he would be right.