Jews, Jews & more Jews... Lessons to be learned

Jews seem to generate a lot of negative emotions among non-Jews. While it's become particularly intense since Israel began retaliating against Hamas, it's been going on for a long time.  

The Romans fought three wars against the Jews, who had been a civilization for over a millennium before the time the Romans touched the sands of the Middle East.  The first of those wars, the First Jewish – Roman War 66-73 AD, which ended with the deaths of defenders of Masada resulted in destruction of the Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, the death of 50,000 Jews and absolute Roman control of Jerusalem.

Over the course of the three wars the Jewish universe would change dramatically, with the adherents going from a powerful entity (although one subservient to the Romans) in the eastern Mediterranean, with semi-autonomous local control and nominal power over large swaths of land to a vilified people with virtually no power, no land and its surviving population either sold into slavery or kicked out of its traditional home and spread out across the region.

The reasons given for people hating Jews through the ages are numerous. They were a thorn in the side of the Romans.  They killed Christ.  They’re greedy bankers.  They’re insular, self-dealing and dislike non-Jews and their faith puts them above other 2^nd tier peoples and religions. Then there’s people who say Jews stole the land from the Arabs, put Palestinians in camps and Israel was founded by men like like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who were actual terrorists. 

In America some of that hate exists.  Why? The answers are things like: Because Jews control everything.  Jews built and control Hollywood, think Loew, Meyer and Warner up to Weinstein, Geffen & Emanuel. Jews control the media, think Zucker, Iger, Bloomberg, Newhouse and others. Jews frequently use finance to perpetrate scams on others, think Boesky, Epstein and Madoff. They control Wall Street, think Bill Ackman, Larry Fink & Stephen A. Schwarzman, Steve Cohen, John Paulson and many others. They have a huge influence in technology & Silicon Valley, think Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page & Brin, Ballmer, Dell and Cuban.  In business in general they’re everywhere, founding Home Depot, Carnival Cruise Lines, Rocket Mortgage, Levis, Hyatt Hotels, Ben & Jerrys, Starbucks, Snapple and many more.

Then of course there is the place where power is most cancerous, government.  Here, particularly where Democrats are concerned, Jews play a dominant role.  This just fired administration is a great example:  Homeland Security was helmed by Alejandro Mayorkas, Treasury by Janet Yellin, State by Tony Blinken while the AG was Merrick Garland, and the Chief of Staff was Ron Klain, who followed Jeffrey Zients. Not to mention the bottom feeders in Congress from Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff.  And the groups which push America to pour billions of dollars into Israel’s security like AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee). 

And lastly it was the Rosenbergs who gave the secrets of nuclear power to the Soviets, Marc Elias who helped Joe Biden steal the White House and George Soros who has funded the near collapse of the United States. 

All in all, for someone looking to hate, Jews make a good target. 

But here’s the thing… most of the names listed above – even the vermin Democrats – are relatively well known because they’ve been successful.  And most of them – except the vermin Democrats – have become successful because they created a business or a service that consumers – all consumers, not just Jews – were able and willing to exchange their hard earned money for in a free market, i.e. making people’s lives better.  That is very possibly the most noble way for a human being to make money.

When someone stops to think of all the Jewish names above, and other ones they know, one might think that Jews are a huge segment of the population.  But they’re not.  Here in America Jews number about 7 million, or about 2% of the population. Worldwide the 16 million Jews, represent just .2% of the population.

Do you ever wonder why when we think of Jews we think of banking and media and not construction or farming?  Is it because Jews can’t build or farm? No. They built Jerusalem long before the Romans arrived and created a vibrant farming industry out of what was essentially a 19^th century desert in what would later become Israel.  The reason Jews are often associated with banking and media and other such pursuits has to do with the fact that historically, in much of the world they were prohibited from large swaths of the economy. In Europe, under both the Romans and their Christian successors Jews were often excluded from craft and merchant guilds.  In Islamic lands while not necessarily excluded, they faced Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims. 

Those exclusions and taxes dovetailed with usury bans on Christians and Muslims to open up a significant opportunity for Jews, which they were well equipped to take advantage of.  A key element of their being able to take advantage of that opportunity comes directly from the Jewish faith itself, which requires Jews read the Torah.  Literacy, and its companion numeracy, allowed Jews to be successful bankers. That expertise and success in turn provided them with the capital and connections with which to branch into other elements of what we would today call white collar businesses. 

One might ask, given this success, why are there still so few Jews relative to the rest of the population. A number of factors. In increasingly prosperous nations, success tends to reduce the number of children a family has. Additionally, successful Jews often intermarry, particularly into Christian families and seem to drift away from the faith. And lastly, as Gad Saad points out in The Parasitic Mind, Judaism demands a great deal of its adherents and even more from those who want to become members.  The result is that while Jewish civilization is one of the oldest in human history, its adherents remain a tiny fraction of mankind.

That tiny number hides much.  With their focus on education handed down over thousands of years, Jews have among the highest IQs in the world. Indeed, while representing just .2% of the world’s population, Jews represent more than 20% of Nobel Prize recipients across disciplines and fully 41% in Economics, 26% in Medicine and 25% in Physics.  Jews outperform virtually every other group on the planet in terms of success across a wide swath of culture and civilization.  Mark Twain observed:  “[The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy… [Jewish] contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world… and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

While like members of every other group on the planet, there are no doubt Jews who are avaricious, malicious and mendacious, but I would suggest they too are a minority.  I would further suggest that the hatred with which Jews are held by has little to do with anything other than envy.  People hate or dislike Jews because they are in aggregate so successful, and they focus on the key elements that made them so: family, community and education.  (I myself neither hate nor dislike Jews, but I am somewhat dumbfounded why so many ostensibly smart people vote for Democrats, who are against virtually everything Jews have harnessed to succeed…)

The fact that Jews make up such an incredible proportion of successful Americans should not be a reason to hate them, but rather should be taken as a roadmap.  Tony Robbins may have put it best:  “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.”

While I doubt I could ever become a chess master regardless of how much I practiced, the notion of strong families, strong communities and a focus on education is a proven 3,000 year old recipe for success.  America would be far better off if more people followed it. 

Happiness doesn't come from equality of outcomes... Nor does prosperity

For years we’ve been hearing stories of schools scrapping dodge-ball, sports leagues eliminating scoring and schools passing students despite their lack of academic achievement. The reason, we’re told, is to protect the self esteem of students who might otherwise be harmed by coming up on the short end of a competitive stick.

Of course none of this is a surprise to anyone who has watched as liberals have transformed the United States economy from a dynamic prosperity creating machine to a middling debt addict where the middle class finds itself on its knees as the government takes care of those at the top and the bottom of the economic spectrum.

Tangentially… I occasionally play the lottery. If the jackpot posted on the sign on the road from downtown flashes over $200 million I’ll consider plunking down a dollar or two for a ticket. Of course I’ve never won but I find it entertaining to wonder for a brief moment what I might do with my windfall.

At the same time I’ve often wondered, if I actually did win the lottery, would I really be happy? Sure, I’d no doubt have lots of fun spending my millions, but would I really be happy? I’m not so sure. That might sound strange, but the history of many lottery winners seems to indicate that lottery money doesn’t bring happiness.

Here’s how these two tangential things are related. Happiness can’t be given to someone. Nor can self esteem. Yes, someone can give you money, and it can ameliorate some problems, but that doesn’t buy happiness. In a similar way, a parent or a school can tell a child they are wonderful, that grades or scores don’t matter… but the kids know better.

Happiness doesn’t come from having, it comes from earning. That’s the fundamental problem liberals don’t understand, whether it’s telling kids there are no winners or losers in sports, or the government giving people money and food stamps and phones and housing vouchers. Liberals focus on outcomes rather than opportunities. They seek a de jure egalitarian society rather than one governed by effort and innovation. It’s not enough for everyone to have the same chance at success based on some test or competition. No, the resulting output, whether it’s bank loans, jobs or college acceptance letters, has to reflect the hue and composition of the larger population or the test is by definition racist or sexist or some other ist. (While such a framework is supposed to apply in boardrooms and law enforcement, for some reason it never seems to apply in the NBA or the NFL…)

Liberals think that if they somehow make everyone equal, everyone will be happy. Once again they’re wrong. The Soviet Union and modern North Korea might be the best examples of “egalitarian” societies in modern history. And in both cases the people were indeed equal… but that equality was / is an equality of poverty, of desperation, of despair.

Just as there’s a difference between “equality” of outcomes and equality of opportunity, there’s a fundamental difference between earning something and being given it. Compare the way tenants of housing projects take care of their homes with the care shown by those who pay mortgages, or compare the level of pride expressed by a kid at winning a bronze medal to that of a kid being issued a participation medal. It’s natural to value something more when it’s earned, rather than when it’s given. Hard work doesn’t guarantee happiness, but it can instill pride, a sense of accomplishment and a sense of having done something of value, all things which are important elements of happiness.

It’s no coincidence then that as the government has become more generous in its gifts to citizens and its regulatory framework – intended to “protect” citizens from the verities of the marketplace – has become a leviathan akin to a straitjacket, the economic dynamo that was once the United States has become has become a lumbering husk of an economy that is kept alive via stratospheric levels of debt? The result is a workforce participation rate at levels not seen since the 1970’s, skyrocketing welfare rolls all while the percentage of people actually paying income taxes has fallen off a cliff.

At the end of the day, liberals claim they seek widespread prosperity and happiness. In reality however, whether it’s a participation trophy or a nanny state that “protects” the citizenry from virtually anything, they accomplish neither. From kids ill equipped to handle failure in life to millions of Americans who have simply stopped bothering to look for work, to the tens of millions who are on government assistance, liberals talk a game of prosperity but never actually realize it. Sadly, they're not the only ones paying the price for their failures. The entire country is.

But at least we can take solace in the fact that their self esteem won’t be hurt because success isn’t measured by actual results, but only by intentions…

Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson misses the target and gets lost in the race space...

I recently saw a clip of Cosmos host and all round brilliant Neil Degrasse Tyson answering a question posed during a panel discussion. The question, which wasn’t really a question at all, had to do with former Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments on the disproportionate representation of women in science and math fields and his wondering if innate differences in sex might partially explain it.

The heavily mustached Tyson, seeking to ensure clarity in the event that there was any confusion, stated emphatically “I’ve never been a female.” He quickly followed with “But I have been black my whole life”. He went on to suggest that he might be able to tangentially address the issue. “So let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective because there are many similar social issues related to access to opportunity that we find in the black community as well as the community of women in a male dominated, white male dominated society."

He goes on to talk about the roadblocks, he faced beginning as a 9 year old who had decided that he wanted to study astrophysics. Teachers would ask if he wouldn’t rather be an athlete. Later, security guards would follow him in stores thinking he might be a thief. He states that the decision to become an astrophysicist was for him “The path of most resistance through the forces of nature in society, the forces of society.” He then follows with this: “And fortunately my depth of interest in the universe was so deep and so fuel enriched, that every one of these curveballs I was thrown and fences that were built in front of me and hills I had to climb… I just reached for more fuel and kept going.”

He then wonders why there are so few others (blacks or women) where he is: “Where are the others who might have been this? They’re not there. And I wonder how, who, what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not, simply because of the forces of society that prevented, at every turn, at every turn…”

Finally, wrapping up he says: “My life experience tells me that when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, you don’t find women in the sciences, I know these forces are real and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you’ve got to come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation.”

Just as Tyson has never been a woman, I’ve never been a black person. But as a sentient person I recognize that discrimination exists. It always has and until we’re all either clones or robots, it always will. Discrimination is about making choices and making choices is part of life, and people make them for all different reasons. Whether it’s hiring a cousin over a more qualified stranger, a man choosing the younger more attractive secretary over the older more experienced applicant, a woman choosing the 6’ ft brooding Adonis over the 5’4” nice guy, or a white family choosing to attend the mostly white church 4 blocks from their house rather than the mostly black church a block and a half away… discrimination of all sorts exists and takes place every single day.  It exists everywhere... and for lots of different reasons, some of which society can seek to minimize and some of which it can't. Think about it, when was the last time you chose to hit on someone you found unattractive? At the end of the day, life is not fair because we’re all different, with different characteristics, abilities, skills, personalities, likes, dislikes, prejudices and as Tyson pointed out, drives.

And that’s where Dr. Tyson misses the mark. He said it himself when he talked about his desire being so deep that it fueled him to overcome all obstacles to his success. Despite what he calls the “forces of nature” set against his success, he succeeded to a level he would likely never have imagined. His success was not due to some phantom “system where there’s equal opportunity” but rather his success was due to his desire to succeed and his willingness to work for it. Just as it was for Clarence Thomas, Jackie Robinson, Oprah Winfrey, Robert Reich, John Stossel and millions of other Americans. Is Tyson suggesting that he is superman and that other blacks and women don’t have what it takes to succeed in life as he did, and therefore they need some special advantages he did not have? I don’t think so. By his own words one could make the argument that Tyson succeeded because of the challenges he faced, not in spite of them. After all he used the roadblocks to fuel his passion to achieve, which led him to become one of the best known scientists in the country.

The problem with Tyson’s comments is that he puts the focus in the wrong place. He suggests that we don’t currently have “a system where there’s equal opportunity” and implies that it is possible to create one. The United States may not be perfect, but for those who are willing to work, for those who have the drive, for those who have the passion to pursue their goals, the United States offers more opportunity than any nation in history. Tyson and tens of millions of others prove that point. But by focusing on a mythical, unachievable, discrimination-free society or system, he undermines the single most powerful factor in someone’s success… their own willingness to overcome obstacles in order to achieve their goals.

There are indeed challenges that blacks face in the United States. And likely they are greater and different than those faced by whites. But the question is, what is keeping more blacks from achieving success? Is it white racism in a world where even the hint of racism can cost a company millions of dollars or open an individual’s life up to social and online scorn and ostracization? Or is it teachers’ unions that force mostly minority students to stay in failing schools? Is it minimum wage laws that keep black youth unemployment near or above 50% and remove opportunities for work experience? Is it government welfare programs that make it feasible for 77% of black babies to be born to unwed mothers?

What has a better chance of unleashing the potential power of success for blacks who have yet to achieve it? Focusing on some impossible dream of a where equal opportunity is equated with equal outcomes or rather empowering everyone by focusing on equipping children with the tools and skills to pursue their passions and overcome all obstacles with the vigor Dr. Tyson did. My guess is the latter would.

Small business lessons that Barack Obama never learned...

Last year I was having a conversation with a friend who runs a small business that employs about a half a dozen people and does a little over a million dollars a year in revenue. She came onboard about two years after the recession pummeled the business and they’ve been basically flat since, but they’ve survived, something many of their competitors did not.

She was telling me that she was worried there was not going to be enough money in the bank at the end of the month to cover payroll. At the same time she was having problems with a couple of customers, who, in their niche market, often talk to one another. In that market, once you get a tarnished reputation it’s very difficult to overcome. And, as if bending over backwards for pretentious customers wasn’t enough, she also had to deal with employees who were pestering her for more hours, despite the fact that sales simply couldn’t support them.

Some time later I talked with her and she had weathered the storm. She was able to make payroll, satisfy the irksome customers with a smile and challenge her employees to “help me figure out a way to give you more hours by showing me how you can increase our sales”. Interestingly, the absentee owners talked with her amidst the tumult and heaped praise on an ex manager who was interested in possibly returning.

My friend was a bit disheartened that while she had been able to right the ship and keep it in the black after the downturn, the owners seemed to be looking beyond her. Knowing the owners, I told her she had nothing to worry about. While the owners were talking quite glowingly about the ex manager, there was no way they would ever put him in charge of their store again. Although he was a gregarious fellow and he could schmooze customers with the best of them, and was a great friend to the owners themselves, his sales record was less than spectacular. Customers would walk out of the store having greatly enjoyed themselves, but rarely with purchases. In addition, all of those things that are necessary to make a business successful: book keeping, inventory control, accounts payable, accounts collectable and so much else, he was terrible at. In addition, he had left them in a lurch when he changed jobs on short notice. I told my friend that while they owners might sit in their perches and say nice things about a gregarious ex employee, they knew very well that their business was in incredibly capable hands with her, and that there was no way they were going to give up the solid success that she had built for the flash of someone who could do none of the things she had achieved, regardless of how much he made them smile.

As I am wont to do, I used politics as a backdrop. I told her that she’d probably make a better president than Barack Obama. She looked at me quizzically. I told her that she had actually run a business, had to deal with making a payroll and running that business under the constraints of limited resources, something that he had not only never done, but something his actions demonstrated clearly he had no idea how to do. Unfortunately, unlike the owners of her store, the American people are sometimes not very prudent. They find someone they like for one reason and then they elect them to a job for which they are utterly unqualified. Barack Obama is a perfect example of that. While he might have been an effective community organizer, he had neither experience nor an apparent aptitude for actually running anything. Just because someone is good at one thing doesn’t mean they’d be good at everything. Take John McCain. He was a great war hero who showed great honor and bravery. But that doesn’t mean he would have made a good president… in fact, he probably would not have. And it’s the case at all levels in all kinds of jobs. Just because someone is a good cop doesn’t mean they would make a good Chief of Police. Just because someone is a good programmer doesn’t mean they will make a great CEO.

In my friend’s shop the situation was simply that while the ex manager had been able to make people smile and feel good about themselves, he was terrible at the business of actually running the business. That is exactly Barack Obama with the country. He said the things that made many (although not all) people feel good and smile, but he’s an abysmal failure at actually running the country.

At the end of the day I told my friend that the shop’s owners made the decision to put substance above style when they brought her in. While they may speak wistfully of having someone who made them smile and gave them a laugh, they understand that their continued prosperity is based on having someone in charge who can actually run the business. In 2012 the American people chose just the opposite. Rather than going with someone who was boring, but was a management genius who created billions of dollars of value and hundreds of thousands of jobs, they went with someone who said what they wanted to hear despite his four years of demonstrated managerial incompetence.

It’s no surprise that businessowners, whose livelihoods depend on actual success, choose substance over style when the chips are down while a majority of the American people, whose livelihoods increasingly have little to do with actual success in the real world, choose style over substance. There are more than a few lessons to be learned from that…

Mitt Romney should leverage his tax records to re-educate Americans on the prosperity capitalism can engender.

For months we’ve heard calls from Democrats for Mitt Romney to release his tax records. Last week Harry Reid even claimed he had it from “a number of people” had told him that Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes for a decade and demanded he release them.

I’d like to suggest Mitt Romney actually go ahead and release his tax records. Much like pulling a Band-Aid off a wound, where the fear of the pain is actually worse than the pain itself, I suspect the speculative hay that Democrats will be making over the next three months will be a far more attention grabbing than the actual returns themselves would be.

This is not to suggest that Romney should feel compelled to provide whatever information Democrats seek. On the contrary. I’m suggesting that Romney use his tax returns to do something he has yet to forcefully do: Make a crystal clear argument that capitalism is at the core of American success and it offers virtually every American the opportunity to achieve prosperity. Essentially his argument should be something like: “I’m proud to have earned hundreds of millions of dollars throughout my career. I’ve paid tens of millions of dollars in taxes, I’ve donated tens of millions more to charities and I’ve helped create tens of thousands of jobs and I’ve helped generate billions of dollars in honest income for tens of thousands of American families.”

Such language, when coupled with a telling of his time at Bain demonstrating the impact he and Bain had on companies from Staples, to Gartner Group to Domino's Pizza clearly tell the story of success that capitalism has written in our past and can write for our future.

Staples provides a perfect example. Bain Capital was one of the key early funders of the company in 1986. Not only did Staples itself create over 50,000 jobs within its stores, but it likely created hundreds of thousands more by giving small business people the opportunity to save money on office products, which they could then invest in other areas of their businesses such as marketing, capital and even employees. At the end of the day Bain Capital and Mitt Romney may have made tens of millions of dollars from their Staples investment, but the positive impact on the economy was worth billions.

But of course not all Bain endeavors worked out, and in some cases both money and jobs were lost. But that’s the whole point of capitalism. Mitt Romney’s job at Bain Capital was never to create jobs, nor to destroy them. It was to employ the capital in his care in such a way that it would legally earn the most money possible for his investors. Bain’s capital was simply one – albeit an important one – of the inputs necessary to build, grow or rescue a business. Others include everything from risk taking to janitorial services to manufacturing to R&D and hundreds more. Capitalism works because it harnesses the efforts of millions of producers, each seeking to achieve their own goals to meet the needs of millions or billions of consumers seeking an ever evolving supply of goods and services.

There may be no better demonstration of the power of the mechanism of capitalism than Leonard Read’s seminal 1958 essay “I, Pencil”. Read demonstrates with unparalleled clarity the myriad forces that come into play in order to manufacture one simple pencil. From the lumberjacks in California and Oregon to the graphite miners in Sri Lanka to the workers shipping the pumice from Italy, everyone plays a role in the manufacturing of the pencil, not by adhering to some grand top-down strategy for manufacturing a pencil, but rather by doing what they have chosen to do in response to the needs of the market.

The lessons Read wrote about in I, Pencil are as true today as they were in 1958. Compare the market driven success of the mobile device universe with the iPhone, Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle and their hundreds of thousands of apps with the abject failure of government driven endeavors such as solar power, ethanol, education and General Motors.

Mitt Romney should leverage his tax returns and the wealth they reflect to champion the cause of capitalism and clearly demonstrate the role it plays in American prosperity. Indeed he could not have asked for a better foil than Barack Obama in an effort to contrast that success with the abject failure of the progressive top-down statist approach. It’s not often that history gives a politician the opportunity to dovetail their personal story with current events to demonstrate with crystal clarity the superior nature of capitalism vs. statism. By releasing his tax returns and explaining the story behind them Romney will not only take a weapon out of the hands of his opponents, but more importantly, he can remind many Americans that it was capitalism that allowed us to prosper in the first place.