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. 

Karl Marx is alive and well in 2024 America

Marxism was easily the most destructive political theory to ever be put into practice.  Over the course of the 20th century it was responsible for the purposeful killing of well over 100 million people.  To put that evil into context, the slave trade into the United States was 400,000 people, the number of Congolese dead during the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium is estimated as high as 10 million and the total number of deaths during WWII was 73 million.  But Communism beats them all, combined.  And the vast majority of those numbers came from governments killing their own citizens!  I mention all of this is because the father of Communism, Karl Marx, has been on my mind lately. 

Marx was a despicable human being.  It’s often said that he never had a job in his life.  That’s not technically true. Although he had a doctorate, his radicalism kept most universities from hiring him.  He was a writer and editor for a number of publications, most of which went bankrupt because no one was reading them, or were shuttered by governments seeking to quell what they saw as sedition. He was a writer for the New-York Daily Tribune for a decade and later for the New York Sun. None of these jobs paid particularly well or consistently (other than the Tribune) and what they did pay Marx often spent on alcohol and tobacco. 

Marx’s family lived in poverty and debt his entire life and often they went hungry and were evicted a number of times.  This, despite Marx having received substantial inheritances from his parents and his taking numerous “loans” from friends. He fathered at least seven children with his wife, but only three survived to adulthood, in part due to the family’s poverty and its consequent malnutrition. But Marx never once took a job that would economically support his family and give them sufficient sustenance.  In reality, Marx spent most of his adult life supported by his friend, co-author and defacto vassal, Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer. Aside from being a hypocrite, arrogant, condescending, violent with words and sometimes deeds, Marx was also a slovenly man.  He drank to excess, smoked and almost never bathed.  A German spy, after visiting Marx, reported “[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk.” And he was a racist and an antisemite as well, despite his father having converted to Christianity for political and economic reasons. 

Marx spent virtually his entire adult life decrying the inequality and “failures” of Capitalism and proffering the replacement of Capitalism & democracy with Communism as outlined in he and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.  But the thing is, Marx had no direct connection to actual Capitalism other than taking the money produced by it to support him and his family.  He had no experience starting a business, building a business, managing payroll, insurance, suppliers, customers, employees, unions or anything else.  No, he learned everything he knew about business and economics from reading. 

Not that it’s impossible to learn about economics from reading. I’ve read Thomas Sowell’s books and feel better informed for it.  But unlike Marx, Sowell actually worked in the government and observed in real life the consequences of government programs. In addition, he directly ties his work to specific data from a wide variety of real-world sources. He cites specific companies, government programs, economic measures and studies when he writes.  Marx does none of that.  Most of the information Marx gathered during his career was that of various philosophers, political, economic and otherwise.  These included among others Adam Smith, James Mill, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and of course Friedrich Hegel. But he never visited a factory, a mill, a mine or interacted with the proletariat he championed.  He did interact with one virtual slave, however, his lifelong family maid who he never paid, and with whom he fathered a child he refused to acknowledge. 

Engels on the other hand did have experience, in his family’s manufacturing business, his German father sending him to Manchester, England in 1842 to get the impressionable lad away from the radical politics infecting Prussia. Too late however as Engels was already radicalized and headed on the path that would define his legacy.  Engels would visit the most downtrodden slums of England and would share his observations with Marx. He would leave the company in 1844 and would not return until 1850, two years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto.  Much of what Engels would write however was either embellished, taken out of context or an outright lie, a characteristic he and Marx shared.

Although Engels had limited experience with the proletariat, Marx had none and wanted none.  He demurred when Engels invited him to visit factories with him, nor would he query his merchant uncle about business other than on a single family matter.  But lack of actual evidence or experience with anything outside of reading didn’t stop Marx from writing about the destruction of the entirety of western civilization.  Individual liberty and private property would be gone while the government would control the means of communication, transportation and production and simultaneously undermining the family and dictating where citizens would live. He proffered a world of Communism with no understanding of how the world actually works, ignoring the lessons from New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen’s failed attempt to build a socialist nirvana in America, about which Marx would most certainly have known. His means of accomplishing this was not via democracy, but rather violence, writing in 1848 “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

Which brings me to why Marx has been on my mind.  Does any of the above sound familiar?  A vile, self-centered and arrogant individual with poor hygiene, highly educated, with little or no experience doing anything resembling productive and spending his time railing against society and advocating for its violent overthrow?  It should, because we’ seeing thousands of individuals – many highly educated (including lawyers!) and most with no experience in producing anything in the real world – violently demonstrating for the overthrow the United States as we know it. From Portland to New York to Atlanta to Tampa every time we get the mugshots and reports from the police of the arrestees, they look exactly like you would expect, unkempt, modern day wannabe Karl Marxs. A majority of them are professional agitators, going from place to place causing trouble. 

While Marx had a vision (albeit an absurd and impossible one) with which he wanted to replace democracy and Capitalism, today’s agitators are nihilists with no plan beyond destroying America. They, like Marx, are parasites who do nothing productive for society.  They have no idea how the world actually works, how to build anything productive, nor an idea how to do anything but throw fists, stones and Molotov Cocktails while complaining about the society that nourishes them. But then that’s the beauty of the left, there never needs to be a connection between ideas and reality.  It’s enough to criticize, theorize and legislate, no proof necessary, then let the chips fall where they may. With Marx humanity paid a terrible toll for such folly.  You’d think Americans would have learned something from that history. Sadly however, looking at the support the Democrat party maintains – and make no mistake, the Democrat party of today is a modern incarnation of Marx’s theory – many apparently haven’t.      

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…

Of Startups and Meltdowns... Free Market Success vs. Government Failure

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m constantly full of ideas and trying to get businesses started. As I seek to launch my newest endeavor, BrandScanned, I’m trying to get myself involved in the Atlanta startup community. As such, last weekend I had something of a startup adventure. I participated in Startup Weekend at Georgia Tech, where people with ideas and skills get together in a mashup competition to build an idea into something more over the course 54 hours. Inexplicably, BrandScanned just missed attracting enough votes to be one of the projects that went forward, so I joined a team called Zuit. Zuit was the brainchild of a young woman named Megan, who saw an opportunity in the fact that women rarely feel beautiful or confident in off the rack suits. Her customized tailoring website idea was not only brilliant, but the team was amazing. Over the course of a weekend we took Megan’s idea and turned it into something more. The tech part of our team was made up of four coding geniuses, including these guys. They designed and built a beautiful demo website that was nothing short of spectacular.  My part of the team focused on the business model, the business opportunity and putting together the investor pitch while others filmed videos for the site.  

You can of course imagine the scene… Diet Cokes, granola bars, pizzas and lots of coffee. There were computers and iPads and mobile devices and lots of white boarding. Some of the teams had a plan then pivoted 180 degrees after talking to prospective customers. Others, including ours, stayed laser focused on the original idea. And that of course is the beauty of entrepreneurship, you combine what you’re good at or passionate about and figure out how those things fit with what customers need or want. 

While some of the ideas that teams worked on were throwaway and others were quite serious, the takeaway of the weekend was this: Driven people can do amazing things. Essentially a room full of people who mostly didn’t know one another were told to talk about their ideas, split into groups and then essentially “Go do something.” And they did. None of the ideas is likely to save the world or cure cancer, but that wasn’t the point. It was to try and make something. And they did.

The whole thing reminded me of something I’d read a few days before Startup Weekend. It had to do with three guys who developed HealthSherpa.com (an Obamacare clone that actually worked) in just a few days. Somehow, three 20 year old kids were able to build something in less than a week that the government couldn’t figure out how to accomplish in three years with half a billion dollars at their disposal. (Actually the government spent 4 times more building a broken website than apple did building the iPhone that changed the world.) What’s worse, the catastrophe that is Obamacare not only doesn’t do what was claimed it would do, but it actually makes matters far worse than it was on countless levels, and we’re not just talking about a dysfunctional website. Can you imagine if Apple built into the iPhone a tool that allowed convicted felons to track your whereabouts? Can you imagine if your stock broker took away your shares of Google and replaced them with shares of Zynga without asking? How about if you live in Iowa but in order to drive a car State Farm required you to have hurricane insurance? That's basically what the government does with Obamacare.

Thankfully the private sector doesn’t usually work that way. There are two reasons for that. The first is that in a free market consumers have choices, and they can vote with their feet and dollars when a company fails to meet their needs. With government that’s never the case. It decides what’s best for you and you’d better get used to it, because it’s pretty certain that you’re going to be stuck with it for a long time. There is no consequence for failure and as a result most government endeavors fail, miserably.

The second reason is that government operates from a top down mentality. A bunch of politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists decide they know what’s good for you and then start writing laws and regulations and force you to comply. Unfortunately for you, while the ostensible motivation is your well being, in reality the driving force is usually the accumulation of power, money and of course reelection. Entrepreneurship is just the opposite. It’s a bottom up approach where most ideas come from people who are actually doing things and trying to find real solutions to problems in the marketplace or make their fortune by seizing opportunities where consumers are willing to pay for goods or services.

Which brings us back to Startup Weekend, Zuit and three guys behind HealthSherpa.com. Whether America wants real solutions to real problems or frivolous things that are… well, just fun, the source is unlikely to come from government. Genius ideas come about when creativity is fostered, success matters and the customer is the driving force. As Obamacare (which shares none of those things) decimates the American healthcare system it might be time for Americans to remember what created our unprecedented prosperity in the first place: free markets where entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators decided to try and do something and customers voted with their pocketbooks. As more of our resources are sucked into the abyss of government failure, less are available to invest in entrepreneurs like Megan who seek opportunities in building businesses that bring solutions to real problems. If the implosion of Obamacare does nothing else, maybe it will reverse that trend. Maybe that half billion dollars spent will have a positive outcome after all…