Prosperity's Bible & Einstein's Definition of Insanity

Albert Einstein defined Insanity thus: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

One has to wonder what Einstein would think of the left’s continued desire to inflict centralized planning on the citizens of the United States. Central planning has been a failure virtually every time it’s ever been implemented, whether in the Soviet Union, Venezuela or here. And we’ve seen a lot of it here, and, not surprisingly, a lot of failures. Education, check. Mortgages, check. Welfare, check. Amtrak, check. We are already seeing the wheels coming off of their most recent foray into state control, Obamacare.

Despite everything we’ve seen, despite the track record of abysmal failure, liberals seem to think that centralization can solve everything. As disheartening as liberalism’s failures are in the social and education spheres, the real tragedy is what they have done in the economic sphere. It’s economic prosperity that gives liberals sufficient benefits that they have the luxury to chase their fantasy of a world filled with lollipops and fairness. And they are killing the golden goose.

The thing that liberals don’t get is that prosperity doesn’t come from some grand master plan. Rather, prosperity is the result of people taking risks, people working hard, and yes, people seeking to win. American prosperity is the result of billions of decisions made by millions of individuals over the course of two centuries. Decisions to risk everything to start a business. Decisions to start again after one or five or ten failures. Decisions to ignore conventional wisdom and take the road less traveled. Decisions to put a road where one didn’t previously exist. Decisions to invent things that seemed impossible. American history is replete with millions of stories of courage, perseverance, industriousness and optimism. Many of those stories you and I will never hear about or know about, but that doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from them. We do, because those entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors are the oxygen that keep the American economy from collapsing in the face of the left’s burdensome regulatory state. The problem is, as the regulations increase fewer and fewer people have the strength to withstand the onslaught of paperwork and fees and the intimidation by a burgeoning regulatory apparatus.

It might be worthwhile for liberals to look at how we got here in the first place.

Why did most of the inventors and entrepreneurs and innovators who created our prosperity take those risks? There are probably as many reasons as there are dreamers, but one thing is for certain, most of the people who helped build the most prosperous nation in the history were driven by a desire to improve their lot in life. Most of them didn’t come from a life of privilege. Most of them didn’t grow up in risk free bubbles where everything was provided to them by some government agency. Indeed most of them came from middle class households (or below) and wanted to create something better for themselves and their families. Not sure that’s true, check out this year’s Forbes 400 list. Of the 400 richest people in the United States, fully 68% of them made the list as a result of their own efforts, not because they were born in a golden bassinette or with a platinum spoon in their mouths.

A better source might be something call Prosperity’s Bible. That’s not the real title, but it’s appropriate. The actual title of the book is They Made America. From Robert Fulton, Samuel Colt and Cyrus McCormick to Juan Trippe, Ted Turner and Steve Jobs, it’s full of two centuries of the most important innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs in American history. These men – and a few women – built things, invented things, but most importantly, changed things. They helped drive a tiny nation of immigrants to become the most prosperous nation in human history. And they brought their fellow man along with them by creating jobs, opportunity and a dramatic improvement in the standard of living around the world. And in many cases, from Carnegie to Rockefeller to Gates, after they created it they gave much of their wealth away for the benefit of others.

But virtually none of these giants did what they did (except perhaps some of the railroad barons) at the behest of the government. Amadeo Giannini didn’t lend money on a handshake after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because of any government mandates. Garrett Morgan didn’t invent the gas mask and the traffic signal in pursuit of government contracts. Chemist Leo Baekeland didn’t leave Belgium because there was no government support for his research – there was, plenty – no, he came to America to build a business… which he did, and one of the things he invented was plastic. Rockefeller didn’t rationalize the petroleum market to support some government regulation… although he did save the whales in the process.


And that’s the key to why liberalism has always failed, and always will fail.  It seeks to replace individual drive, individual achievement, and individual responsibility with government mandates, government support and most perniciously, government regulations… all enforced by nameless faceless bureaucrats who have no idea what it takes to succeed in the real world most of us live in.  Liberalism seeks to remove the risk of failure from the human condition.  It seeks an equality of outcome separate from an equality of effort. It seeks to restrict anything that might ever have a negative outcome.   It seeks to mold a world made of imperfect people into a perfect Stepford world where everyone is the same, no one has more than their share and everyone is told what they can’t do and what they must do by regulatory busybodies. 

Obamacare is just the latest in a half century long march of mandates, regulations and other aspects of centralization that have gutted American prosperity and in the process created tens of millions of wards of the state who have no desire to, nor understanding of how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go out and make something of themselves, create prosperity for their families and their country, to change the world by doing something of consequence.

Americans of all stripes could benefit from picking up a copy of They Made America. It shows in black and white exactly what it takes to create prosperity on an unprecedented scale. If liberals picked it up they might finally recognize that success can’t be mandated but it can be inspired and stop living up to Einstein’s definition of insanity.

What might Albert Einstein think about Barack Obama's Green Energy Obsession...

As I’ve written before, I was a very uninformed young person for the first half of my life. I remember watching a movie in the Florida State student union about how Campbell’s Soup treated workers unfairly. I quickly decided to start my own boycott. Inexplicably, they somehow survived my boycott. I once went to the Tallahassee airport to try and meet Gary Hart before his presidential campaign imploded and I also sat on the stage when Jessie Jackson gave a speech during his 1984 race for the White House. As a Political Science undergraduate one of my professors, a self described Bolshevik, explained the great successes of the Soviet Union thus: Their economic and political system had to be superior to ours, otherwise how could they produce the weapon systems we were so scared of? Made sense to me… There were probably numerous other episodes but my brain has apparently, thankfully, forgotten most of them.

The reason I mention this is because we all did things during our college years that we might want to forget. Luckily for me, none of my nonsense was captured on video. Not so lucky for our President. The video of him encouraging a gathering of Harvard students to embrace the man and the message of the late leftist Dr. Derrick Bell has been making the rounds of the Internet. Although Democrats (and most of the media) suggest this is nothing more than a student showing support for the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, I’m fairly sure the President would just as soon not have to deal with the issue during an election campaign.

Luckily Americans recognize that by the time most of us reach middle age, the explorations, experimentations, the ill advised exhortations have been tempered by time and real world experience. Most of course does not mean all, and while one might be inclined to offer a pass to the President for what said in college two decades ago, the same cannot be said for his equally ill advised words two weeks ago.

Of course I’m not talking about Professor Bell. I’m talking about President Obama’s “Energy Speech” delivered last month. Aside from the fact that he makes a number of factual errors, the biggest problem is that the President doesn’t seem to learn from actual experience.

The President seems determined to run the United States off an economic cliff for the sake of his belief in the scam known as “Green Energy”. Not only has he wasted billions of taxpayer’s money on boondoggles like Solyndra, the very expensive and nonworking Fisker-Karma and the rapidly shrinking National Renewable Energy Lab, but more importantly he has added, literally, $243 billion a year to what Americans pay for gasoline. (130 billion gallons a year X $1.86 – the increase in the price of gas since Obama took office) That’s more than 10 times what Americans spend on the NFL, Hollywood movies and in Starbucks annually! Of course there are other unseen costs Americans must bear as businesses have to wrap their increased energy and transportation costs into everything they offer, be it canned tomatoes or package delivery, but those are too numerous to discuss here.

The problem is not a lack of accessible energy as the President suggests, rather the problem is his laser like focus on the illusion of economically viable “renewable” or “sustainable” energy to the explicit detriment of the demonstrably viable and abundant energy sources that fueled the 20th Century. More concerning is that he maintains that focus in the face of the repeated failures of virtually every aspect of the Green Energy hoax:

From subsidized windfarms that are now being subsidized further to stop operating to General Motors halting production of its heavily subsidized Volt because no one wants to buy it to the $50 light bulb that won the Department of Energy’s prize for a “green” but affordable light bulb. Add to that the fact that Green jobs are largely an expensive mirage and you have the makings of what must be a parody of a plan to actually revive the economy. Then when you think about the closing of actual, functioning plants across the country due to increased regulation, and the quixotic support for foreign fossil fuel exploration, it seems like more than just a parody, it’s like he’s mocking the American people.

But, no, really, his intentions are good… Well, even if they were, one must remember Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I don’t think the President is insane, which leads me to the conclusion that he’s doing the same thing over and over again expecting the same results. He believes so strongly that he is right about his green agenda that he simply refuses to believe that things will not turn his way eventually. He’s a modern day Walter Duranty, where billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of jobs are being destroyed yet somehow he doesn’t see it, or doesn't care. Like Duranty’s reporting of the economic miracle that was the USSR while Stalin used an iron fist to inflict bloodshed and starvation across the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union, President Obama’s words increasingly ring hollow. More and more often when Americans hear “We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices” or “We’re focused on (oil) production” or “The only real solution to helping families at the pump in the medium and long term is clean energy. That's how we'll save families money” they recognize they are being lied to in a way that seems almost impossible to believe coming from a President.

Perhaps the President thinks the government’s education industrial complex has eradicated the critical thinking or skepticism gene from the average American so that they will simply believe something because it’s delivered by a man with a smile and an air of confidence. As much damage as government schools do, I don’t think they’ve succeeded in that yet.

At the end of the day most Americans are willing to look past the defiant words of a college student looking to make his mark on the world. I think they are less likely however to accord the same deference for equally nonsensical words uttered by someone old enough to have learned that the world does not actually operate like the ivory towers of academia, where theories and speeches and a lack of real world consequences rule the day. As much of a headache his words at Harvard might be causing for the President, his more current words are causing a much bigger one for the American people. This will take more than aspirin to fix…