Do Black Lives Really Matter? It Depends on Who You Ask...

Do black lives really matter? Apparently it depends on who you're asking. In what seems counter intuitive in 2021, the answer from conservatives is generally yes, in that they believe all lives matter, regardless of color.  They will tell you that society and government should strive to be colorblind and that someone should never get less or more based on the color of their skin. The goal is to get government out of the way and let all citizens pursue freedom and opportunity equally, regardless of color.

For liberals however, the answer is quite different.  They say “Yes! Black Lives Matter!” But like the man who kisses his wife goodbye and tells her he loves her before he flies off to Miami for a “business meeting” that’s really just a premise for a romp with his mistress, it’s a lie. And it’s not even close.  Liberals don’t care about black Americans – other than their votes.  Three issues demonstrate it clearly.

First:  Murders.  The “Defund the Police” movement took center stage last summer.  The claim is essentially that police are killing innocent black men across the country, that white cops are hunting down black men and killing them. That is of course a fiction.  It’s not an exaggeration, it’s not hyperbole.  It’s fiction created out of whole cloth.  In 2019, there were a total of 1,089 people killed by police in America, 877 of which race was known. Of that 877 number 259, or 29% were black, 9 of whom were unarmed – although unarmed is not synonymous with innocent.  Given that blacks make up 12% of the population that 29% seems disproportionate.  At the same time however, given that black men make up 6% of the American population but are responsible for approximately 55% of all murders, the 29% of those killed by police doesn’t seem so disproportionate after all. 

But facts be damned!  So Black Lives Matter, Democrats and Antifa got together and pushed the Defund the Police movement.  Across the country police forces faced budget cuts, manpower shortages and the Ferguson Effect where officers subtly pull back from enforcement activities because they’re worried about being scapegoated by administrations that don’t have their backs.

The result of this insanity?  Crime is up around the country and, surprise, more dead black people… How many?  A lot.  Murders increased by 25% in the United States in 2020, more than double the increase in any year since at least 1960.  The total was 20,480, an increase of 4,056 over 2019, and given that blacks generally make up approximately 60% of murder victims, the leftist attack on American policing cost the lives of 2,474 black Americans.  That’s 2,474 funerals, families devastated and opportunities lost.  Those 2,474 black lives didn’t seem to matter.

On October 1^st the New York Post ran a piece about the 21 children who have been murdered this year, triple the number from both 2019 and 2020.  The cover image was heartbreaking… but one notices that of the 18 faces shown, at least 17 of them are black.  Apparently those black lives don’t matter. 

Nor for that matter do the average citizens of urban communities who for years decried the lack of services in their neighborhoods.  Given the rampant crime in cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of small businesses who serve those communities have closed and large businesses are following suit.  In San Francisco the shoplifting has become so rampant that Walgreens has just announced it’s closing 5 more stores, which comes on the heels of 17 already closed due to shoplifting.  That will no doubt make life easier for the elderly black Americans who need to get their medicines or citizens looking for snacks or Band Aids or Halloween candy.  Their black lives don't seem to matter.

Second:  Schools:

Education is one of the most important elements of the lives of Americans.  School is often where young people learn to socialize, follow directions, work hard, pay attention and maybe be part of a team.  Of course all of that is secondary to the primary object of schools, which is teaching math, reading, writing, science and history.  On all of that, public schools in America are failing black students miserably.

Here’s proof.  Below are the 2019 scores in math and reading for black 8^th grade students in eleven of the largest school districts.

Black 8th grade students proficient in:
	Math	Reading
Atlanta	10%	15%
Baltimore	6%	10%
Chicago	15%	16%
Dallas	10%	7%
Denver	13%	14%
Detroit	4%	5%
Los Angeles	8%	9%
Miami	12%	13%
New York	10%	14%
Philadelphia	8%	13%
Washington, DC	11%	14%

Source: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/districts/scores/?grade=4
(Scroll to bottom of page and select the city then 8^th grade)

What are these numbers?  They are the number of black 8^th grade students who are PROFICIENT or above in math and reading.  The average rate of achievement of proficient or above is 10% for math and 12% for reading.  That means that literally 90% of the black 8^th graders fail math and 88% fail reading. 

This is a staggering level of failure on the part of schools.  Education is one of the most fundamental elements in equipping a young person for success in life and the public schools across the country are failing black students, criminally.  And just to be clear, it doesn’t have to be that way.  Watch Stand and Deliver or Lean on Me – both based on true stories – to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.  Or read about the Harlem Success Academy in New York or the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta.  Sadly, in most of America’s school systems young black lives don’t seem to matter. 

Third:  Open Borders

Employment is the single biggest driver of prosperity and financial success. Many, if not most Americans start out working at entry level jobs, often making minimum wage or somewhere close to it.  From there generally, as they gain work experience, confidence and skills, most people advance to different jobs or get promoted in ways that see their incomes increase. 

To the degree that many of the ill educated black students America's government schools are producing can get jobs, those jobs are likely to be entry level jobs.  But for decades the opportunities for those entry level jobs has been undermined by unfettered illegal immigration.  The result is that many of those entry level jobs are filled by illegal immigrants rather than by young black Americans.  As such, the opportunities for employment leading to advancement and financial and social success for those unskilled and uneducated black youth are curtailed dramatically.  Without such entry level jobs, the kind one would use to acquire the skills and experience needed to achieve the American dream, their opportunities are largely nonexistent.  Apparently their black lives don’t matter. 

All three of these areas are owned, lock stock and barrel by Democrats.  Democrats are the ones who want to defund the police.  Democrats control the teachers’ unions and almost every major city in the country where the schools are so bad.  Democrats are the ones who want open borders and refuse to enforce immigration laws.

There are other things as well, like Democrat social programs responsible for the dissolution of the black family and keeping generations of families on government handouts, but these three alone are enough to demonstrate that indeed, black lives don’t matter, at least not to Democrats. 

They want black votes and they use black faces and black stories to increase budgets, grow their bureaucratic ranks and strengthen their regulatory power, but they don’t actually care about black men and women and children.  And that’s the irony here. The worse conditions get for black Americans, the more black Americans vote for Democrats, the very party that played such a central role in the destruction of the black American family in the first place.  It reminds one of the ironic saying: “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.   

Ronald Reagan said: “If you want more of something, subsidize it" That Apparently Includes Unemployment!

 Eight years ago I wrote a post titled:  Can A Nation Built By Giants Survive Nanny State Paternalism? The Numbers Don't Look Good...  In it I wrote:

“ Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent, who crisscrossed that continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways and who won two world wars so different than Americans today… Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be”.

The piece goes on to talk about the staggering changes in the makeup of the American workforce in terms of numbers of people actually working vs the number living off of government largesse.  I observed:  “If the record of the last 40 years were to be repeated over the next 40, in 2050 the country would have 260 million workers supporting 43 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps.”

It turns out that I was off by a few decades…

The last year saw what may turn out to be the most cataclysmic mutation of American society in our history.  Not only did the Democrats take Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” maxim to heart, they put it on steroids.  They took a virus and turned into a catastrophe of epic proportions.

At the state level, from New York to Michigan to California, mini tyrants used the virus to strangle small business as the governors put their boots on the necks of their citizens.   At the national level Joe Biden has shifted government spending into overdrive. 

To put that spending into perspective, in March and April of 2020 when the pandemic was taking off and the United States lost 22 million jobs, president Trump signed a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill to keep the country on track.  He signed another $2 trillion over the next eight months as the economy found its footing and recovered 12 million of those jobs.  In his three months in office, when the nation added more than 1.5 million jobs, with demand spiking and prices surging, Joe Biden has signed into law or proposed $8 Trillion in new spending. 

Spending $4 trillion of dollars that the government doesn’t have when the economy is in freefall with more than 20 million Americans losing their jobs may be defensible, but spending $8 trillion when the economy is starting to overheat is simply ludicrous.

The proof of the folly is all around.  Across the country businesses are finding it almost impossible to hire staff, and those who can are doing so at much higher costs than they would normally pay.  Why?  Government, of course.  Businesses have to compete with supplemental unemployment payments that in Mississippi, the state with the lowest unemployment benefits in the union, equals $535 per week ($235 + $300 supplemental) which works out to the equivalent of $13.37 an hour in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25.(Within the last few days a dozen states – including Mississippi - have decided to leave the federal unemployment benefits program.)   In Massachusetts, where the minimum wage is $13.50 the total unemployment benefit works out to the equivalent of $28.20.  This spike in labor costs is even worse than it sounds because as businesses struggle to find workers, the higher wages necessary to attract them drive an increase in prices, which in turn tamps down demand for their offerings in the first place.

This tragedy is particularly difficult for small businesses who have taken the brunt of the damage in this economic meltdown with in excess of 2 million closing up shop and almost 10 million not sure they will survive.  Large companies like Amazon, Home Depot, Wal Mart and others have not only survived the pandemic, they’ve thrived from it.  Sadly, small businesses, who have traditionally been the life’s blood of the American economy, have not been so fortunate.  While large businesses often have the finances or flexibility to deal with surging labor costs, small businesses rarely do.  And labor typically makes up a much bigger cost of operations for small companies than it does for large firms who often can harness technology, scale and outsourcing to minimize labor costs.  For restaurants, karate classess, beauty shops and most small businesses, labor is often the biggest expense and the primary vehicle through which they deliver their services.

What we have in 2021 is a continuation of the Emanuel maxim. Last year Democrats used it to lay the groundwork for stealing the election and now they’re using it to drive their fundamental socialist goal:  The destruction of American small business. 

Small businesses represent solutions, opportunity and most of all, individual freedom, all things Democrats despise because they don’t look to government for direction.  Big business on the other hand, as Coke, Delta, Disney and myriad others have recently demonstrated, can be counted on to pick up the Democrat standard and run with it, much like Wal Mart and McDonalds did when they supported the passage of Obamacare.

Beyond the businesses themselves, small businessmen and women are a problem for Democrats.  By definition they are entrepreneurs, people who want to build something, want to be in control of their destinies and as such lean towards smaller government and the GOP.  Given that the Democrat Party is the party of government largesse, of government regulation and ultimately, government control, a crisis that disproportionately harms small businesses while growing the power and influence of the state is seen by them as a win-win proposition.  Look no further than their collusion with the teacher’s unions on the opening of schools to understand that it’s not what’s good for citizens that’s important, but rather, what’s good for the party and their donors. 

All of this came into stark view last week when the news that the economy added a mere 266,000 jobs in April when the expectation was for over 1 million.  That number, when combined with the tidal wave of help wanted signs across the country clearly demonstrates that Americans are indeed motivated not to work. Joe Biden scoffed at such notions:  “Americans want to work” he said.  Maybe not:  Bank of America estimates that anyone who earned $32,000 before the pandemic can now get more from a combination of state and federal unemployment benefits. They are also allowed to claim benefits for up to 39 weeks - nearly a full year - whereas before, it was capped at 26 weeks. The average US salary in 2019 was $31,133.

Which brings us back to the notion of a nation built by giants.  For most of our history, Americans very much had a “can do” spirit.  They carved a nation out of forest, rock and through deserts while fighting the elements, Indians, the English, Spanish, Mexicans and even one another.  Americans built the Transcontinental Railroad in six years, the Golden Gate Bridge in four and the Empire State Building in 410 days. Today however, Democrats have Americans cowering in their homes, requiring masks on the chance they’re given permission to emerge and looking to the government for their incomes. The virus provided Democrats with a perfect storm of opportunity to finish what they started half a century ago, turning a nation of giants into a nation of vassals where life, liberty and dollars are doled out in exchange for supplication to the Democrat Party. Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed.

A solution for American economic malaise - Detroit as a proving ground for economic prosperity.

The United States is in the midst of an economic malaise. 92 million Americans are out of work. 35% of the population is on welfare. The economy is barely growing. While incomes for the richest have been skyrocketing, the middle class has seen their incomes decline by 5% in the last 5 years. The federal debt stands at $17 trillion, up $6 trillion since Barack Obama became president. All of this while the Fed has been pumping tens of billions of dollars a month into the economy for years…

Although Barack Obama has made much of this worse, the truth is, things have been going the wrong way for half a century and rather dramatically for a quarter century. Of all of the problems that exist today – and their numbers are legion – there are two that are most troublesome: regulations and taxes. These two things have hammered the fount of American prosperity, the middle class.

First is the regulatory state – particularly federal regulations. Being an entrepreneur, running a successful small business (from whence 2/3 of all new jobs emerge) takes a great deal of work, tenacity and effort. Unfortunately however, the cost of complying with regulations has skyrocketed over the last 40 years. From the EPA to OSHA to the NLRB to HHS and a seemingly endless array of acronymmed bureaucracies come regulations that strangle job creation, and in the process, prosperity. According to the US Chamber of Commerce – no friend to small business – the cost of complying with government regulations at all levels has almost quadrupled since 2000… and all of those increasing costs contribute to the growing death rate among small businesses, which in turn take jobs with them.

Then there are taxes, again, particularly federal taxes and the insane complexity of the IRS tax code. This can be summed up in one measure: According to the Tax Foundation’s 2014 International Tax Competitiveness Index the United States ranks 32 out of 34 developed countries in terms of the competitiveness of our tax system – and if it weren’t for our relatively low consumption taxes, ranked 5 out of 34, we’d be dead last. That means, for companies seeking to invest their money, of the 34 OECD nations, only 2 of them have tax structures that are less inviting than the United States, Portugal and France. Imagine that, that the United States tax system is less attractive to investors – and prospective employers – than Turkey, Estonia, Chile… and even the dysfunctional Greece! While the United States does have advantages… for investors, tax consequences are an extraordinary driver of their choices. And unfortunately for American workers, the government is making the choice to invest in the United States less and less appealing every year.

Despite what you might hear on the Sunday morning news programs or read in the NY Times, this new American malaise is not an intractable problem, is not an unsolvable problem, in fact, the solution is rather simple. Fix those two problems. “How?” you say.

First, sunset every federal regulation on the books. If necessary, pass a Constitutional Amendment that states that every federal law has an implicit sunset provision of 10 years unless it passes each house of Congress by at least 60%. It would also stipulate that all federal regulations sunset after 10 years, regardless of the margin of passage of the underlying law. If such regulations demonstrate themselves to be effective and necessary, they can be renewed. If a regulation were deemed or proven to be sufficiently important to be granted permanent status it should then be passed as a law rather than remaining a regulation.

Second, implement the Fair Tax – although a 10% flat tax might be a distant second suggestion. In 2014 investors have the world at their fingertips. Choices abound from Estonia to Singapore to Switzerland to Canada. If the United States were to implement the Fair Tax, not only would the economy be jolted by an immediate influx of an estimated $2 trillion from the offshore holdings of American companies, it would likely experience an additional annual influx of hundreds of billions of dollars of direct investment from foreign companies seeking to set up shop in the United States. Those additional trillions of dollars would result in the creation of millions of jobs – and these would be real jobs in the real economy, unlike the boondoggles inflicted on the country by President Obama’s “Stimulus”. In addition, the resulting savings of the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted each year simply trying to comply with the incomprehensible IRS tax code could be spent on useful things – or just fun – and the hundreds of millions of hours saved could be spent on work or leisure.

Of course it’s one thing to point these things out and another to actually get them done. So, as in an effort to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the above I’d like to suggest using Wayne County, Michigan – where the disaster area known as Detroit is located – as an “Enterprise Zone” proving ground. This demonstration would turn Wayne County into a federal tax and regulation free zone. Eliminate all federal regulations within the county and eliminate all federal taxes save a 23% embedded tax.

This wouldn’t impact public safety or individual rights as public safety and law enforcement are state and local functions while citizens’ rights don’t come from regulations but from the Constitution… which would still be in force.

Creating a county wide Enterprise Zone centered on the country’s most economically dysfunctional city would be a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the potential prosperity free market competition can create. Massive amounts of investment would take place and a cacophony of companies would be started, sometimes built on nothing more than an entrepreneur’s idea and a willingness to take a risk. And at the same time, jobs would be created… lots of jobs would be created, with employers competing for the best workers.

While there would be some logistical challenges to implementation due to the fact that the proving ground would be surrounded by non participating counties and cities, at the end of the day the results would demonstrate clearly the potential benefits of dialing back the twin garrotes of federal action that have been strangling American prosperity for half a century. With actual data in hand then the debate over applying the same to rest of the country could begin. Maybe then the country could get back on the road to prosperity where a rising tide lifts all boats rather than today’s perpetually receding tide that leaves most American boats slowly sinking in the mud of the exposed sea floor.

Why does Barack Obama have an 83% job approval rating among black Americans when he's doing so much damage to them?

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Barack Obama is rated as the worst president since WWII. That’s no surprise to anyone actually paying attention to the last five years of failure. What’s interesting however is how 40% of the American population can still approve of the way he’s doing his job. Demographics may play a part in that. Americans are no different than people everywhere else. When we don’t have a great deal of information about something or someone we grasp for those things that are familiar to us, that are like us. It’s like when you go to a party where you don’t know anyone. If you see someone you know, even if you don’t like them much you’re likely go over and talk to them, at least until you see someone you actually like or would rather talk to. That’s because at least you will have something to talk about rather than just standing around feeling awkward.

And in the United States there are a lot of voters who don’t have a great deal of information. Indeed, only 65% of native born Americans can get a pitiful 6 out of 10 answers right on the citizenship test – vs. 93% of immigrants preparing to take the test. And those are basic facts that everyone learned in school rather than positions on sometimes difficult issues.

The bottom line is that many, perhaps a majority of American voters know practically nothing about what candidates actually stand for and what policies they support. As a result, many voters simply support candidates who are like themselves or have perceived shared experiences… In 2008 one might understand why Barack Obama carried 95% of the black vote, despite the fact that most voters - regardless of race - didn’t really know his positions. It was a historical event with a black man running for president on a major ticket in a country that started out with slavery legal in half of its states. It’s understandable. One has to wonder however, how four years later, he could still garner 93% of the black vote, and today with a plethora of further failures his approval rating still stands at 83% among black Americans.

One wonders how that figure can stand when Barack Obama has done so much to harm black families.

He supports an increase in the minimum wage, which results in far fewer jobs for the unskilled, particularly youth. This hits black youth particularly hard, and the problem is worse today than when Obama took office. In 2009 the general unemployment rate in the US was 8% while for black youth it was 3.9 times higher at 31%. Fast forward after five years of Barack Obama and while the overall unemployment rate had dropped to 6.6% by February of 2014, for black youth it had actually grown to 38%, 5.9 times the rate of the general public.

With Obamacare Barack Obama has forced businesses, particularly small businesses, to limit the number of hours employees work so that they do not hit the full time threshold which would force those businesses to provide benefits that they often cannot afford. The result is fewer full time jobs for everyone, and those who need full time employment to support their families are forced to seek multiple part time jobs in order to make ends meet. The most recent jobs report demonstrates this with perfect clarity. The Obama administration crows at the fact that 288,000 net jobs were created in May, but what they don’t tell you is that 275,000 of them were part time jobs. And who is it that get that gets hurt by those far fewer full time jobs? Those with the highest unemployment rate, which happens to be blacks, with an unemployment rate of 10.7%, more than twice the 5.3% of white Americans.

The final item of curiosity is immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Barack Obama has opened the floodgates on our southern border, in essence inviting hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to wade across the Rio Grande – or send their children or babies across with coyotes – in hopes of getting a foothold in the United States so that they can gain amnesty and eventually bring their entire families to the United States. That’s a bad thing for all Americans, but a very bad thing for black Americans. Why? Because those immigrants will be competing for and taking the jobs that many black Americans might otherwise be getting. Since 2000 there have been 5.7 million net jobs created in the United States. And how many of those jobs went to immigrants – both legal and illegal? Surprise: 5.7 million! That means that literally every single net job that has been created in the last 14 years has gone to immigrants, the majority of them illegal. And who are these new and largely uneducated immigrants going to compete with for jobs? Is it the 1% who have flourished and grown richer under Barack Obama. Probably not. It’s going to be entry level and lower income workers, a group disproportionately populated by black Americans.

So the real question is, not why 33% of whites still approve of Barack Obama’s job performance or 47% of Hispanics… in a country where apparently 45% of the population still believe in ghosts you have to expect that some people are immune to reason. No, rather it’s why 83% of black Americans still support a politician who is not only demonstrably incompetent, but one who seems to be doing so much to damage to black families. Jobs are at the core of success in America… not government programs, not government handouts, not government anything. It’s a job that gives most Americans their self respect, sense of accomplishment, and most importantly the connection to a society where they can work hard and succeed, in this job or that better job or by creating a job for themselves and start hiring others. And to the degree that Barack Obama has had any impact on jobs in the United States it has been a negative one, particularly for black Americans. Maybe it’s time to recognize that Barack Obama is bad for all Americans, regardless of his race or that of anyone else, and that maybe politicians should be evaluated on their policies rather than their pigmentation.   

Random Observations on Government

Ronald Reagan was the most conservative president in the last 75 years. Despite interest rates of 20% when he took office, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 17.7%. Barack Obama is the most progressive president in American history. Despite interest rates close to zero throughout his terms, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 5.8%... and it's getting worse, shrinking at an annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014!

At the very moment in time when crime in the United States is at record lows, local police departments are morphing into paramilitary armies. How many times have you heard of someone buying a brand new toy and letting it sit in the closet? Probably not that often…

Barack Obama’s never been a big fan of American Exceptionalism or hegemony, despite the fact that American leadership has ushered two generations of relative peace after two world wars in the first 40 years of the 20th century. He is however a big fan of international consensus and cooperation. The UN is a good example of just such cooperation. They are the ones who brought us a UN Human Rights Council featuring such freedom loving states as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba. Barack Obama likes that non-US centric model so much that he has decided the United States will relinquish its management of the Internet traffic cop organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). So now such liberty stalwarts as China, Venezuela and Iran will have just as much to say about the freedom of the Internet as the United States does. That should work out well.

Despite mounting proof that NOAA and other organizations manipulated data to further the myth of global warming… despite record cold temperatures and ice packs in the Great Lakes, Barack Obama believes “Climate Change” (AKA “Global Warming”) is as great a threat to national security as is terrorism.

Why is it that over the last 5 years GDP has grown by 6% yet the stock market is up by over 120%. Could it have anything to do with Big Government?

There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. Why are 7 of the 10 richest located adjacent to Washington, DC? No, that couldn’t have anything to do with Big Government.

The bad news: In 2014 there are 127,000 fewer native born Americans working than there were in 2000, despite that group growing by 17 million people. The good news: Since 2000 there have been approximately 5.7 million jobs created in the United States. The worse news: According to the Center for Immigration Studies, all of that 5.7 million net job growth has gone to immigrants – legal and illegal – leaving a total of 58 million working age native born Americans without work.

After years of practically non existent border enforcement, and his administration signaling to millions of poor that if they can just get to the United States they just might be able to stay, Barack Obama blames Republicans for the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who are flooding across America’s southern border. Constitution be damned, he’s going to use executive action to solve America’s immigration problem. Regardless of the rhetoric, the outcome of Obama’s unilateral action will likely be amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who will soon thereafter be converted into Democrat voters.

Despite crystal clear evidence that ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline… Despite the fact that prices for everything from beef to plastic and everything in between are rising because so much farmland is dedicated to ethanol corn production… Despite the fact that ethanol significantly raises the price of gasoline… Congress just passed another Farm Bill that will provide tens of billions of dollars to maintain the ethanol cabal.

Congress’s approval ratings are at historic lows, in the single digits, yet somehow American voters regularly return over of 90% of their Congressmen and Senators to Washington.

Despite the fantasy that progressive policies are good for the poor, in the end they are bad for everyone, except those in government and the friends of those in government. If you’re riding the Wall Street gravy train then you love big government. If you’re a big business who uses government to limit competition and pad your bottom line, you love big government. If you’re a government employee with practically lifetime employment, 50% higher salaries than your private sector counterparts and the power of life or death over businesses, you love big government.

If however you are an entrepreneur seeking to start a business and create jobs, you are oppressed by big government. If however you are an unskilled youth seeking to get your first job, your opportunities are limited by big government. If however you a simple wage earner who wonders where the rest of your check went, big government exploits you.

None of this is rocket science, nor is there anything here particularly surprising. Nonetheless, Americans continue to vote for big government progressives in both parties and wonder why things never seem to get any better. The question is not whether this unsustainable and suffocating government system will end, but when. The more important question is, will the entity we know as the United States survive intact or will it devolve into anarchy and chaos and become just another ghost of a failed state on history’s chronicle of mankind’s evolution? If people with no sense of liberty, no appreciation for small government and no allegiance to the the Constitution keep getting elected, the outlook doesn't look good.

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.

Barackalypse Now, the story of one man's destruction of the American Dream

By now you have figured out that Armageddon did not occur on Friday and the dire warnings from the White House that the nation would essentially collapse were, shall we say, somewhat overstated.

That doesn’t mean however that the nation and American prosperity is in any less danger. Barackalypse Now is indeed upon us, and it has nothing to do with the Sequester. It has everything to do with the deranged economic policies of the Obama administration.

Virtually every American would like to be a little better off tomorrow than he or she is today. It makes no difference whether they are rich or poor, or whether they are happy with their current circumstances. Most of us would simply like to be a little better off next year and the years after than we are today.  Most of us don't mind working to make that a reality, but the question is, how we can accomplish it.

One way many people have chosen to pursue the American Dream has been to start their own businesses. The goal of entrepreneurs is often a mix of trying to become wealthy and doing something about which they are passionate. Every single company you know the name of or have interacted with started out at some point as just an idea that someone sought to do something with. Two such companies are Subway, the largest sub sandwich restaurant chain in the world and Home Depot, America’s largest home improvement chain. Both have thousands of locations, do billions of dollars a year in revenue and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Both companies started out with one unit each and grew into the 800 lb gorillas they are today. Interestingly, the founders of both companies say that if they started their companies today they could never have succeeded. And it has nothing to do with the recession, indeed Home Depot was founded in 1978 in the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Both founders cite government regulations for the reason that they could not succeed. Fred Deluca, the founder of Subway says:

It's continuously gotten worse because there's more and more regulations and it's tougher for people to get into business, especially a small business. I tell you, if I started Subway today, Subway would not exist, because I had an easy time of it in the '60s when I started and I just see a continuous increase in regulation.

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot says this when asked why more businesses don’t complain about the regulatory burdens:

They are frightened to death — frightened that they will have the IRS or SEC on them. In my 50 years in business, I have never seen executives of major companies who were more intimidated by an administration.

Although overregulation has been getting worse for decades, the Obama administration has put the regulatory apparatus on steroids and uses the coercive power of government to intimidate businesses into submission. The result is that large companies like Home Depot, Subway, Google, Wal-Mart and others can hire armies of lawyers to bring them into compliance or find loopholes through which they can maneuver. Small businesses however, the fount of jobs, with their limited resources and bandwidth simply can’t compete. The result is that big companies get bigger and fewer competitors emerge as success as an entrepreneur becomes less possible.  It’s ironic that the administration that was so quick to embrace Occupy Wall Street’s disdain for big business has actually helped big business by suppressing potential competitors.

Another way Americans seek to improve their lives is to find a good paying job. Here too the Obama administration has punched the average American in the solar plexus. Perhaps no single regulation has had more negative impact on jobs in the economy than has Obamacare. The regulations are not yet fully implemented but they are already causing a disaster in job creation. Across the country employers are shifting employees from full time (defined as 30 hours or more a week) to part time status so that they can avoid the taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that fewer people will have full time jobs and must take two or three part time jobs to make what they would have at one full time job. That is the definition of inefficiency. From a quality of life perspective Obamacare is going to result in parents spending more time out of the house as they work their two six hour jobs with two hours in between or they work seven days to earn a full time equivalent paycheck. Even without families, everyone is going to have less leisure time to do everything from go to restaurants, the movies, the beach, play sports, read books or whatever it is they love to do.   The small businesses lose out as well. While they may avoid paying the Obamacare taxes for a while, they now have to provide the training, scheduling, management and administration support for more employees than they would if they could fill their jobs with full time employees.  Obamacare is a job killing machine, and with it goes the dreams of millions of Americans who were hoping that a job would help them achieve their life's goals.  

With a flawed government focused mindset, his administration has already accomplished what Barack Obama suggested it would take two terms to finish: “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America”. Unfortunately for those seeking to pursue the American Dream, the Barackalypse he has created has little resemblance to the dynamic America whose engine drove our own and the world’s prosperity for a century. At some point in the future when anthropologists discover the ruins of what was once America they will wonder what kind of Apocalypse could have destroyed such a great and powerful nation. One wonders what curious artifacts will remain that indicate the damage was self inflicted when the citizens twice elevated to their presidency a self aggrandizing man with no understanding of how the world actually works beyond the chimerical fantasy created in his mind and perpetuated by a cabal of empowering sycophants. Perhaps the story the write will be "Barackalypse Now, the story of one man's destruction of the American Dream".