Transgender Politics was the cause of the Colorodo School Shooting–So Why is Anybody Talking about Gun Control?

This is the trend of how we are all supposed to respond to danger. I wish the kid had survived but what he did is the very American thing to do, when a hostile loser with his hair colored oddly and black finger nails stepped into his school classroom to open fire, Kendrick Castillo Joshua Jones, and Brendan Bialy rushed the gunman and stopped the carnage. Castillo was killed, and the other young men took a few bullets, but the carnage was stopped right then and there, as it should always be. And that is the story that should be and will continue to be told. When there is danger, we always need heroes and it was a wonderful thing to see that a few young people in a Colorado school decided not to be victims. Even better, when gun control advocates tried to politicize the event at a vigil held to memorialize the event, students got up and walked out in protest. There is hope in all this tragedy yet.

The killers were a couple of losers that are quite common these days and were obviously inspired by movies to enact what they thought was revenge for being bullied in school themselves. Devon Erickson and his girl friend Maya McKinney referring herself as a himself “Alec” came into the STEM School Highlands Ranch with a gun tucked away in a guitar case meaning to unleash violence. This is something that has been done in several movies that I can think of and was obviously a fantasy of the two kids. I would go on to say that the two attackers were people functioning in the world created by liberal thinking and were just as nuts as the rest of them, but rather than accept that it was they who were imposing themselves on others, it was the fault of everyone else for their continued failures in life so they sought to kill those they disagreed with. It should be noted that Maya McKinney was one of these transgender people that was going from a girl to a boy and felt obviously entitled to make the transition without any kind of social fall out. Obviously that’s not what happened so the result was carnage and violence—not unexpectantly.

For gun control to even become the first thing out of everyone’s mouth was reprehensible. As many have been saying for a long time, violence like this will always happen. What we need are people at the point of the attack who will stop the violence, which was certainly the case at this particular school shooting, and was the situation at the recent California synagogue shooting where a border patrol attendee had been carrying his gun by the Rabbi’s urging. In all those cases and any in the future, the body count will be noticeably different when violence is confronted rather than avoided. More people die when victims run away than when they attack. That is a fact of life. I would go on to say that such behavior should be expected among Americans who are born free and live in a culture that should respect it. I hate to hear that Kendrick Castillo lost his life in the process but on the other hand, what a great life he lived. It’s better to have such a life cut short than to live for the next 50 or 60 years wishing he had done something when the time arrived. What a good kid.

But let’s stick to the real issue, which has nothing to do with gun control, rather the real need we have which is liberalization control. Both the initiators of violence in this case were messed up kids who obviously were taking liberal positions of gender neutrality and attempting to live their lives as promised by those beliefs which were obviously in conflict with the sentiment of the community. We are all told to turn off our sensibilities to these kinds of issues, such as Devon Erickson and his colored hair and finger nails and this Maya McKinney thing who was a girl wanting to be a boy. And they had worked themselves up into such a froth of victimization that they actually wanted to kill their classmates in a school they were soon graduating from. They were the ones putting their sexual preferences out in front of everyone else to accept yet they felt so entitled due to their hurt feelings at not being accepted that they chose to actually kill people who disagreed with them. That sounds an awful lot like the current Democrat party to be honest. Where do we think these kids learned this behavior? It certainly wasn’t the NRA or anybody in the Republican party. Guns didn’t just jump into that guitar case in a “Desperado” fashion to invoke terror on all the people who didn’t like transgender politics thrown into their faces everyday. Most of those kids just wanted to go to school and live their lives. The real villain is a mental health question, but the specificity of the ailment is the feeding of a liberalized view of the world in conflict with a traditional one. And who has been fueling that fire—liberals.

Then when a school shooting occurs everyone is surprised that a person here and there snaps under the pressure and seeks to get revenge on those who persecute them, because those people have been taught that they are victims, not initiators. What was the point of Devon Erickson painting his fingernails black? Was he looking for acceptance or pushing his beliefs onto those around him? And why was this Maya thing so intent to change their sexual identification? I mean in the bedroom it could be a girl or boy in their sexual context, who the hell cares. But she, he, or it wanted to change the way the world looks at such things, so they were looking for social acceptance by pushing themselves onto the environment around them. Who is doing what to whom?

The heart of the matter is not gun control, its liberal politics and more specifically this whole gender neutrality uprising pushed by that sector of the political spectrum. The instigation of violence by the victims of their own fate is the cause of the school violence, not the access to guns. It was in making the two gunman victims in the social spectrum in the first place than their belief that they had a right to punish those who didn’t agree with them. People like the kids who saved many lives by rushing the gunman decided not to be victims of violence and they engaged at the point of the attack. But the cause was the two loser kids themselves, sexually confused young people who decided they were so self-empowered to impose themselves on the world around them that they decided to kill to maintain their illusion. Ultimately they are the result of liberalism. The desire by Democrats to deflect blame is obvious, so they immediately seek gun control as the means to stop such things in the future. But the real answer is to limit the effect liberalism has on young minds, and that more people need to be armed and ready to stop such carnage in the future well before more lives are lost. Because liberals are a part of our world and to maintain their illusions of mental health, they will attack again.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Why All School Levy Supporters are Stupid

There were a lot of stupid people in Ohio on election day, May 7th 2019, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody. The school districts, which are ran by radical labor unions, count on stupid people to pass their tax increases to support their runaway labor costs, and May ballots always have a lower turnout than fall elections. The stupid people are too stupid to do anything else and they show up while the smart people are off doing other things. So its no surprise that 76% of all school levies in Ohio passed during Tuesday’s election. It’s a known formula that works. But I was happy to see that local schools near me, Lebanon and Milford both rejected their tax increase attempts and it is the why and the margin of victory for the “No” voters that are intriguing and worth analysis.

For those new to school levies and these pages I write upon, Darryl Parks from WLW radio and I have a long-standing term for people who work to pass school levies, that they’re stupid. The reason is that school levies are driven by escalating labor costs that consume most of the budget. Collective bargaining agreements jack up the costs because all employees get paid equally no matter how good they are—their jobs are not merit driven. So, the costs for labor are excessively high and the labor unions essentially take away the school board management of the resources making all public schools messes to manage. The parents with kids in the school don’t care because most of the time they just want the free baby-sitting service. Often, they are too busy with life to care what goes on in the schools so long as someone is watching their kids, so the mess continues into escalating out of control costs. To make matters worse, because children are involved, real estate agents have chained themselves to sales of homes based on the grade of a school district, which is completely a made-up statistic which then shields all the radical labor union activity. These are the same type of elements that have sunk companies like General Motors and the only way that the government schools get away with the whole scam is by throwing constantly more money at the situation with tax increases on property owners. That is why anybody who votes for a school levy is stupid.

But people often settle down once their kids grow up and move out of the house becoming much more reasonable at the voting booth. Once they don’t need that free babysitting service, they tend to vote away from government school support. After all, the product the government schools provide is terrible. I would argue that kids would be better raised in the jungles of South America by monkeys than to attend any public school with a highly liberalized agenda. The monkeys would destroy the mind of young people far less. Once people raise their kids, they tend to become much more conservative with their money and they vote that way. I am proud to say however that I have never supported school levies because for me the education they offered was always a bad product that I couldn’t support.

In Lebanon and Milford, you can see the trend clearly. Both districts are about 10 years into their prime real estate markets for new housing. There are other places in Ohio that have the new growth and likely that is one of the biggest contributors to the school levies that did pass. Many of those homes are in situations where the kids have grown up and away from their community leaving behind the parents who suddenly don’t feel shackled to their local public school, so they care less and less what goes on there. In Milford the tax increase proposal was defeated 57-43, which wasn’t even close even for a May election. And in Lebanon the vote was 56-44 which was ironically almost precisely the same. I would attribute that to the fact that both communities saw their boom surges in the housing market at nearly the same time, so their demographic makeup is nearly the same.

Mason, Lakota, and even Fairfield which are near those school districts have nearly the same demographic situation, there isn’t a lot of new home building going on. There are new students who move into the districts and enter the school system, but not nearly as much as when entire neighborhood sprung up out of corn fields and sent thousands of new students, and panicky parents to the voting booth each year. In essence, the student populations of each of those districts is declining while the home ownership is stabilizing with older and more mature property owners not so invested in their local schools. That means that the reliability of the public-school funding model depends completely on the explosive growth of a community and the amount of children a family typically produces in its life cycle. If parents are only having 1.5 children per family these days as opposed to two or three as it has been in the past, then there is no way that government school districts can continue to even think about getting enough votes to continue throwing money at the dumpster fire that is the present school funding system. And the unions won’t be able to do anything about it. They have already burnt their bridges with many supporters and people are tired of hearing them cry for money that most people don’t get in their own jobs. They have lost the support of a sympathetic public.

I am one who have thought for years that teachers make too much money under their union contracts. I’ve seen the job they do up close and I’m not impressed. And speaking to the kids graduating I’m even less impressed. Teachers for the job they are doing shouldn’t be making more than $40,000 per year for a good one. Because what they are teaching kids is actually bad for them in overly liberalized curriculums and the actuality of the job is just a glorified baby sitter anyway. I’ve never been against people who want to use schools for the baby-sitting service so they can go fulfill their career objectives. But don’t ask me to pay for it. And that is the attitude of an increasing number of voters year by year. The situation is even clearer today than it was back when Darryl Parks and I were talking about how stupid voters were who passed school levies on WLW radio. The reason for the clarity is because of the maturation of the school districts, which older neighborhoods now housing more voters who don’t have young kids in the district are a dominating factor.

The unionized funding model of continued pay increases paid for on the backs of property owners is exactly the same model that assumed General Motors would always be the top of the food chain in the car making market, but of course that proved not to be the case. Once there was a break in the supply side of those funds, everything fell apart and that is where the public-school funding path is headed. I would say the signs are already there, especially in how Lebanon and Milford voted. But there are still a lot of stupid people out there voting. But not enough to carry this mess far into the future. And that is great news for a change.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Real Bullies in the World, Liberals

Do you know why I hate liberals so much dear reader, as if the millions of words that I have now written about them up to this point didn’t make the situation clear? Because they are bullies. Their political philosophy without question requires the destruction of individual thought and to enforce it they are more than willing to use force. I have always been open with them, willing to sit down and listen, but they have not been that way with me and of course my policy is never to turn the other cheek. So my relationship with liberals has always been contentious, even when they called themselves Republicans. I have seen the ugly truth about liberals more than once and way too up close for my liking and it is always the same. They are like mobsters, even the suburbanite soccer moms who want their school levy support for free babysitting. They always seek to impose themselves on the world around them and if you get in their way, they will try to destroy you. Whether it is with physical force, or by attempting to destroy your career, or your place in a community, they will do anything to destroy someone they perceive to be in the way of what they want as a group. Liberals pose themselves as friendly, but their ruse is only skin deep. The essence of them is nothing short of the morality of a snake, and that is probably giving snakes a bad name undeserved.

All the proof you need is in how they are seeking to demonize William Barr who clearly acted correctly regarding the Mueller report. He was just put into office. He provided a summary of the Mueller report once it was turned in, then he put forth a redacted version. And an actual unredacted copy was offered to select members who would put forth the effort under controlled circumstances. But Democrats know they can’t beat President Trump in an election so they put all their chips onto this Mueller Report which tried as hard as they could to find something from nothing, and now that nothing has been found, Democrats are desperate. So what do they do, they seek to destroy the reputation of William Barr for going against their wishes. In the end, that’s all any of the talk of holding the new Attorney General in contempt of congress is. And the way they are trying to destroy him in the media, and in his career is a story we have seen over and over again.

I’ve seen this all many times but for me it hit hard during the Lakota school levy days in my neighborhood when I was leading a group of business owners to stop the tax increases suggested by the progressive tax advocates. I was the point person to give many of the business owners anonymity because they literally feared for their careers and social status if it got out that they didn’t support the tax increase for Lakota schools. One name did get out and the pro tax supporters did what all leftists did, they organized a boycott against the business and lobbied against it in the financial circles to literally get his business taken away from him. They tried the same thing against me about a year later when my continued radio appearances and debates against their side didn’t give them any wins. They figured they’d have to destroy me in every way that a person could be destroyed. Only I didn’t care about the things they normally extort which left them toothless. And when they tried the physical violence route, well, that was disastrous for them as well. They found that they couldn’t take anything from me so that fire was put out really fast. But they did try and for that I will always hold it against them. I have a thing against bullies. I have never yielded to them going way back into my school days. I believe so strongly about it that people have died in the process. So I’m not going to start accepting that behavior now. If anything, it sickens me more when I see it.

What is even worse is that we all know why they are going after William Barr, because now the new Attorney General has the power to come after them for all the crimes they committed, and this attack by liberals against Barr is simply to beat him to the punch. That is the way all liberals play, even the docile bra burning environmentalists. They are all bullies and con artists. Very little of their personal ideology contains any truth, only a Game of Thrones like lust for power within groups and they’ll run over anybody to get what they want. Liberals as I have said are all suffering to some degree or another a form of mental illness. And what makes them dangerous is that they wish to continue in that state. Rather than respect the Attorney General and the law he represents, they would seek to destroy him completely, just as they tried to do with Justice Kavanaugh. I’d like to think differently about them, but there is no evidence to the contrary.

The problem with liberals is that their philosophy about life is wrong and stands against the trajectory of time. So the only way they can compete is to destroy anyone and anything that presents facts to them. Liberals are dangerous because of their refusal to deal with the nature of reality itself, and their willingness to live life with blinders on and nothing else. For those who can actually see, they detest such people and will resort to violence to keep the effects of reality from coming into their minds. They hate people who can see them for what they are most of all, and if they can overcome such people with violence or other methods, they will do so and not care if the other person is destroyed or not, no different than classical mobsters used to behave.

The contempt for the law that all the liberals involved in the FBI coup against President Trump is appalling and is filled with thousands of bullies who are all trying to stand against the tides of history. And now that yielding to those bullies have not worked under the Trump administration, they are seeking to destroy his AG before the investigations into the real crimes can take place. And with liberals, they will do anything to put a stop to Barr’s plans. Just as liberals will instigate boycotts against businesses and advertisers whom they disagree with, always with them is the threat of violence or pain if the people they are targeting do not comply with their intended thoughts. They have no other way of obtaining favor but through force, which is why they stand against the 2nd Amendment, and why they are attempting to control the 1st with online censorship and “editorial” censorship. In many ways they have complete control over most human resource departments through government control of labor relations. And they never trust that their ideas are better, only that theirs are the only ones that survive. That’s all they care about and is completely reflective in the William Barr case. If he didn’t do what they wanted him to do, then they would bring pain to him any way they could. And in the past, this has worked for liberals. That is, until now where some are starting to fight back. As they should have all along.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

1.6 Trillion in College Debt–More of a Reason to Rethink the Whole Issue

As the college scandal has revealed recently in Hollywood, it wasn’t just Felicity Huffman and Lori Lughlin who believed that college was a stepping stone culturally into a better life and that all it took to get there was money. I can think of literally thousands of people I have personally spoken with over the last three decades who thought just as they did. They didn’t care what their kids really learned in college, only that they attended and that the name alone would take them to great places in life. To accept that premise you have to accept that it doesn’t matter what you do in life, its who you know. And that in knowing people that there is power in that. I of course have a completely opposite view of what makes what in the world and I have had those notions early in my life. I started to see the clarity of the scam as far back as the sixth grade and the older I became, the more my thoughts were confirmed. I attended college, I lived on the University of Cincinnati campus for a while and nothing about any of those experiences changed my mind. They only confirmed what I already knew and over the years more people are coming to realize that what I have been saying all along was true and now they are ready to admit that the 1.6 trillion in student loan debt that our country currently has, which is crushing for a lot of people, wasn’t worth it. In fact, it was just the latest scam in a long list of snake oil salesman type tactics that have been unleashed on the human race, and people have a right to be angry about it.

I have written extensively about the college experience and how it came to hold such a prominent, if undeserved place in our social pantheon. Click here to review. I feel I can say that because I would consider myself an academic. There are likely few people anywhere who study as much as I have and continues to. The difference is that I see institutional knowledge as a limiting factor as opposed to individualized exploration. My beef with college is that it costs too much and is the wrong kind of knowledge that is being offered to students in relation to the world we are living it. It’s not the work certainly. My view of college is that it’s a huge waste of time because of all the drinking and socializing that goes on there. I think there are two things that ruin people for most of their lives, puberty, and their post high school years where all the choices of the world are open to them, and they end up picking one of three meat headed options, death by college, death by the military, or death by a non-college degreed middle class life in a factory and learn at age 18 and 19 to never set their sites for the stars but for some rusty truck for which they are the third owners with 200,000 miles on it, and are happy about it. All three of those paths are the embodiments of ancient institutionalism that has permeated our human culture from the dawn of mankind, and they all suck. There are many more paths available to individuals, but it takes courage to walk them. And to be honest, that path is not for the weak at heart.

But the nature of the scam of college was that people like Felicity Huffman, who was a Hollywood lightweight intellectually, a neurotic suburbanite who likely puts a bicycle helmet on her kids just to go to the end of the driveway and lives her whole life in that fearful bubble were told by the institutions that if only they paid a lot of money to the colleges, then there overly pampered children could grow up and be good people with good jobs and that their terrible parenting would go undetected. Well, obviously that has not been the case. I suppose I had the good fortune to learn all this very early which opened the door to me on how things really worked in the world. I was bored with college, out of my mind bored. If I could have taken the average four your course and compressed it into one quarter I would have. So in those years I got myself into a lot of trouble, in the business world, and it was fun. I learned a lot, far more than any class on business. I met a lot of multimillionaires and became friends with them. I was invited to several lunches where these guys dropped $11,000 for lunch and didn’t even think about the cost. I had never seen a $2,000 tip stuffed down the shirt of a waitress before and with these guys it happened all the time, and the waitresses were always very happy to see them. But I learned from them how things really worked, which I had suspected all along. I was around 22 years old at the time so it was a very interesting time for me. College was pretty boring in comparison. And I was with these guys because I understood their language. It was all about risk taking and having the guts to ride out when those risks failed. But you had to take a shot. The risk reward ratio was what it was all about—and you can’t buy that with a college degree.

The degree would prepare people to work for one of those guys, but it didn’t make you one of those people, so my contention has always been, why would you do it. In all honesty, I probably have paid over a half a million dollars for my education, if opportunity cost were a factor. I certainly took the path through the forest with the most thorns, snakes, and other treacheries, but there was always more gold there too, and well worth the journey. But I’d rather pay that than to be six figures in debt to a stupid college that is running a scam that it sells with their sports programs then has nothing for their students to do when they graduate. For some people getting their foot into the door of a real job makes that big investment worthwhile, but the real education starts when you begin that job. Everyone knows the game whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, which they don’t. But Lori Lughlin was only doing what everyone else was, buying her kids social prestige. Only because she had more expendable income than other parents did she take it steps too far. What she did ruins the snake oil sales appeal, so our society had to draw a line somewhere, especially since so many people are now on the hook for a college degree that costs as much as a house, and they don’t have a job that justifies it.

I admire anybody who gets an education and completes what they start. But the college costs have been leveraged out of range of their real worth do to their monopoly on what they were really selling, social status, a position that our political structure nurtured along for their own objectives of institutional control. Now I understand that not everyone is meant to be like those guys I talked about having lunch with when I was 22, or the people I most enjoy associating with now. Those are the real titans who make or break economies. Everyone else is just trying to get a job with them. And that isn’t worth over 1.6 trillion in national debt.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Hope of Comics

Even though it’s not why I do it, because in the beginning I considered this blog to be a fun extension of my life and my many interests, it has become something bigger and much more literate. And with that come judgments from people who just aren’t very intellectual presently, or perhaps never will be which I consider worthless. The difference between me writing these many articles for myself, which I have for many, many years and sharing them in the form of a blog is that in the back of my mind I hope to help people realize that there is more to life than what they are presently living. I think by any measure I am a very well-balanced person and an excellent thinker. True, I could be another Alex Jones, I certainly have interests in that direction, but I could also be a sports star, or any number of things. But what I am is a lot of things and I like it that way. And I share those things with my audience purely for the sake of their own uses, certainly not mine. What I do for myself is know that I am trying to help people live better and more authentically, and when the refusal of that offer is openly rejected I do get mad about it. I don’t force people to do anything and they certainly shouldn’t expect such a thing from me. The things I do object to in life however is anything that leads to below the line thinking and when I see such a thing I do get pretty vocal about a need to rebel against it erupts. But sometimes even for me the disappointments about how people choose to live and paint themselves into a corner gets to be too much and on those moments I give myself a breath by going to my local comic book store.

As I’ve said before, I like every sport there is. The reason I didn’t enter professional sports as a young person was that while I liked the objectives of winning, I didn’t like the compliance of building a team. I always related more to the coaches than the players and the elements of leadership so sports took up too much time and there were too many social stigmas about what success or failure meant and I had other things I wanted to spend time on. But I’m certainly not one who is an either or person, either the life of a jock or the life of the geek who hangs out in comic book stores avoiding life while others chase balls around and get headlines in the newspapers because of it. Those divisions were always absurd to me and still are. I enjoy reading all types of things, including comic books. They are usually full of ambition and the artwork is usually very energetic.

So it was with that zeal that my oldest daughter, my youngest grandson and my wife went to two comic book stores on Saturday which was a combination of Star Wars day and free comic book day. What I really wanted was the new comic about the new Star Wars land at their theme parks called Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve always been a Han Solo guy so I am quite excited that the plot of the new land was featuring him and that it was highlighted in the new comic, and I wanted to get it. I can’t recall the last time a theme park decided to tie modern mythology in this way and I found it very interesting. So for the history of it I wanted to collect it for reflection 50 or 60 years from now in the future. I was also curious how Disney would attempt to tie all these media platforms together into a big unified story.

Much to my surprise they were sold out of the Galaxy’s Edge comic that I wanted at the first comic store, but otherwise it was a very bustling place. I didn’t see any kids there, but a lot of adults and they were all talking quite vibrantly about various comics, the recent Game of Thrones episode, the Avengers climax with Endgame and the upcoming Cincinnati Comic Con which my other daughter is planning to attend as an exhibitor. I couldn’t help but wonder if Socrates ever thought for a second that any culture on earth would have so much mythology produced and that people would gather in a comic book store to talk about them with such passion. I am encouraged by such places, they often restore my thoughts that people are worth saving when I read comics and see the bold desires there that are unfurled by obscure artists revealing their hopes and dreams through fantastic characters that are translated onto colorful pages full of art. There was more art produced just in that one comic book store than the entire Renaissance period of Europe, which I think is every bit as good.

We ultimately had to go to a comic book store in Mason to get my Galaxy’s Edge comic. I picked up far more than I had planned to and I enjoyed reading them later while I watched the Reds game on television and for me, all was right with the world. But more than anything I enjoyed the people. There were a lot more people participating in the free comic book day events than I would have thought which led to a lot of contemplation for me. My daughter and I discussed it over lunch. Her generation has grown up in a lot of hapless situations. The political system has let them down, their educations were a joke, their parental structure often broken. It was in their last hopes for participating in mankind that they go to the comic book store looking for heroes to believe in. Some people would say they were escaping from reality, but what I saw was that it was for their own good. Their love of comics was a survival mechanism to the disappointments of life and I saw in all those people a desire to not just accept a “bla” existence, but to at least learn through the mythology of fantasy characters that there was more to the human experience than just accepting defeat then eventually death.

To say I’m excited about Disney’s new Galaxy’s Edge would be a severe understatement. I read the comic pretty much in the car on the way home because I couldn’t wait to see how everything would be tied together and I was happy with the ambition of it all. I personally needed the break in thought myself. For me it’s never about going backwards. When I get disappointed in the ambitions of the human species, I too look for reasons to feel good about it all again and comic book stores do it for me. They are filled with hope not just in the artists who produce the content, but in the participants. In all their geekdom, they are essentially out for the same thing that the baseball player is, or the golf enthusiast, or Fantasy Football player, everyone wants a win. And if there are things that comics are typically selling, its victories of the human soul overcoming adversity. And unfortunately for most, such concepts are a fantasy. But at least they haven’t lost sight of the need for such a thing.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Golf and Guns

My problem in the world is that I enjoy too many things. But to be successful, traditionally, we have a culture that values specificity, where we immerse ourselves into one particular thing. For instance when it comes to this blog site, there is a political context and a narrative that has to be fulfilled for it to work. And since my audience is largely Trump supporters and Second Amendment advocates, going off the rails too far on a tangent doesn’t fulfil that market necessity. So I talk about guns and my love of Cowboy Fast Draw a lot as opposed to other kinds of sports, like baseball and golf. But to my mind they are all the same. In fact, I view Cowboy Fast Draw as another kind of game not at all unlike golf or bowling. We make games at life to represent our culture in various ways and to me they are all the same. The gun and their use is purely a sporting activity and are directly applicable to other sports. Truth be told, I enjoy every sport though. When I go to a sporting goods store, I am absolutely in heaven because every section is something I enjoy. I love baseball, I love football, I love the outdoor section, I love soccer, golf, I love everything. And to me they are all one big story.

I do resent being put into a classification with people who are limited in their scope of enjoyment of life though. I understand their limits and I hope that at some point they overcome them, but it certainly isn’t my task to yield myself to their handicaps. This is an issue that has come up more than once recently among several people. A politician friend recently asked me to take them out of a video they appeared in many years ago because their life had changed and they now had a much higher social profile, and political enemies were using it against them. One of the weapons that was used against this person was that I am a “gun advocate dressed to kill” which is shown on this blog site quite audaciously. But that’s not how I see it. To me a gun and holster rig with the gunfighting garb of Cowboy Fast Draw is no different from a group of people hitting the golf course with a dress code that would otherwise be laughed at during a visit to any local mall. Or a baseball player stepping off the field and without changing going to a nice restaurant. The baseball outfit would be considered odd in any other public setting except for a game. So the gunslinger outfit to me is something of an American heritage, no different from the Japanese reverence for their samurai or some other warrior reference that a culture wants to remember honorably. If you take away the politics all these sports are fun and have their place and I enjoy them all.

I was thinking about all this while I was looking for a nice golf bag and I found one, a really cool red, white and blue patriotic golf bag that I thought was really cool. Then I found a great baseball bat that was all decked out in patriotic colors, and so it went for several hours that day, I had a great visit to the sporting goods store. But I was also thinking about the objectives of those games and how they fit culturally into our society. And also specifically, they have a very unique style of dress for each of them. Something we have culturally come to accept. Except somehow the way I dress on this blog site was considered by some to be politically dangerous, and divisive. But the game of golf wasn’t? Both sports had the object of hitting targets. In shooting there are obviously targets to hit and you are measured by your success or failure in hitting them. And in golf the whole point of the game is to hit the target in as few strokes possible. Where is the problem with guns, other than they have been made politically volatile by a political class that has sought them out for their own purposes? In America guns are a sport like any other sport and I am personally offended that its even an issue.

One of my very good friends, an old radio guy, who was very talented had to completely erase his social media imprint into saving the Republic of America, which he felt very strongly about. But to work for this company they made him make a choice. A six-figure income or he couldn’t be promoted into this new position and as I held that American flag baseball bat I couldn’t help but think of how dangerous that offer really was. I understand the decision he made; he picked the money. A lot of people would. I obviously haven’t. I’ve had similar offers and I picked the blog, my books, my guns and the generalities of my life because in the end those are the things that the people who really matter to me care about. But such a choice should never have to be made, and honestly, we have been stupid as a civilization to let people make such divisiveness over anything, especially among our sports.

A visit to a sporting goods store shows just how rich our American culture is. I’d love to explore them all but unfortunately there is only time for a few of them. However to allow politics to ruin any of them is what I consider reprehensible. To allow a censorship of some with an emphasis on others is a further hypocrisy. Golf especially in the business world is considered a game for upper management, and I can see why. The goals of the game are very similar to those in the business world. Get to the goal in the shortest way possible using the various tools in your golf bag to get there. We don’t think about the people who actually kill other people with golf clubs every year when we play the game even though often the number is higher than with rifles. Yet liberals want to ban rifles and the game of golf is promoted, especially in business as if the two were radically different. But they aren’t different. Both sports, guns and golf are all about hitting targets. Both represent aspects of culture that are valuable and metaphorical, yet one is attacked and one is supported and that standard is very hypocritical.

I think we should enjoy everything, and I do. And I personally resent any judgments cast against me when what I do is part of the sport of shooting. The views that I value about an America that predates this liberal censorship trend that is going on in our media, companies and our politics is dangerous. That it is even considered radical to proudly display a gun rig that I am very proud of is a disgrace. Now if I was in a picture with that new golf bag which would cost about half as much as the gun and the holster rig then the world would be happy. That is not how things should be and it’s a shame we’ve let it become that way. I’m certainly not going to change the way I do things, but it’s a shame that so many people are forced to, just to fulfill a social norm that has been shaped by anti-American forces. It is my assertion that we shouldn’t have such limits.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

No Inflation and a Booming Economy, What’s Not to Like?

Yes Larry Kudlow, no inflation. And everyone was wondering why Facebook was and other social media platforms along with Twitter were starting to ban conservatives. Well, it’s for the same reasons that all banning occurs, it is to continue pretending that things are one way when in all reality they are quite another. Banning people who know otherwise is a feeble attempt to control the flow of information. In this case the United States was set up by a political class that wanted global socialism and was trying to redistribute the wealth of the United States into other countries. And while they were doing it they didn’t want anybody to figure out how the game was really played. Heck, in college economic classes they were teaching this idea that America was on a declining cycle and that everywhere else—such as communist China were on the uptick. But that’s just not the truth. In reality the virtues of capitalism is why America had wealth in the first place and it all it would take to rekindle it would be to give credit, and jobs, where it had been from the beginning. What it would take was a presidential administration who understood the basic economic principles of deregulation, and pro growth management to unlock it, and the Trump administration has certainly done that and the results are obvious. But the biggest number of all isn’t the 3.2 percent rise in the GDP or the addition of 263,000 jobs in April 2019 or even the unemployment rate of 3.6%. The biggest stat of all is that it was all done with no inflation and maintaining the value of the American dollar.

We’re not talking about economic theory here, but statistical facts that have been well-known for many years. But there has been an agenda and most people have been following it in the United States. Most schools teach it, and it has certainly slipped into our mainstream entertainment. The measure of an economy has been to the limit that we measure such things and it has been mixed with all these altruistic causes. In politics the measure of economic success wasn’t in the wealth that economic activity produced, but in how it was distributed. More or less, instead of focusing on the food on the table, the measure has always been on the amount of table scraps that end up on the floor feeding some quadruped tag along. As I’ve pointed out before the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana long ago made up their mind about communist China. They have a whole exhibit they’re preparing the next generation for the ultimate reality, that China would be taking over the United States and that their version of communism would be coming here. Cities like Seattle are already well on their way as well as the states of California and Illinois. That was of course until we elected Donald Trump.

It’s not that Trump was filled with magic or anything. But as a business guy, he understood what the rest of us already knew, that we were being crippled by our politicians to intentionally fail so that the economic effort the world desired at this present time could be filled by European and Asian economies. Personally I have no problem with those economies having a strong presence, but what they have had was artificially created politically. Their gains were United States loses, and it was in America that the economic foundations were created, because that is where the buyer’s markets were generated. But Trump knew better, he was already rich and knew how the sausage was made and was able to attack the economy rather easily. But what was different for him was that he didn’t rely on advisors to guide his thoughts on the matter, like all the previous presidents before him did.

I knew when I was pushing so hard for him during the last election and even standing by Trump over these first contemptuous years in office that the key to his success was his independence from the political class that was well-trained to take America down a dark road letting its wealth along the way so that socialism and communism could be propped up and countries that had done very little by way of economic growth could suddenly be rock stars. As long as the political class was advising top politicians like presidents what could and couldn’t be done, and they listened, the restrictive economic activity could flourish in the grand scheme of it all. There is a similar scam going on in the business world, the world of consultants keep companies from seeing their true growth by fitting their scope of work into confines of established practices. The same with presidential advisors. They would say that you can expand the economy with deregulation, but that there will be a cost, a loss of jobs or you will inflate the dollar. The choices were never you can have this, and this and this, but only that you would have to choose between this or that as if some artificial limitation existed that everyone had to conform to. Only that limit was created by the political class of advisors to satisfy a global vision that they came up with long ago.

I can say I certainly knew better so that was why I supported Trump early on and very enthusiastically, and I still do. All the stuff against Trump has been made up by that political class, for which entertainment is a big part of. And their desire in doing so was to avoid what we are seeing. An economy that has no signs of weakening, its only going up. At some point we will run out of people to do the jobs that are being created, which is why robotics and A.I. are so important to our continued growth. But Trump understood from the very beginning what makes wealth, and it’s not governments. Its people free to go out and create it. I never believed the business cycles that they taught in college, I always felt that growth was a choice not a limit. But we just never had a politician in the White House who understood that. Bush Senior was too interested in global expansion, Clinton was a socialist loving globalist, Bush Jr. was a drunk who tried to make up is lack of knowledge with false bravado and lots of advisors. Obama was a socialist from Indonesia who again was policy driven by advisors, who were also socialists and communists. My favorite, Reagan was an actor who had learned enough about economics to get by, and his policies of deregulation and low taxation created the 80s, which I remember very well, a vibrant, thriving culture. But I always felt we could do better and now under just two years of President Trump, we certainly are—finally.

All those numbers mentioned are good, but the reason the no inflation indicator is so important is that the down players out there—the consultant class—have always said that if you get growth in the modern context that you will spike inflation. Well, that just isn’t true and this quarter shows that. I remain convinced that if we could get all the consultants out-of-the-way, especially those who work in the news industry because they aren’t good enough to do the gig on their own in real life, that we can push our GDP up over 5% and 6%. And others are beginning to see that as well, which is why there is a panic now on social media, a hope that the message can be controlled and people won’t understand just how good the economy is. But it won’t work, that cat is out of the bag and its only going to get better. The momentum is certainly in the favor of Larry Kudlow’s handling of things. Our best days are in front of us and quite frankly I’m very proud to have played my part of it. It certainly wasn’t easy and it pissed off a lot of people. But then again, why did it piss them off? That is the real question that has a rather ominous answer. To that I say “so what.” Enjoy the great economy and everything that comes with it. We deserve in America everything. We should be proud of it, not ashamed. Other countries could have it too, if only they embraced capitalism instead of other failed methods. The evidence is quite clear now.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Socialist Failures in Seattle, and Everywhere Else

I tend to not think of political things as ideology and harmless thoughts cast into the swells of democracy, but in good or bad ideas. A bad idea is not a harmless thing, if a politician gets something wrong, lots of people suffer. People put a lot of faith into the people they elect, which is also a problem. But what they are asking is essentially a representative to conduct management on their behalf, so if they get it wrong and pick a bad manager, then the ramifications can be quite disastrous, so elections and the people who end up elected is no small matter. That is also why I care about these kinds of things so much. It’s not just about ideology and the beliefs that come from such endeavors, it is literally about success or failure. When put to practice you just can’t hide the results of bad ideas which is becoming obvious in American cities that are now overrun by liberal thoughts as conservatives retreated away from the high taxes of city living for the suburbs.

You might remember dear reader when many years ago I covered the election of Kshama Sawant onto the Seattle City Council. That event was notable because she was one of the first politicians in the country to openly call herself a socialist, and to be elected. Up until that point people like me were considered “radical” for even talking about the effects of socialism in our American political system because honestly the enemy was conducting themselves as a Trojan horse and nobody wanted to spook the guards, so they didn’t want anybody talking about it. But I was one who did and I remember covering the election of Sawant and warning everyone what would happen to Seattle.

I turned out to be correct, which doesn’t please me to say. Socialism is bad management and when you spring forth such elements the results will be noticed in the day-to-day conduct of whatever is being managed. Bad ideas do have consequences and the drug abuse, the homelessness and the general impression of the city of Seattle are now dangerously bad. They have real problems in Seattle that are a direct result of electing socialists into their management teams of city management. And now they can no longer live off their former reputations as some of the best cities in the world. Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and many other cities come to mind in following the trajectory of failure that Seattle is currently on, so this isn’t a case of just one city failing. It’s about the failures of a proper management philosophy running the cities and how people suffer as a result.

And I’m not speaking from a vacuum of comfortable midwestern political beliefs developed in the suburbs of a very conservative part of the world. Some ideas work and some don’t, so it’s not a matter of respecting the opinions of people who elected losers like Mayor Catherine Push in Baltimore who has just resigned due to scandal. It’s about electing people who can bring success to a city and avoiding the mistakes. Seattle is an interesting examination because it started with some really good attributes. It has a lot going for it as far as resources, population, and location and that gave it a reputation as being a destination of desire. Until the elements that made it good were taken for granted and socialism parasitically picked away the value of the city and left it a bleeding husk of a previous life. The same could have been said of Detroit, a city where Motown produced some of the greatest music of the modern era, and the big automakers were producing cars the world wanted. Heck, even the Howdy Doody show was produced there. I was surprised to learn while I was doing a television gig in Dayton, Ohio to learn that the studio I was in was the former set of the Phil Donahue Show, which I had thought previously was produced in Hollywood somewhere, or New York. I thought the studio I was in was particularly run down, the part of town was a disaster, so I couldn’t imagine that anything inspiring popular culture the way that show did for a previous generation could have come from such a place. But it didn’t take long for Democrats who were elected to the regional politics to destroy the town, and it was obvious in the crumbling studio.

I’ve traveled to places around the world where the socialist failures are more mature because they had openly embraced socialism much earlier than we had in the United States, places like France for instance. Notice how the investigation into the burning down of Notre Dame has just fizzled into the background. That is because their policy of immigration has destroyed the city of Paris. And why did they turn to immigration as their ultimate fix to most of their problems, well, because their high taxes pushed out all the wealth as France itself has been openly socialist for a long time. That’s not to say that the French people are bad, but only that they had turned toward a failed political philosophy supposedly out of compassion and the results are obvious. To maintain their tax base they opened their doors to immigration and now they can’t support their traditions and have insurgents who are still angry about the First Crusade, and they are activists out for revenge, so the churches around Paris are being desecrated by those angry immigrants who have come from the Middle East. And look what they have done to their cities in Lebanon, and Syria. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Paris is not holding up. Coming out of the train station in Paris from London the first thing I saw was a homeless man threatening to drop a concrete block on the head of another guy as they argued in French at each other some erratic emotional diatribe. They were literally right outside the door to the train station. No police were there to scurry them away to maintain order. Additionally, beggars were everywhere harassing anyone who would listen for a scrap of donation so they could eat. It was a two-mile walk from there to get into the tourist areas where Paris could still be seen.

I also stayed for a time in the English city of Canterbury where my son-in-law is from and saw first hand the homeless problem they have there. You literally have to step over them when walking around the old city which predates Roman occupation. In the name of compassion liberal management has created a situation that produces more people who end up homeless than a city that produces successful people who can actively live life with a real job and contribute to the world around them. In socialism the desire to work hard and have things in life gives way to the human trait of just letting someone else do all the work while the lazy mooch off the results. And some people are so lazy that they will sleep on the sidewalk if they can get just enough food to get by. For them life is so detrimental that they’d rather take drugs to avoid dealing with reality so under socialism they are empowered to yield toward the worst of their natures. And that is how Seattle has been going for a long time now, and the results are showing.

The video above is worth watching. It’s a little over an hour-long but its an honest look at a great American city that is now in decline. But this is not a unique problem to just America, it’s a problem of all socialist management systems and anywhere where it occurs, failure is not far off. When a city is failing it is because of bad management and one thing that is very much proven it’s that socialism in any form brings about failure. And that should be a warning to anybody who is heading in that direction, don’t do it. Because it doesn’t and never will work. Socialism always, 100% of the time leads to failure, even in Scandinavia. The only reason that people like Bernie Sanders don’t see that failure is because they put a fresh coat of paint on it. But if you look just a little under the surface you can see the same failures that are obvious now in Seattle. And it’s not pretty to look at.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Guns and Teachers in Florida, an answer to a problem that won’t go away by itself

It passed the House in Florida with a comfortable vote of 65 to 47 after hours of debate. Now it goes to the desk of the governor, Ron DeSantis to be signed. The bill that has now passed and will become law in Florida is their answer to the long debated question about guns in schools, and now at least their teachers will be able to take a course and qualify to carry guns to protect students which is the ultimate answer to the whole school shooting debate. I personally have never thought it was a debatable situation and have said so in my own school district in Ohio. Guns are the answer to the tendency of violence, not the cause. But just like other aspects of culture that involve liberal input, the government tampering on the matter has created a more dangerous situation, not less of one and the only thing that needed debate was how people are afraid of guns are going to have to deal with a world that made them in the first place, out of necessity. The eradication of guns from society was never an option. Having guns in more places more often is, because of the nature of humanity, which invented them for a reason.

Listening to the debates against guns in schools in Florida was interesting. It was all emotionally driven and largely preprogrammed. The fear based diatribes were not conducive to a proper sentiment. In essence, we know from trial and error that we cannot trust the government network to protect us, and that includes police, firefighters, FBI agents, the military—if given the opportunity to fail, they often will. As it is true that we do hire those types of people for our government the truth is that they are often too slow to react or when they do, they don’t have enough skin in the game to act properly. So when there is the potential for danger, those with the most to lose and who are at the heart of a matter should be armed with deadly force so that they can protect whatever threat might come about. It’s a perfectly logical element to a problem that permeates human thought, the temptation to abuse other people for failures of others.

During the recent California synagogue attack by a nineteen-year-old kid it was a border patrol agent who was in attendance who was able to put a stop to the rampage and thwart the advance of terrorism, otherwise a lot more people would have died. There is no way to deal with mass shootings but to confront them at the point of the attack. Waiting for a 911 response simply isn’t an option. Violence has to be confronted, not avoided, and the fantasy that guns can be removed from society and that therefore opportunities for attackers to conduct themselves in such violent ways will be diminished, is simply a false hope evolved under a premise of utopia that is grounded in reality as a fantasy story. Guns are not the villains; they are the answer to villainy.

As everyone knows I have a long history with public schools and feeling that the teachers are overpaid and are dangerous in what they teach our children. But I have been willing to say that I’d support pay increases for teachers in my school district in Ohio if they are willing to carry guns while on the job, and taking on that extra responsibility. That would prevent mass shootings. It may not prevent the intent to violence, but it could minimize the impact such as what happened at that California synagogue. When the danger erupts a person comfortable with a gun needs to be there to confront the attacker. And in essence, that is the only logical answer. Nothing else will work, not metal detectors, not more school security because like the police, it’s just a job and that doesn’t always promise that in a tenuous situation, they will act properly—and certainly not more gun laws. The reliance on more centralized authority, which is always the liberal perspective gives precisely the opposite result. Only people who are highly motivated to solve a problem like that, who are in that life and death situation can really be trusted to act in their own self-interest. And when they do, they need a gun to perform that task. It was out of protecting self-interest that guns were invented in the first place and why they are such an important part of American culture.

Schools and places of worship, or any place where would be attackers know that people do not have guns are made so much more dangerous by the insistence that gun restrictions be present. Anywhere that a lot of people conduct themselves, guns should be frequent. To my experience even at bars and nightclubs, people who become gun owners don’t go around trying to shoot everyone. Guns require discipline and those who learn to use them become better people not worse in the exchange. Most of these young attackers such as end up in these school and synagogue shootings do not have that background. Even in a bar fight it’s not the NRA supporters who pull out a gun and start firing. Using guns tends to make people more responsible, not less. So gun owners are less prone to suddenly become a lunatic while at such places. More guns are better for society, not the other way around. Most gun owners who carry are by default much more careful about engaging in a conflict with another person because they are aware they are carrying deadly force and that responsibility tends to regulate irresponsible behavior. Even for that driver who cuts you off at an intersection and they give you the finger in anger provoking you. Gun carriers tend to blow it off because they know that they have the ability to control the situation and that self-assuredness brings about a much more mature outcome.

The problems occur when you take away that natural tendency and replace it with government enforcement which not even they want. The responsibility for good conduct needs to fall somewhere and experience tells us that people who carry guns tend to be the type of people who will take responsibility for a situation quicker than waiting for a centralized authority to respond to danger. So in all public places guns are the answer to less violence. Not fewer guns and more government authority. The difficult things for liberals to admit to themselves is that more government isn’t the answer. More cops in schools, more people to work security who might end up paying union dues for their job at a metal detector—those are not options because they cost too much and they do nothing to solve the problem. We’ve seen it too often, when gun fire does erupt, cops aren’t always willing to throw themselves in front of the bullets. To some of them, often a ratio that is not acceptable, it’s just a job to them and like the cops in Parkland Florida, they run and hide like everyone else. But not everyone is like that, some people are naturally inclined to leadership and those are the people we want carrying guns, everywhere. And its good to see that Florida is moving in that direction. Maybe the rest of the country will get it and follow before more school shootings occur.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Yes, I like the $2 Trillion Idea of an Infrastructure Plan–but only on one condition

I personally don’t have a problem with the proposed 2 trillion-dollar infrastructure conversation that President Trump had with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. In the great chess game, it shows bipartisan effort and puts the need on the table for discussion the way it should be. The problem I do have is who and how we pay for such a thing with our current debts well into the 20 trillions now. However, we are the best economy in the world. The United States is the destination of hope for the world, so our roads, bridges and other aspects of infrastructure should reflect those attributes. When you land at an airport anywhere in America, it should be more like Orlando and less like La Guardia—which is to say—a tired old arm pit well past the need for care. Orlando is vibrant and new, reflective of the massive wealth generated there by tourism. La Guardia reflects the results of socialism that have crept into the New York area over the years.

I know a lot of politicians and it continues to be a common occurrence that they ask me to run for something in my local community, because they know professionally that I am good at what I do, especially in the context of management. They know as do I that most of government ends up with the worst manager types that our human civilization produces. Mostly they are idiots who couldn’t manage a McDonald’s let along $200 to $500 million in annual sales. For me the private sector is a lot more rewarding, especially if you don’t care about the thrill of winning a popularity contest every four years or so. That kind of thing isn’t for everyone, so we tend to do what we are good at, and politics formally is not one of my dreams. And I’m certainly not alone in that, many feel just as I do. A nice lady just a few days ago asked when I was running for president and I simply told her that I viewed politics as a possible retirement job. I’m still young, so I wouldn’t dream of such a thing at my age. Maybe when I’m in my 70s or 80s. But not now. And in that regard, I can certainly understand Donald Trump who did exactly that. He made the presidency his retirement job. There is far more power in building an economy than in managing the table scraps that are taken from it in the form of government. And government doesn’t build economies. People do.

Thinking of the $2 trillion price tag for Trump’s infrastructure plan makes sense if the culture that is paying the bill has something above a 6% quarterly growth of GDP, which I think is very possible. We are at just under 4% right now with the Trump deregulation and tax cuts that have been initiated. Getting barriers from holding back our economy is the way to get to those kinds of numbers. If growth is paying down the national debt and covering infrastructure, then so be it. I’m happy to indulge. But the bad management of particularly the Democrat party likely just won’t get their arms around that kind of utilization of resources and their way of paying for it will likely include higher taxes and more regulation which will kill any such bill in the Senate until after the 2020 election.

I personally think we can get to over 10% GDP growth if regenerative medicine, hyperloop technology and the commercialization of space are unleashed over the next three years. New markets emerging with explosive job growth, that will far outpace the supply of human labor are the only ways to really pay for $2 trillion in improved infrastructure and those opportunities are before us right now. The human capital problem isn’t really an issue either as robots and artificial intelligence is coming about to fill many of those jobs in the expanding economy. Yes, we’ll continue to have low unemployment, but there will still be millions of jobs created that have to be filled by something, and robotics will be the answer, even if that makes traditional market watchers anxious.

All the ingredients are there to make a 2 trillion-dollar investment into American infrastructure, the problem is who manages all this, the government or the private sector? You don’t get to that kind of growth with more government. You only get there with more market expansion from the private sector. As I said, government tends to bring about the worst managers that there are. The good managers stay in the private sector, unless like in Trump’s case, they are doing the job as a retirement gig. I know personally how much effort goes into the management of industrial resources and in my vast experience with government types, they ain’t doing it. So that is the problem, not in having the ability to do it, but who will do it. This is essentially why socialism always fails. The current situation in Venezuela is just such an example. We are supporting as the United States the removal of a communist, but what will replace him is a socialist, so the people of Venezuela don’t really have a shot at any kind of good government in the foreseeable future. And their culture has run off all the great intellectual aptitude by way of management because government has long ago taken over their industries leaving inept people to run those companies into the ground for nobody’s benefit.

That vast stupidity is also reflected in Joe Biden’s presidential race announcement where he stated that the labor unions built the middle class. Biden is a great example of a government type who is a terrible manager. He doesn’t have even basic understandings of cause and effect and is therefore paralyzed into making even fundamental management decisions. Any CEO of a major company could do his job but Biden could not run even a small company with a staff of ten people, because he doesn’t understand the basics of a management concept. For most in government their entire management plan is to take more in the form of taxes and spend it on their promises they made to get elected. But they never understand that their interference in tax collection halt the growth of an economy, so they are perpetually looking to blame someone, anyone for their failures, just as bad managers in any field do often.

In its current form this infrastructure plan will die in the House and Trump will be able to say he at least listened. But between you and me dear reader I’d actually like to see it happen. Not with Democrats running the House of course, but it would be good to push for 8% to 10% GDP growth in emerging technologies and to see those improvements end up in our roads and bridges. I like shiny new things as much as anybody, but it can’t be built off debt, it needs to be built and reflective of actual growth. If that’s what it takes to get the $2 trillion into those projects, I am happy to support it. Excited even. But the basic assumptions of management must be considered, government isn’t capable. The only thing they can do to help make that happen is to get out of our way.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.