Category: Creative Writing

The Good Government of Lakota Schools: Yes, elections do have consequences

Lakota is Off to a Great Start

Sometimes we get to talk about good things, which this article is one of them. The first Lakota school board meeting of 2022 was an excellent example of a good government. Over the years, I’ve watched thousands of hours of school board meetings, not just at Lakota, but from all over the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and I will have to say that this particular meeting which is included below, is perhaps the best one that I have seen. It was good, of course, to see that Lynda O’Conner was again President of the Board. But what made the meeting so good, aside from how smoothly Lynda transitioned from topic to topic, was the additions of the newly elected Republican endorsed members, Isaac Adi, who was designated already as the Vice-President, and the freedom representative Darbi Boddy. I was very impressed with those two new additions and the kind of questions. As they learn the job, if they can keep up with that level of engagement, Lakota will be very successful in the years to come. That is precisely how government should work. Not everyone will get along. But I will say that the attention to everyone in the room was outstanding, constructive, and conducive to conversation that leads to problem-solving, and that is fantastic. In all these government schools, chaos has been ruling for a long time, and those elements of chaos are indeed circling the campfire of that Lakota board meeting, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so they can feast. But I have a feeling, especially knowing the personalities of these new school board members, that the chaos will wear out before they do. Good to see!

Of course, most of these meetings are never very sexy. For instance, a school board member like Darbi, that ran on a platform of national concern and parent transparency, will find that she might only get to spend 5% of her time on the topics she cares most about. Most of the meetings will be votes on boring issues, like application fees for substitute teachers or the latest call-offs of the bus drivers. These may seem like small, inconsequential things, but there is good work to be done on all of them, and that is usually where school board candidates get bored and start to tune out. But in watching Darbi and Isaac, it is clear that they are going into the job with the right frame of mind. They are keeping their important campaign promises in focus while they also indulge themselves in the job’s nuances and extract value out of the tiniest little bits. It’s not always the big sexy things that determine the success or failure of a school district; it’s the thousands of little things that lead up to the big things, and if those get dealt with, with the enthusiasm that Isaac and Darbi showed on this first meeting, the 20th meeting will be much, much better and so will Lakota and all the participants in the district. 

For instance, as an example of tiny details that are of paramount importance, Superintendent Matt Miller gave an update to the Covid situation, the bussing call-offs, and the general below-the-line problems of managing hundreds of employees, where generally 5% of any work culture will use any excuse to call off work, excused. Covid has created a situation where those types of people are empowered to call off perpetually, without any recourse. Of course, the teacher’s union loves this problem because it benefits them, and Matt gave his summary in a manner where he felt like a victim of circumstance. The district’s management had been taken out of the Board’s hands and placed at the alter of the  Butler County Department of Health, and the union had a free pass to call off work as much as they could. Obviously, the way to break up this labor impasse would be to have plenty of substitute teachers ready to call at a moment’s notice to keep classes moving. But as we learned, there is a government fee within the county of more than $125 just to apply to be a substitute teacher. This was revealed in the meeting by a bright personality named Alicia Davis, who wants to be part of a solution to the staffing shortages but needs help getting through the bureaucracy of government to get to where the need is. There are likely thousands of young women just like Alicia who are willing and able to cover that 5% call-off ratio. However, obviously, the fee is a problem, a discouraging one. If anybody wanted to solve the problem, it would be wise for Lakota to find a way to cover the fee, get the applicant, and ultimately the resource. That may seem like a little thing, but little things lead to big things. 

For instance, the next time a labor contract comes up for a vote. Teachers want to be collectively paid more money and are threatening to walk; if Lakota has a bunch of sharp-witted volunteers waiting to be called into class to teach to keep the schools open, then that network would already be established. When I talked about chaos ruling these schools, this is one of the ways it happens. A superintendent like Matt is trying to navigate all the rules and regulations and finds himself reacting to everything over time. The Board needs to give him proactive solutions to these problems that also pave the way for possible labor strikes from the teacher’s union at the slightest provocation. If they decide to leave work and management has the task of keeping the school open, what else could be done. The chaos is caused by the high cost and bureaucracy of becoming a substitute teacher; the $125 usually scares off most applicants because they couldn’t afford to pay it for a part-time job they may not get much return on the investment from. So, the vacancies go unfulfilled, and solutions are never presented to the labor problem leaving the school a victim to the labor force that can be very politically active at times.   I would say that Lakota is a great place to live because of people like Alicia, not because of any measure of labor that might be employed at any given time. Good parents make good kids, and good kids make a good school. The purpose of government, in this case, is to remove those barriers, not to throw $125 roadblocks up to feed chaos. But to remove chaos from the management process because in chaos is where many lost dollars disappear.

But there will be time for more of that kind of talk for later. For now, I’m just happy to see an actual, functioning school board that has the look and feel of real management. I’m sure there will be trouble, but the measure of good management is how well that trouble is handled, and by the looks of Lynda, Darbi, and Isaac, everything is off to a great start, and it is very encouraging to start the year off. This school board meeting was the kind of school board I have been hoping for, for over 30 years. And although it’s only one, the obvious signs of future success are there for all to see. There is an excellent reason to be excited, and I am. Perhaps things will get better, and that all starts with elections because they have consequences.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Biden DOJ Runs Cover for the Facebook Case: Attempting to hide election fraud proof behind Section 230 government protection

Biden DOJ is Working to Hide the Election Fraud Committed by Facebook

I think it’s the most significant thing that happened this past week, the third week of January 2022. Perhaps you didn’t hear about it on the news. Well, that’s because it’s not a very sexy story. And it’s also one of those situations where the media are still prostitutes to Zuckerbucks and other billionaires who tampered with the election of 2020 with media buyouts. A lot of people have been using Facebook for years, that’s how they communicate with their grandmas in the Midwest or their long-lost high school friends, and they can’t bring themselves to the reality of just what an evil company it is and how treasonous their behavior was during the last election. Remember all those people in the media who always preface election fraud talk by saying, “there is absolutely no evidence of election fraud?” Well, those are Zuckerbucks talking, not the actual evidence. The truth is a year out from that election and the inauguration of Joe Biden (or rather the insertion), there is a lot of evidence, and the Biden people know it. And it’s getting out rather fast. The story this week that I referred to that is so important is that the day after the Senate denied a break in the filibuster bill to allow for the federal takeover of our elections, Biden’s DOJ (Department of Justice) moved on the Trump case against Big Tech, specifically Facebook to insert itself in the grand cover-up. The admission of election fraud is in their actions, but Biden has no choice. Suppose the case continues forward, as the America First Policy Institute projects it. In that case, the discovery process will reveal a direct violation of Section 230, a law passed to protect internet companies in 1996, and a very unconstitutional assault against Americans with direct collaboration between government and Facebook to cheat in the 2020 election and insert a favored candidate, their Joe Biden and remove our President Trump. That is kind of a bad thing any way you look at it. 

On that same day, January 20th, Facebook moved to dismiss the case Trump has against them on merits, hoping that the courts will relieve them of the embarrassment coming their way in court. But it’s getting pretty hot, and the Biden Department of Justice can’t afford for the case to continue, so the insertion of the DOJ is a gross abuse of power, but one that they can’t afford not to use. But they are using it to tell the world everything they need to know. We all know by now that the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democrats working with the FBI planted the seeds to hide the real conspiracy, China, China, China. China had been working with the Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google for ultimate government censorship, and many paid-off politicians were willing to go along with it for the paycheck. While we were looking at Russia, the real scam was being played in China by the real criminals. And Facebook was at the center of it. They invested nearly half a billion dollars in influencing the results of the 2020 election, with Mark Zuckerberg himself getting involved in keeping the radicals of his company appeased. After all, it was their stated goal, and those of Google, which were published and are out there for all to see, to remove Trump from office during the next election cycle. They planned to use their Big Tech platform to hide behind Section 230 government protection, to alter an election.

That’s all bad enough, but the real issue with the Big Tech lawsuit that the DOJ is trying to protect Biden and Facebook from is the direct collaboration of a company hiding behind Section 230 to insert an American president in the White House. That is a terrible thing. Especially legally. In this case, the government and Facebook are very vulnerable, which is why Facebook is seeking to dismiss the case. They can’t afford what will come out due to the discovery process. We know that the conspiracy occurred between the government and Big Tech because of what they did regarding Covid-19 over the same period. The collusion happened; all that has to be proven is that it happened during the election in a way that tilted the scales toward a specific candidate, Joe Biden, in this case.

Additionally, this has been chronicled in several books, most arguably, Molly Hemmingway’s book Rigged, which lays the case of Big Tech collusion during the election out in a very reliable manner. It would not be difficult to present that same evidence and more in court, which is why the DOJ is seeking to insert itself to protect the defendants out of desperation. How is that for an admission? If this were a formal interrogation under any other circumstance, we would say that the target is about to “crack.” 

As the AFPI stated in response to the movement by the DOJ, “the fact that President Biden’s DOJ has filed a Motion to Intervene in this case, involving the censorship of a sitting United States President, tends to indicate the two are working in concert with one another to censor specific people and messages. When Congress passed Section 230 in 1996, it was intended to be used as a tool to help internet companies compete in the new global marketplace — it is now used as a shield that enables Facebook and others to violate America’s most basic right to free speech — it is time to demand accountability.” In other words, the Section 230 abuse is the dagger that will bring all these losers down. All the other noise coming out of Washington, including the January 6th Commission, is just part of the cover-up to keep people’s minds busy on other things, so they don’t see the massive evidence of voter fraud that is building up on this case, and the complicity of the DOJ to try to sabotage the case in the courts before it is too late.   

I would argue that it’s already too late. This move by the Biden DOJ doesn’t surprise me at all. We are dealing with criminals here, as defined by the Constitution. They are guilty of treason, sedition, and terrorism. What the government has done with Covid as a means to attempt to hide these other crimes with literal fear of death has been far worse than anything a terrorist organization around the world has done to America. Our own government has been caught tampering with viruses to make bioweapons out of them in partnership with China, giving them perpetual leverage over our nation indefinitely, a terrible strategic decision. But never forget, at the heart of all the chaos is this court case, the proof that there was election fraud, that Biden is not the legitimate president, and that many in our government are guilty of heinous crimes of treason, then used sheer intimidation including abuse of the DOJ to avoid prosecution. We are dealing with bad people here, and they have been caught in the act of committing these crimes. And their only backstop is the DOJ, hoping to prevent justice from occurring at all. But that’s not how this ends; justice is coming for them, and not even the Department of Justice can protect Biden’s administration and Facebook from the truth. They crossed the line of law by a lot, and now they’ll have to pay for what they did. And they don’t have a right to obfuscate justice in our nation for their own preservation. They committed the crime, and now time will do them in. And they deserve it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How To Make a Two-Party System Work: We are a Republic, not a flea-bitten “democracy”

We are a Republic

Every time I hear some political ignoramus say that we need to “save our democracy,” it is like someone scratching a chalkboard. All this “dagger into democracy” talk is as stupid as stupid gets. We are not a “democracy” in America; we are a “republic.” We are a government “of” the people, not “by” the people. But we are taught in every way of life imaginable that everything is a popularity contest, especially in our public schools. That majority rule, and if you are not in the majority, then you will never rule. Well, when we talk about the majority, we are talking about every drug addict, every sex-starved lunatic, every illiterate fool, ever degenerate imaginable. If we only consider popular elections by a majority, then always the dumbest will rule the smartest, and our society will indeed be equal, equally deficient. So it is no wonder that people get frustrated with politics when they see the system not working. They show up once every four years and vote for some people, and ultimately, those people let them down, then they get discouraged with the two-party system. At the same time, the media drives home the point they learned in their public educations, that democracy is all about the popular rule and that the only way to achieve fairness is to punt everything to a much more centralized government to sort out. This is especially true now where people can see that the party system isn’t working for them, Democrats are off doing the work of outright communism, and Republicans seem to be fighting Trump, a natural outgrowth of the Tea Party movement. People who don’t pay much attention to politics are obviously frustrated because, for some reason or another, they thought they could show up and vote every so often, and that would be the end of it. The world would just carry on and work.

But what I say to all those who want to disparage the two-party system, or who get upset when parts of their chosen party look bad and don’t represent a majority of the people associated with that party, is that the time to work out those elements is always in the off-year elections. For instance, right now, in the early months of a New Year, 2022 is the time for the philosophy of the Republican Party to be worked out in the trenches. The primary season is upon us, and that is when candidates battle each other for the general philosophy of the party. I would say that the system works great as a two-party system so long as people participate. You may not get everything you want in the candidates. I’m hardly ever happy with where things are, but if you don’t participate, then your point of view will never get a seat at the table.   After all, this is what’s going on in the Republican Party right now and what Democrats have continued to fail to match. The news analysts think that Trump is an extreme version of the Republican Party when he is a natural outgrowth of the Tea Party movement that has become more involved in party politics starting at the central committee levels, voting in primaries, and other off-year activities. The establishment types aren’t happy about it, but that representation grew over time from the Tea Party into MAGA and the American First Policy Institute. Democrats have incorrectly assumed that Trump was just an extreme right-winged version of the establishment, so they have tried to counter with their own version, where the Biden administration is now, representing the radical progressives, giving them a voice they have never had before. The progressives took this admission as a mandate, and as a result, they have over-extended themselves.    

To a political outsider not participating in these processes, and looking at presidential elections as the only ones that matter, they will see disfunction because the system is not working the way they were taught, through popular vote, only every so often. But in a republic, we are a nation of laws, not the mob. And those laws are created during off-year elections, not presidential elections every four years. Right now is the prime time to work out the general philosophy of a political party, and if you are not engaged in that debate, you should never be surprised when you are not represented in the final product. But even if you do participate, there are other people involved, and their minds have their inputs, so what you end up with will ultimately not be 100% you.   But at that point, you can’t just pick up all your game pieces and cry like a baby and leave. You have to continue to fight it out, to push for your ideas, and let come what may. That is what a republic looks like. Politics is not supposed to be nice. It is supposed to be contentious so that only the best ideas survive into law and policy. The whims of mankind are meant to be tempered with time and a lack of tenacity. If you want a friend, get a dog. If you’re going to be the master of your own universe, stay at home and never go outside. But if you want your republic to function, participate. When people disagree with you, strengthen your argument to win them over or have your ideas crushed under the weight of analysis. But don’t think for a second that your vote is a one-and-done kind of relationship at the ballot box. There is a lot more to it, and our republic requires people to participate all the time. Not just when it comes time to vote. 

China keeps talking about how efficient they are, and of course, big bureaucrats in Washington D.C. culture want to have the same kind of control that communism gives to those countries. They want to rule by administrative state, so they throw gas on the fires all the time about the follies of our current political process.   Of course, when the government can just tell people what to do, it’s a lot less messy for them. China’s present argument is that “American Democracy” is too messy, too slow, and does not serve the “people’s” needs. They would love to see an end to the two-party system. They love to say things like, “we’re putting daggers into our democracy.” They want to plant that seed and watch it grow into a change state from a capitalist nation into a communist one. If they can convince voters that the system doesn’t work, they may be willing to throw it all away for something that does. But it’s not our republic that is failing; it’s the people participating. Because of their lack of effort, the strength of the two-party system doesn’t get fulfilled the way it should, and the people who end up in charge are the worst because they were the only ones who showed up.   That is clearly the problem with Democrats. Republicans had the Tea Party, and the establishment is very unhappy about their continued presence, but Republicans have a much better party as a result. But punting to default and saying that none of it works is just a falsehood. The only thing not working are people who have been taught wrong from the beginning what their proper role in government always was. And how much influence they really have for the future of our “republic.”

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Monopoly on Violence: Elon Musk sees it, and soon will the rest of the world

The Government’s Monopoly on Violance

Elon Musk has said it in a couple of interviews toward the end of the year since Time Magazine has made him “Man of the Year,” that government has a lot of problems. He thinks that government should be a referee on the field but not a player in the game. And he has continued to say that one of the biggest problems with the government is that they have a “monopoly on violence.” I first heard these comments from him during a Wall Street Journal interview at a yearly think tank kind of thing they do in Washington D.C.  Then again, shortly after that, at a surprise sit down with the Babylon Bee, the online satire website. Many of us have been saying things like that for a long time. Elon Musk is obviously having an evolution as he runs his two major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, with the challenges of government regulation and global commerce that is trying desperately to move toward Chinese communism. The difference is that Musk cannot be canceled for saying what he does because he is at the front of the train on virtually everything. Actually, at a recent Joe Biden EV Summitt, Musk wasn’t invited, even though Tesla is undoubtedly the most important player when it comes to the electric car market. But instead of it looking bad on Musk, it blew up in the face of Biden, like everything does these days. So for Musk to say things about the government that are consistent with Tea Party positions over the last decade is quite a thing and certainly an indicator of things to come. When people like Musk are critiquing government correctly, many mainstreamers want the overflow of his money who will by default see things his way.

And isn’t that the heart of the problem with the government, that government has a monopoly on violence? That is precisely why they naturally are inefficient in everything they do because they never have to worry about someone calling them out as the big bullies. Or at least, that’s what they have assumed for a long time. That is why they feel they can start riots all over the country during 2020, trying to use racism to blame the Trump supporters for the unrest they created, but their real intent was to remove President Trump from office. But then when people went to Washington, a quarter-million people, to hear Trump give one of his final speeches and the frustrations spilled over into a mob at the Capitol building, the government felt it could arrest the participants and hold them in jail for some undetermined time ignoring completely any due process along the way. They also thought they could shoot Ashley Babbitt for no real reason and that there would be no recourse for their reckless actions. They felt they could arrest the participants of the January 6th, 2021 demonstration without any real just cause because of their monopoly on violence. In that case, they could have arrested people in all the mobs previously that were incited by the government, including on Inauguration Day in 2017 when President Trump was sworn in. The damage to Washington D.C. and other places was much more severe on that day, but as we have seen over the last several years, the government picks what it wants to enforce and abandons all laws when it’s not convenient to them. 

Then we have the FBI, which I have been talking about for a while now as one of the most corrupt law enforcement branches we have these days. They are obviously radical from top to bottom. They are not only corrupt at the top floor of the FBI in Washington. The revelations in the Whitmer case in Michigan prove that several FBI agents were involved in a set up of the Wolverine Watchmen, where several agents had penetrated the group and were trying to inspire them into criminal activity. Like it looks, they did on January 6th. The ideas for violence weren’t coming from the militia groups themselves, but from the FBI trying to plant ideas for violence to cause an action that they could then arrest people for entrapment. The corruption in the FBI is at the top level, the middle level, and certainly in every field office.

I know people who are in the FBI. I also know people in the Secret Service. Over the years, many people have worked for me who move off into these fields, and good for them. We always need people to do these jobs; like Elon Musk says, we do need referees to help keep the game honest. But we don’t need the government playing the game.   And when it comes to law enforcement, a badge doesn’t make a good person. Many people who have left me for some federal job I wouldn’t trust with a box of rocks, it’s not that they aren’t good people or were good employees. Yes, without good leadership around them, they go corrupt quickly, almost every time. I would never permit them to arrest people on fake FISA warrants in the middle of the night. What I have heard from the FBI, especially regarding their actions against President Trump, does not surprise me. And for what they have been caught in at the highest levels, you have to logically conclude that they are doing much worse where they never thought they’d get caught. 

Corruption in federal law enforcement, even localized law enforcement, comes from one common source when the government thinks that they have a right to inflict violence on you. Still, you are never allowed to give it back to them, so we have created a corrupt legal system. When power is given to anybody without some measure of regulation, that power will undoubtedly go to their heads. One of those employees I spoke about who used to work for me became a local cop. He was always good for me; he was a model employee. But without me, he spun out of control quickly, and soon he was pulling over carloads of young girls and scaring them with threats of jail and traffic tickets that they didn’t want their parents to find out about. So he and his fellow officers would force the girls to perform oral sex on them to get out of trouble. And it worked most of the time until someone finally came forward and reported what had been happening. By nature, no matter who it is, authority over others will corrupt everyone. The best measure against it is to remove any monopoly of violence. In our brilliant constitutional republic, we do have a measure of addressing that very issue, the Second Amendment. The only reason we have any sense of justice in America is because of gun rights. The government would have gone wrong beyond repair years ago without those gun rights. What’s terrible about these last few years is that the government has gone further in corruption than ever before because of the Trump election of 2016. They were so insulted that people would vote for someone like Trump that they have turned toward their monopoly on violence to commit some significant constitutional crimes, including what they have done with Covid. We will be sorting out that mess for many years to come, but the crimes were, and continue to be, reprehensible. But good things are happening, and when people like Elon Musk are where many of us have been for a long time, positive changes are on the horizon. And in this case, talking about the problem is the first step in fixing it. We no longer have the assumption that we can trust these government authorities. Left alone, they are prone to corruption at every level, and it is from there, we must take action to correct it in the future.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jared Schmeck is Just the Beginning: Americans are better than anybody in the world at sticking it in the eye of authority

Jared Schmeck is a real American

Of course, the Democrats support the filibuster change in the senate. Biden knows he didn’t win the election and that none of the Democrats will win anything in the Midterms. Democrats are not the majority in America. They know it, and voting proves it. They can only hide their extreme minority opinion by cheating in elections. So for them, it is a nail in their coffin to contemplate tighter controls on future elections. They have convinced us to open up the voting dates and voter ID parameters, but that has proven to be a disaster. And after 2020, of course, voting rights will have to be much more tightly controlled. There will never be another election in America where the entire nation openly accepts the results.

Democrats have been pushing their luck for decades on vote cheating, and this time they just went too far. A certain amount of cheating in places like Philadelphia and Detroit were give-ins that we put up with to get along with Democrats. But never again, after what happened in the middle of the night, where “someone” stopped vote counting in five critical states after Vegas had called the race for Trump around 10 PM on election night, will our society ever go back to what it was. When we all woke up on election day, we were told that Joe Biden was going to win and that massive leads in Pennsylvania would be erased for Trump and that we were going to like it. Take it, or take it, the media told us. We had no other choice. Our country’s corporations had taken over our government, and they were letting us know that we had no choice but to go along if we wanted to get along. Because they didn’t care really what we thought about it, they were taking our government from us.

That’s why it didn’t surprise me in the least to hear Jared Schmeck tell Biden on Christmas Eve, “Let’s Go Brandon.” As incompetent as the Biden administration is, and to not screen their calls any better than they did during a call to promote Santa Clause, Trump supporters got a different kind of Christmas present from a young dad and Trump supporter. The “Let’s Go Brandon” rally call has been fuming all through 2021 and epitomized the thoughts of a majority of Americans. More than 75 million people voted for Trump, more than any political figure in history. It all started at a NASCAR event where fans made television cameras nearby know their feelings about Joe Biden. Of course, the camera crew could hear what the crowd was saying, “F, Joe Biden.” But the news reporter stated on camera, even as we could listen to it for ourselves, that the crowd was saying, “Let’s Go, Brandon.” As the election results of 2020 and the panic over Covid continued, most Americans can see the con game in real-time because they are free to think about such things. Here was a group of people saying obviously one thing, but the media said that it was something completely different. So to reflect that paradox, among disenfranchised Trump voters, “Let’s Go Brandon” has become a thing to remember the ridiculousness and corruption of our political system in general and our media culture that is obviously controlled by a corporate narrative that thinks they are actually in control of our government through soft money, dark money, all kinds of money. And that our Constitution to them is meaningless. 

I think we all understand the problems of our government, but this illusion that the media has created over the years is kind of like holiday dinners where you put up with loved ones who may have fallen off the wagon over the years. Usually, our dealings with them are short. Once they leave, we don’t have to deal with them for another year, and everyone goes back to their own little worlds. That is how this massive corruption has managed to take hold the way it has. That is why all the cheaters of the 2020 election thought they would get away with it. Suddenly the undesirables weren’t just stopping by for Christmas dinner; they wanted to come over for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July too. They were sticking themselves into our lives in ways that crossed the line. And people weren’t happy about it. I thought hard about it after the election. I was so thoroughly pissed off that my wife and I packed up our RV and traveled the country extensively through the year. I was pleased to meet many, many, many people like Jared Schmeck. They were at every gas station, restaurant, and rest stop from Cincinnati to Idaho and all the way to the border with Mexico. My wife and I went to all those places in the heart of America to get to know if we still really had a free country to live in. If the people living in the country really still believed in the Constitution.

As it turned out, I wondered after all our trips if anybody had actually voted for Joe Biden. He certainly didn’t get the number of votes that the election results showed. Democrats had cheated massively, and they had been caught. And even with all their tightly controlled messaging, so many people hated Biden that spillover into something like that Christmas Eve Santa call with Jared Schmeck was bound to happen. There are millions of people like Jared out there. The media has tried to ignore them and cover everywhere that they aren’t. But, because of the incompetency of the lying Biden administration, that is becoming impossible to do.

I was listening to that call live. My home is a nerve center of monitoring whatever is going on in culture for people who know me. I usually have my reading chair in my living room that has four points of media coming to me at all times, not counting the large television we have there, which is always watching something from football games to movies. At that station, I monitor podcasts, videos through the computer, audiobooks, all types of information, all at the same time. Then in my gun workshop, I have an additional three inputs that are always playing. That way, I don’t miss anything as I move around my home. So I was listening to the Biden call with Jared as it happened. I even turned down the other inputs to hear it as it started to sound like something that was about to fall apart for Biden.

When it did, of course, I laughed pretty hard for a long time. Not only was it funny that the Biden’s were clueless and incompetent even to allow the call to happen in the first place, but that the spirit of America was very alive at that moment. Even with all the media manipulation that is going on, the censorship, the threats from the left toward violence, Americans can stick it in the eye of authority better than anybody on planet earth. Here it was happening in quite a spectacular way on Christmas Eve, a year after the misery of the 2020 elections made it look like all was hopeless. It was far from hopeless, and we see that in people like Jared Schmeck. The media wants to think of him as unusual. But he’s not. Actually, I learned this year that he is pretty common, more so than all the Democrats put together. And it is that which they know too, which scares them the most. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Thing I Received for Christmas: Todd Minniear in Liberty Township

I Got Todd Minniear for Christmas

Another question that comes up always after Christmas, mainly out of obligations of small talk, is what did you get for Christmas?  Was it all worth it?  Did you have a good Holiday?  Well, for me, this year, I did have a great Holiday.  But it wasn’t just family gift exchanges that I enjoyed.  Just a few days before Christmas, at the Liberty Township Building just down the road from my house, Todd Minniear was sworn in as my next trustee, one of three.  He is the product of a series of off-year elections where constitutional conservatives were targeted for election to either replace liberals or offer a more conservative candidate aside from the ones traditionally provided.  For me, it was quite a nice Christmas present to have Todd give me a call and invite me to his swearing-in, which I went to and was greeted there with a kind of class reunion from the various campaigns of 2021, and it was nice to see all that hard work come to some positive culmination.  I say it all the time, if you want a good government, then put good people in it. Don’t just sit on the couch and hope things work out alright.  Either run yourself for an office locally or support someone who wants to.  After the Trump presidency, that was certainly my story where obvious political shenanigans to remove him from office took place.   The audacious behavior of the national establishment is something I’ve seen plenty of times locally, over thirty years.  And the election of Todd Minniear, a constitutional and freedom-minded purist, was a significant achievement in my community and was a sign of things to come nationally. 

Another thing I say all the time to just about everyone I speak with is, “don’t be a victim.” Never allow yourself to be a victim in the story of your own life.  Those people we put into elected positions in our republic are never supposed to be our “betters” or some useless member of an aristocracy.  They are there to represent us.  But that’s not the way the political class views that relationship.  Often, they get into public office for the attention of it and the power that follows by having their hands on the levers of rules and regulations that govern our lives.  In the case of a local trustee, the question is often, “can I build a new pole barn on my property to hold my classic car.” The politicians usually will reply, “but think about the lowered property values of the community.  They don’t need to be penalized because you want to protect some gas-guzzling old car that should be on the junk heap, according to the United Nations.” They don’t say that they often work to protect the interests of those who give them campaign donations to keep them in power instead of representing all the community’s people all the time. I’ve been involved in politics in some way or another all of my adult life, and I have seen all the kinds of corruption that can come out of it, all the ugly stuff.  And I understand entirely how that corruption comes about and how to fix it.  The solution is to follow the Constitution of the nation and our state.  If everyone did that, things would work pretty well.  When politicians get away from the constitutions and bring their personal desires or biases to an issue, that’s where corruption starts.  

I don’t think any politician gets into a public office with the idea of becoming corrupt.  They get that way because they lose their way while solving problems.  Corruption starts to eat away from them once they get off the constitutional script.  For instance, I have several very close personal friends who are politicians.  People like George Lang. I’ve known George for a long time since he was a trustee in West Chester, well over a decade ago.  We bonded over Tea Party ideas of small government and the novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  George has a habit of giving that novel out as a Christmas present at Christmas time.  He believes in the ideas in every aspect of his life.  Even though now he is an establishment figure, he is still the same person.

Because he is a big-time senator within the state, many people assume that politics has made him corrupt.  But I know personally, it hasn’t changed him at all. He’s still the same Atlas Shrugged-giving guy.  We might remember when Paul Ryan was also an Atlas Shrugged fan, but when Mitt Romney wanted him to be his VP, all that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand stuff was tossed away so that they could become the next power player in congress, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.  Some people can handle the pressure of public scrutiny, and some can’t.  George can; Paul Ryan couldn’t.  Power has a way of altering people into the most profound things in their hearts.  George, for instance, at this Todd Minniear event, was pressed about several projects that involved tax money distribution.  His answer was a classic George Lang line, and he didn’t just say it because I was there.  It’s what he says all the time to everyone, “don’t give the government or me any more tax money. We’ll just spend it.  Keep your money. Our job is to take the barriers out of your way to living a good life.” 

I’ve watched several good politicians like George Lang get elected into more and more positions over the years.  And at that Todd Minniear swearing-in, several of our Lakota school board members newly elected were there as well, more parts of a future solution.  Locally, I’ve always looked to West Chester to ensure more small-government ideas found their way to the trustees.  My friend Mark Welch and others there have done a great job of keeping the government’s small and business engagement very high.  It is the model of what should be happening all over Ohio.  And if we can primary Mike DeWine as governor of Ohio and replace him with Jim Renacci, we’ll be able to do great things in Ohio.  But Liberty Township is where I live, and the trustees there have always been Republican, but more of the Paul Ryan type, and not so much that of George Lang.  At the start of the election in 2021, I didn’t think a freedom candidate like Todd Minniear could find his way on a Republican Party that was still much more like the Republican Party nationally of 2012 and not so much like the Trump Republican Party of 2020.  But Todd won with a solid majority, and he had a tremendous amount of people show up to support him, which is unusual at these kinds of events.  And as I stood there watching Jennifer Gross, our member of the Ohio House, swear in Todd, I could see where our country was headed.  And it made me very happy to see.  All the hard work that goes into these kinds of things was certainly worth it.  For those wondering about it, I would say that doing such things is some of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself.  Often there isn’t much personal satisfaction in politics but putting the right people in the correct positions at the right time through a vote is one of the most rewarding things anybody can do in a healthy republic.  And in Liberty Township for Christmas of 2021, I can say that seeing Todd Minniear sworn in for public office was the highlight of my Holiday season. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Tornados of Mayfield, Kentucky: Government using tragedy to grab more power for themselves

The Government Power Grab after the Tornados of Kentucky

It’s more than worth it after the media tried to portray Rand Paul negatively after asking for tornado disaster relief for his state to tackle a usually obscure issue of government interference.  Paul has a history of speaking out against every little bailout, but I understand Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell’s problem in Kentucky.  In many ways, it’s the only thing they can do now that the government has embedded itself into people’s lives the way they have.  They really have no choice.  Saying no to federal money would be like denying people surgery after they’ve lost a leg.  The only option but to bleed to death really isn’t practical. This topic deserves some analysis for the many evils that come after the tornados ruined the lives of many thousands of people in Western Kentucky, an area I know very well.

In some cases, there was a tornado on the ground for over 200 miles, so the level of destruction was enormous, even to the point where Rand Paul had to put his differences aside and ask for federal money when he clearly, otherwise wouldn’t.  There is something else at work here that is much more sinister than the tornados themselves.  In a drool of excitement, the media revealed it, and it’s something we must all contend with while dealing with these issues in the future.  The media and their partners in government ultimately want a universal wage to pay people and control them totally. To get there, they have an anti-work attitude about everything hoping to rob people of their joy of work so that the universal wage can become possible.  Where people would just accept the government check, accept what role the government gives them in a heavily managed economy, and lower their standard of living to such an extent that the government could justifiably become everybody’s parents from the perspective of a panel of experts who themselves are nothing but lazy slugs looking for a government check. 

The instant target was a candle factory in Mayfield, where reports were that the management there ordered workers to continue working even during the tornado sirens.  The communist governor Andy Beshear has stuck his nose into the situation to promise an investigation.  The media and government both quickly jumped into an anti-work sentiment indicating that safety is always first, no matter what.  Now, I have a long history with this kind of thing, and honestly, I would have kept working.  When there is something to be done, nothing comes between me or it.  However, the rules say that you are responsible for their safety if you employ people, so I would have let the employees seek shelter or even gone home.  If it had been me in charge that night at the candle factory, I would have been tracking the storm on my phone, and when the red part of the cell hit our area and moved on, I would have then had everyone return to their jobs.  The whole tornado drill would have lasted about 15 minutes.  The employees could have worked a little overtime to compensate for the lost time.  But, I can see why the management would have been skeptical of the storms and the weather reports.  Usually, the news is wrong about these kinds of things, just as they have been over Covid.  So when the media cries wolf too many times, people just stop listening.  Tornados in December are pretty rare, and I can see how management would have thought it a safe bet to ignore the news and keep working.  After all, some things needed to be done, and just because the media says something, it suddenly doesn’t make everyone who hears it culpable.  You see, that is the little secret that is really behind all this.  The media wants to do the bidding of the government and claim powers it doesn’t have, such as telling people when it’s safe to work and when it isn’t.  And they use every little tragedy that might come along to gain that power little by little.  So the management of companies that did not run for their lives when the media reported a tornado warning is under attack not just for not believing the news or ignoring the information, but in putting work and the need of it over all else.

I’ve ridden bicycles in tornados, I’ve worked through serious tragedies, I’ve steamrolled through every kind of problem imaginable.  There have been times when my wife and I only had one car, and I’d ride a motorcycle through snowstorms to get to work.  I am one of those never-call-off types.  Work is always the most important thing to me, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.  And yes, I have been in charge of many workers under dangerous conditions, and everyone has always gone home without harm to their families at the end of their shifts.  People might get angry with me, but so what.  If there is work to do, that is always the highest priority, end of the story.  The media and government have been trying over a long period to gain control of work through socialism, regulation, emergency powers such as they did with Covid, and to throttle productivity into something they control.  Every time there is a tragedy like these tornados in Kentucky or a hurricane in the south, the government can’t wait to pass out confiscated wealth to the victims so that they can then set new rules against the qualification of money because they have become so litigious that all human resource departments are now slaves to every little government whim.    And in that way, Rand Paul had no choice but to take money from the federal government to help the victims.  Because that good ol’ fashioned “can-do” spirit that is quite well-known in regions like Western Kentucky is destroyed under the liability of making the wrong decision according to the government.  And nobody wants to take that chance. 

The government stuck its nose in our economy over Covid, and we have never recovered.  That is why fast food lines are taking too long, shipping is stuck in ports, and planes are canceling flights.  The government creates a liability to alter behavior and, thus, to tamper with the enthusiasm to be productive.  Most of the time, the media gets tornado warnings wrong, and even though that candle factory was pressed to fulfill orders during a holiday season, and the Amazon plant there was trying to stay on top of things, tornado or not, everyone would have gone home except for this extraordinary situation of a perfect December storm.  Without question, it was wrong not to let workers seek shelter, and people did die.  But, the government doesn’t really care about those deaths; what they want out of this tragedy is more control.  The management had the liability to follow the storm and to listen to what the “experts” said.  And because they put productivity over safety, according to the government, they are now accountable for what nature did to them.  And companies all across the country are watching and taking note.  When people wonder how companies become so “woke,” this is how.  They overreact to every government action because it’s really the only way they can stay in business.  And when compliance to the government becomes more important than the productivity of industrious effort, you have an economy that is moving more to the static. You are putting up with government interference that is far worse than the death of a freakish storm.  You have tyranny that is disguised behind safety and a government that looks to eat all innocent people in its perpetual desire to grow and dominate our lives from behind a desk of bureaucracy and wants to rule us all without the risk of a physical, risky takeover.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Gavin Newsom is Wrong In California: Guns are Constitutionally protected, abortion is not

Abortion is Murder, Gun Rights is about Protecting LIfe

The best thing about the last few years in America has been that people have read and understood the Constitution more than ever.  I remember well that our local Tea Party used to have Saturday classes to teach the Constitution.  My son-in-law also took a lengthy class at Liberty University as an immigrant from the United Kingdom that he valued quite a lot.  Many in the world have understood the Constitution for a long time, the law of the land, and our country.  Without those laws, we don’t have a country.  Otherwise, there is merely a mob of power-hungry bureaucrats who live to tell other people what to do, like Dr. Fauci.  Little people like him gain a lot of power if there is no constitutional law, so there are apparent forces at play to erode our laws so that a bureaucratic expert class can take over.  For instance, if people had just followed the law from the outset of Covid, there wouldn’t be many of the problems we have now.  We don’t change our laws to solve emergencies, even government-made ones like Covid-19 and manufactured variants.  We use science to solve those kinds of problems, and while that occurs, we stay on target with a law-and-order society.  Those are the rules, and more people than ever understand those rules.  So, it didn’t take much for people to see through the problem quickly of California’s Gavin Newsom’s attempt to turn the world upside down to rally progressives to their increasingly losing cause.

Newsom and other progressives were upset about the trajectory of the Supreme Court, specifically a Texas law that allows for legal procedures against abortion clinics that enable abortions after six weeks.  They attempted to flip the script and apply the same methods to firearms in California.  The effort gained a lot of press from the communists, socialists, and soothsayers of public education who work in the media, but nobody seemed to understand the differences.  Many media types referred to the abortion law of Texas as an attack on a constitutionally protected right, whereas removing gun rights in any form was somehow validated.  This is where a decent understanding of the Constitution comes in handy.  Every American should understand it.  It should be taught in public schools when we are all little. It’s the essential thing you can learn, yet obviously, that has not been the case with most people in politics.  The Supreme Court made a mistake with Roe v. Wade that will be rectified after a few decades of analysis.  The trajectory of the law is that it will be revisited, and that decision that allowed for abortion will be reversed because it was never a constitutional right.

Meanwhile, gun rights are in the same mold in that their effectiveness has been eroded unjustly because they are a constitutionally protected right.  Thugs and losers posing as a mob threatening to destroy the lives of members of the court were how Roe v. Wade came about in the first place.  And if guns had played a more central role in the protests, preventing acts of violence from being threatened, then a more logical court decision would have transpired, and we wouldn’t be talking about all this now. 

The trajectory meanwhile of gun rights, despite the progressive controls we see all around us from the government, is that restoration of legal purity is underway.  In Ohio and many other places, we aren’t just talking about Concealed Carry; we are moving toward Constitutional Carry, where you don’t even have to let the police know you are armed if you get pulled over for a traffic stop.  Carrying a gun should be as common as carrying a wallet, and that’s where many of the mistakes progressives have made are taking our nation to a more pure appreciation for the Constitution in the first place.  I say it often; I have copies of The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers next to my reading chair, which I look at several times a week for pleasure.  I see them as works of philosophy emerging from western civilization resulting from centuries of trial and error.  They are incredible human achievement works, and I often remind myself of them by sifting through their pages during football games and other television programs.

Additionally, I have a copy of the Ohio Constitution that I do the same with.  These are law and order components of our society which has worked well for all people.  And I stand by them.  On the other hand, I don’t have tolerance or understanding among law enforcement or politicians who do not follow the rules.  What happened to General Flynn, Roger Stone, even Brad Parscall won’t happen at my house.  I will defend it the way the Constitution specifies.  The legal system doesn’t get to suspend my constitutional rights while they figure things out as a slow, dim-witted, bureaucratic society.  In their world, people like Dr. Fauci are king.  But in the world of the constitutionally protected, kings are rejected, and their powers are limited to some useless office position behind a desk somewhere.  They are not allowed to bring their nonsense into our lives. 

Now, regarding that California proposal, which is just air coming out of the mouth of Gavin Newsom, looking for revenge and intimidation meant to hurl at the Supreme Court if Roe v. Wade is overturned in the summer of 2022.  Gun rights are legal and constitutionally protected.  They are intended to protect us from overreaching authority figures like Gavin Newsom and Dr. Fauci.  And yes, that means that gunfights are expected and patriotic if a government goes bad and comes to spread their “badness” to constitutionally protected people.  Not desired, but neither is government abuse.  Gun rights are the last right of defense against an out-of-control government, and over the previous several years, we have seen just how bad it can get.  It’s one thing to warn about these things before people know for themselves how dangerous government can be and what we saw from the government over Covid should be enough to rattle the foundations of anybody.

Nobody wants to shoot people in self-defense.  But living under tyranny is worse.  So that is why there is a trend in states toward even fewer gun restrictions instead of more.   And this has all happened as the government is trying to bankrupt the NRA financially.  Like Trump, through the NRA, the government thought those were the forces behind gun rights, so they attacked them in ways to destroy them.  No, the NRA was just a collection of over 5 million people who supported gun rights.  They would continue to support gun rights whether or not there was an NRA.  One did not create the other.   There are no rights to apply to anti-gun advocates seeking to use the Texas abortion law to gun sales in California.  Guns are constitutionally protected.  Abortion is not and never was.  Only threats of intimidation allowed for abortion, and that portion of the law will soon be restored to constitutional observations of life.  Guns are meant to protect life, liberty, and happiness.  And abortion is about killing life.  Now that more people appreciate the Constitution, we see a restoration of its legal value.  And from my observation, that is a wonderful, new trait that I welcome tremendously. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ray Dalio Misses the Point: Wealth is created by risk-takers, not a compliant society

The Looted Wealth of China

I enjoy all books.  I like books much better than people in general, even though people write books.  I figure that if someone works hard enough to write a book, they have thought their thoughts through enough to have some respectful consideration.  But I don’t like small talk and just yacking with people over nothing.  If a conversation is not the most epic philosophical consideration in the history of mankind, then I don’t have a lot of use for it.  So instead of wasting time with lots of people talking about nothing, I spend my time reading books, even by people I disagree with, such as Ray Dalio.  He has a new book out, which I pay attention to because I have enjoyed his other works. I’m afraid I have to disagree with Ray Dalio on much, especially this latest offering.  Ray has a lot of problems, he’s a globalist, and he has bet against America with his many billions of dollars, and things aren’t going to work out for him like he thought they were.  I think you’ll find me disassembling this globalist view of the world more and more because, in this global war for which we are all a part, I see the tides changing in favor of an America First agenda.  I just received my membership card to the America First Policy Institute on the same day that I received my monthly magazine for the NRA, and it was a good day for me.  I see great catastrophe for Ray Dalio and his fellow globalist billionaires from where I view the world.  That doesn’t mean I hate Ray.  I actually like him, but just because he has billions of dollars, that doesn’t mean he’s beyond reproach.  His new book was essentially a remake of the grand globalist book I refer to a lot, Tragedy & Hope, which was a globalist point of view of the history of the world. Ray’s book is the same; only he’s trying to sell computer model simulations on human behavior to justify his massive investment into China, which has now pretty much announced itself as an enemy of America.  And people like Ray have been handed the detonator for world destruction, and he’s trying to convince us all why he must push the button.

Ray and the gang, let’s call them the “Davos Crowd,” essentially believed that the global economy would shift into China.  They know the globalist’s game; corporations have a quarterly mandate to always show increases to their shareholders and to everyone’s point of view, America was a saturated market.  There are only 300 million people in America, and they can all only buy so many cars, tennis shoes, and hamburgers.  So the globalists want new markets to exploit that ever-present need for upward trends of profit forecasts, and places like Africa, India, and China look like that next untapped well.  While doing media for his new book, Ray himself has said that China has over 1 billion people increasing in median income year by year.  That is where the expanding middle class is, not in America, so that has been the focus of investors like Ray. America’s middle class is dying because many of the jobs that made it up have been transferred to places like China and the minds of people like Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, and Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire class, that is an investment into a bigger house.  The middle class in America can only grow so much.  But there are many more opportunities for wealth generation in China among a larger country with a much larger population, 3-1.  So that is why the markets of the world turned toward China for the next great gold rush of expanding markets.  Only, there is a problem.  China is a communist country, and these billionaires have been caught tampering with global politics by using Karl Marx’s philosophies to move market value from one place to another, leaving behind the criminal underclass to control all their wealth as the curtain everyone sees.  And now they’ve all been caught, and the sentiment is flipping back to America.  What China did with the coronavirus in partnership with Dr. Fauci and the NIH was reprehensible.  It was much worse than when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and now China is a villain to the world, and all the investments that people like Ray have made there are in jeopardy. 

You have to understand wealth creation, which I explain extensively in my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  The middle class is not a finite creation.  Wealth just doesn’t happen, as Ray often alludes to in his books when he talks about the cycles of civilization.  Wealth is made from risk, and when a nation produces lots of risk-takers, then it can be said to be wealthy.  When a nation produces many compliant people, as China does because of their communist government, you will have perpetual stagnation.  There is currently an expanding middle class in China because that wealth drives it to be stolen from American capitalism.  It’s just money that was moved to a bigger balloon, but the wealth generated is finite; it’s limited to the air in the balloon.  What makes the air is risk; what expands wealth is not compliance and order, the way all corporations would love it to be, but in reckless investment for the gain of capital off innovation and diligence.  Inventors don’t stay up all night writing code or inventing a new concept so they can turn it over to the state for redistribution.  They want to get rich, just as people will sit at a poker table and gamble on a pot of money, hoping to win it.  The game generates wealth because it inspires risk to win it.  Elementary economic stuff, but it’s what’s missing in Ray’s books, his graphs on human nature and the history of the world, and all those like him in the billionaire class who obviously feel guilty about their own wealth and aren’t sure they deserve so much power over others because of it.

China’s rise to power is over; their trajectory to be the new example of markets is deflating as we speak.  Oh, sure, many governments still think China is the future, but they don’t understand the basics of wealth creation even though they may be personally wealthy themselves.  America is a culture of risk, and that is why it has been and will continue to be wealthy. America’s wealth is not present because of policy, politics, philosophy.  A centralized authority can’t control it.  It’s not something that is managed by the global Davos crowd. They’d love to control it, to loot off it, to ride it for their ease and comfort.  But stealing America’s wealth and giving it to China as they have been doing from behind the face of governments won’t make China wealthy and expand their middle class in the same way it did in America.  Because to create wealth, you must have risk and ambition unleashed in a free market and society.  And China isn’t and will never be free.  The number of people happy with a car, a house, a spouse, a few kids, and an iPhone that can track you in everything you do is not enough for many people.  And for the people it is enough are not the types who make extraordinary wealth.  So when Ray puts up his computer models about human behavior to justify billions of dollars in investments he has made into China, he is always missing the most critical thing in a society that wishes to be wealthy, that there are plenty of risk-takers who are willing to stay up all night and work through the weekends to invent a new market.  And it is with them, and only them, that an expanding middle class is born, and there are people to buy hamburgers, go to amusement parks, and buy tennis shoes.  Centralized authority always kills wealth, and in this case, Ray and his friends will lose many billions in their gamble against America for the great nothing of China’s rise to power.

 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Defeat the Administrative State: Why being free is profitable

How to Defeat the Administrative State

I wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because of the necessity in business and life in general to defeat the administrative state.  One of the most significant objectives in business cultures is to decentralize their operations and break down the silos that various departments often isolate themselves with tall walls of bureaucracy.  Most of the world is suffering under some form of administrative state.  When governments want communism, for instance, they want an expansion of the administrative state.   When people say they want to be freer, they want to have less restriction in their lives of an administrative state.  So it was my goal in that book to teach people to break down their limitations without destroying their organization by learning how to deal with decentralized administration and value the input of individual effort.  It will remain for quite a long time; the most significant problem humans have is their desire to create administrative states. Yet, their personal needs to function without them is what all life strives for.  The defining problem of Lean Manufacturing is to decentralize business operations with de-siloed methods.  But it never works well in America because, in Asia, people need less of an administrative state due to the nature of the people to submit to an authority figure, since they have always been accustomed to worshiping a king or emporer throughout their societal development.  That is why communism might appear to work in China, whereas it would never work in America because people will not follow directions from a centralized planner.  They might pay lip service to such instructional flow down. Still, Americans will always sabotage their central planners where in Asia, they individually accept their place in the scheme of things and follow directions in a decentralized way.

Decentralization, therefore, is the goal and the trend of all future societies.  How successful can an organization be if the administrative state is small and without teeth of authority?  I explain in my book why embracing decentralization of authority, there are more opportunities for success than in the slow, terrestrial administrative state filled with mind-numbing bureaucrats.  For instance, I like to use football metaphors, and the best teams on the field are those most decentralized.  If players have to look to the sideline for instruction from their coaches after each play, then coordinating all that activity in the face of constantly changing circumstances moment to moment while confronting the variables of an opponent, the chances for error are much greater. Instead, what the coaches should do is prepare each player between games for every circumstance, then once on the field, they can adapt through their onfield leadership on how to deal with the challenges they are dealing with.  For instance, coaching becomes much easier when a team has a great quarterback because you have leadership representation in the huddle, and audibles can be made much faster depending on the kind of defense presented.  That is the same in all things in life; if we wait for a centralized planner to tell us what to do, the opportunities for success in life, whether for the individual or a social group, are minimized and perhaps lost altogether.  When innovation and productivity are significantly reduced, people tend to be much unhappier, including people who function as members of the administrative state. 

One of my most common sayings is that I’ll trade my Black Belt for a gunbelt all the time.  In Lean Manufacturing, which uses terminology from oriental martial arts, the American perception of gunfighting is much more effective.  Where the martial arts of Asia are mostly a defensive fighting mode, not usually displayed for an attack on an opponent, such as a centralized authority, the American gunfighter showed traits where they could function as agents of justice even when the legal system was decentralized from the backing of a big government.  The frontier sheriffs such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were able to bring a sense of justice to developing towns in the Wild West through gunfighting that was unique in the world.  Never before in modern history, modern being the city-state’s development, did a nation form under the blank slate of natural human autonomy.  This is why to this very day, the political left, communists, socialists, even major corporations tend to seek sympathy for the American Indian, as they were soundly defeated during Westward Expansion.  They like the tribal Indian with all their administrative state, adherence to the gods of nature, the village chief, and social hierarchy formed in communal life.  When really, what we learned during Westward Expansion was the alignment of individual goals to the task of necessity.  For instance, President Grant made it known that there was personal wealth to be obtained in the Black Hills, which inspired many hungry individuals to risk it all in pursuit of opportunity.  When a great leader can align the needs of a business, or a nation toward an objective without imposing an administrative state in the way to slow everything down, great things can happen and did.  The centralized administrative state, the Indians, could not fight the decentralized frontier settler.  One was motivated by preserving a centralized authority. The other was driven by individual gain.  This is precisely the problem of our modern times with centralized authority for all kinds of reasons trying to pin down a society with the fear porn of Covid.  Americans pay lip service to authority but do what they want.  Other cultures where Covid was designed are quick to adhere to centralized planning, which ultimately fails because the administrative state is too insulated from reality to make the proper decisions in crisis management. 

When people look at the events happening to them right now and fear a global takeover of the “elite” of the “Davos Crowd,” I tell them not to worry.  The fight is not about force or even intelligence.  The administrative state will always have the same problems; they will always be too slow to solve issues in real-time as problems arise.  Yet, due to their desire for the safety of group affiliation, most human society seeks to create an administrative state as their first primal instinct. We’ve built our entire education system, our political system, our businesses, just about everything we do around the maintenance of an administrative state.  America was formed by people trying to get away from the overregulation of an administrative state. At the same time, the rest of the world suffers under much less personal wealth because they have been slowed down too much by an administrative state and its massive, slow-moving bureaucracy.  When centralizing order, such as visiting the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, regulation gains are at the expense of freedom and innovation.  That is why we all hate going to the BMV.  They are slow and uncompetitive.  Yet to drive, we all have to go to them and wait in the long lines because the government does what government does to their time frame.  That is always why our public education system designed by people like John Dewey doesn’t work, and it will never work.  We are teaching people to be members of the administrative state when the trend of the world is to be more decentralized.  So what people most crave in the world, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, is to function successfully in a decentralized state, whether in their places of business, their neighborhoods or even within their families.  And it is our modern task to teach them how to let go of the burdens of the administrative state and function more as individuals, making nations great, businesses profitable, and lives much, much better off.

Rich Hoffman

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