Category: Education

Intellectual Capital: What Ray Dalio and other billionaires miss in financial portfolios and quests for freedom

Intellectual Currency

There are many kinds of currency in our society.  We tend to focus on financial currency, and our governments emphasize that measurable standard because it’s easy and obvious.  But many currencies are instigated to measure value.  So when I criticize people like Ray Dalio for all his Chinese investments, or George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbucks, and many others, it’s because I don’t have a lot of value for the way they measure currency.  Most of the people I know, people I associate with, are millionaires or more.  I know what they did to get the money, I don’t think of making money as being hard, and it’s easy to see the faults of their life from my perspective because I value a different kind of currency in life.  Because they think of finance as their most important measure of wealth, most people believe that a billionaire is at the top of our pecking order in society.  But I don’t think that way at all.  I think money is easy to make, and I make what I need to get through a day or a year.  I see those types of people as an evolving group, and they are not as free as I need to be in life because with all their financial entanglements come claims on their time and energy, which I find objectionable.  Making a million dollars is not hard.  Just do something that people want to pay a million dollars for, and you’ll have it.  No, there is a lot more to currency than just financial, and for me, the most significant measure of value in human scale is what I call “intellectual capital.” 

My oldest grandson has a currency that he invented that lets me know that he had a good time visiting with me.  He allows me to buckle him up in his mom’s car when he leaves. That’s his way of showing value for our visit without getting all mushy about wordy exchanges.  When a wife grants sex to a husband even though she may not feel like being poked and prodded due to the stresses of life, it’s usually to express appreciation for a nice lawn mowed, a car fixed, or a paycheck deposited into the bank account, one less thing to be stressed out about.  Sex is a kind of currency in a marriage that has value and promotes a healthy economy under the roof of a house.  Humans have many ways of generating currency and showing that they are willing to pay something to get something that everyone agrees is of value.  In the video above, I tell a little story about a very beautiful woman I know who is married, but she’s always on the lookout for male attention. She’s not really interested in men for men’s sake, but she does have a love of exotic cars.  She loves Lamborghinis.  And she has traded her womanly traits with other men who have bought her a few of them.  What her husband thinks of these cars in her driveway is a good question.  But people work the currencies of their lives in their own unique ways depending on their values.  So when it comes to politics, we must deal with all the kinds of currencies there are, not just the financial ones.  And if we could point to one thing that is the source of all corruption in politics, our value for politics is not the same as our politicians have.  They measure things in financial capital, looking for more intellectual capital from elected officials. 

So, when its said, “well, you’re not a billionaire.  Who are you to criticize Ray Dalio?  He does a lot of good in the world, gives his money to lots of charities, makes a lot of people wealthy with their stock portfolios, and is a generous man who writes books to share the wealth with others.” I say, yes, he makes a lot of money and shares it with others like some global grandparent.  But there’s more to the story, he has invested in China at the expense of America and is perpetuating a global system of government that erodes American sovereignty.  The values of that American sovereignty are not measured using financial capital but of intellectual capital.  Our right to think, do, and say what we want in our lives and to produce GDP based on our vast imaginations and intellect is what is harmed by people like Ray Dalio.  Those types of investments don’t show up well on a stock portfolio.  But they show up in mysterious ways to financial planners blind to those measures when they count the product that is made, money.  People like Ray who work strictly with financial capital often miss the ingredients that make money.  They know how to measure money once it is made.  But they don’t really understand what makes money to start with, which is intellectual capital. 

Most of my life has not been built around financial portfolios or banking relationships.  I view the making of money as a secondary thing.  What is valuable to me, and what people often are willing to pay for in regards to me, is my intellectual capital, my portfolio of ideas that have been built by a lifetime of experience in thinking outside the box.  There are talks of boycotting people like Elon Musk, an intelligent guy, but if China needs a massage, Elon must give it to them because he requires their car batteries.  Suppose some billionaire must take up climate change as a political position to keep government out of their pockets with excessive taxation. In that case, they are stuck uttering things they don’t believe so that they can stay in business.    The point of the matter is that our current political movement needs to understand that the battle is fought not in financial capital.  Governments and mobs have found ways to capture financial capital and to manipulate all of society based on their ability to steal it.  But for me, I purposely don’t have millions of dollars in the bank.  I could put millions of dollars in the bank tomorrow, and so could anybody who has developed their intellectual capital to such a degree.  But the world’s governments cannot steal what’s in my head.  They can’t steal my thoughts.  They can’t tax what I have invested in to put knowledge in my head. What’s in my mind is mine, and that is the wealthiest attribute a human can have.  Once people understand that, the power of government loses all its ability, and they will wither in front of us like dried leaves in autumn.  The purpose of this story is to express to you, dear reader, that the way to beat these oppressive forces is not to play their game of financial capital. Instead, stick with intellectual capital.  It’s all valuable, and to my experience, intellectual capital is far more beneficial.  It can make millions of dollars.  But it can also do much more, which is what real freedom looks like.  It’s not just property rights and physical inventory that give power to people.  It’s what they think, what they know, and how they apply it to wealth creation that genuinely matters.  Ray Dalio and all the other billionaires secretly know this, and they are always in service to those who can think of new ideas, which makes them inferior in every way humans measure value.  And those, my friends, are the rules of the universe.  Use them to significant effect and maintain your personal freedom accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Turning Point of the War: When conspiracies turn out to be true and we learn the Constitution and guns are all that really matter

The Turning Point in the War

I have been talking about the FEMA camps that we are now seeing happen in Australia and Austria for decades.  Of course, they call them something else in those places, but in essence, the tyrannical intentions of those governments have been unleashed over Covid, and we have seen attempts in America toward the same.  Recently, in fact, two times in the year 2021, I took my wife through Indianapolis, where the FEMA camp railyards for my sector of the country we’re supposed to transpire.  Given the world’s blueprint, it’s pretty obvious now what the plan was.  I could never figure out how our constitutional republic would ever pull off a FEMA camp imprisonment similar to what Hitler did to the Jews, but after 2021, we now see who and why they would be sent to FEMA camps.  It would be the unvaccinated, of course, and similar government disrupters such as the rioters at the January 6th event that has violated all kinds of constitutional liberties for those still imprisoned.  And in many ways, I feel like the fever is breaking, that there is a tide turning in this war that many never knew was even happening.  But it was, and it goes back a long way. The way that Australia and Austria have been behaving over Covid and how the media has shown themselves to be agents of their corporate sponsors, we now see what many thought years ago were just conspiracies. 

But I’m not all doom and gloom over these revelations; I’ve always known about them.  My problem was that I couldn’t prove it to people who were much more interested in getting their kids to soccer practice and having a block party for the Ohio State/Michigan game than in getting to the bottom of why our government would have planned FEMA camps for innocent people decades ago, only to come true now, in the early 2020s.  Then we saw the unthinkable in September of 2021 when the Biden people put out an Executive Order mandating vaccines for a virus our government created as a bioweapon in a Chinese lab, for most employers in America targeting all the people who work for them.  It was perhaps the most aggressive overreach of the federal government any of us have ever seen outside of wartime escapades. It was alarming to Americans not used to such an imposing government.  People really didn’t know what to do because they had never been challenged legally in these ways.  In the country’s history, we had never seen conspiracies like this playing out before our eyes, and it was scary stuff.  But I said then as I say now, it was always unconstitutional, and that is what sets America apart from the rest of the world, is that bit of constitutional philosophy that is so wonderfully debated in two of my favorite books ever written, The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.  I personally prefer The Anti-Federalist Papers.  Even though I’m from Hamilton, Ohio, which is named after Alexander Hamilton, of Federalist Papers fame, I’m a hardliner for the Anti-Federalist Papers.  I admire those works in the context of history. I’ve been to the site in England of one of the Magna Cartas.  Our American Constitution wasn’t just put together yesterday; it’s the culmination of many years of human intellect which modern progressives are trying to toss out the window.  But it’s the law of our land, and so long as we stick by it and defend it from attackers by using the Second Amendment, everything will be fine.

That’s precisely what broke this sickness; as I said, it would end eventually when the legal system caught up to the crimes.  Up to this point, December 8th of 2021, the crimes of international governments were far outpacing the ability of our courts to deal with them, which was part of the strategy, a standard Cloward and Piven tactic of overwhelming a system and forcing it to collapse.  Just like blitzing the quarterback in football, that is what attackers of America have been doing to us all, including some within our own government, such as the Biden administration.  And like everywhere that Covid protocols by overreaching politicians have attempted it, a judge in Georgia put a hold on the federal portion of the Biden executive order, pretty much killing the unconstitutional mandate as soon as it was born.  That has been the case in all Covid cases, but that hold on the federal mandate was the big one, and from this point, it will establish all case law in the future.  Governments have limits on their powers on purpose, and that doesn’t go away when there is a panic; even a government-created one like coronavirus has been.  The plan was to suspend our constitutional rights with Covid and replace direct military authority with medical authority, which was always a plan by those types of people.  This is why we have a constitution that protects individual liberty from those declaring collective salvation.  Because it was always a power grab, and those who didn’t follow along would be sent to FEMA camps to enforce compliance to this new global authority.

But that’s not how it rolls in America.  It took people a few years to get their feet settled in America, but finally, people are learning about the Constitution in ways they should have always known.  Government schools that wanted to acquire power for themselves, of course, will not teach constitutional value in their classrooms.  We were crazy to think they ever would.  But people have learned through this Covid nightmare the value of limits on government which the Constitution provides.  Finally, people have the context they can relate to.  Our rights do not get put on hold because the world’s governments can’t manage a silly virus.  Their inabilities do not constitute imprisonment, sorrow, or a loss of enjoyment of life.  And that essentially is what judge R. Stan Baker granted from Georgia regarding the federal portion of the Biden Executive Order.

A president doesn’t get to make orders like some king from the White House.  Governor DeWine in Ohio tried similar stupidity during Covid, which the legislature had to take away from him.  In America, we understand we need government for the basics.  But we must put limits on the powers of government because if stupid people get to be in charge by some deficiency, then people need insulation from that stupidity.  And that has certainly been the case with Covid-19.  There is plenty of stupid to go around.  And while the stupid people sort out their errors, people need to live their lives.  And in that way, I am happy to see more people than ever understanding finally what these differences are.  It is dangerous to let a government become all-powerful and even consider that FEMA camps were a possibility.  If not for our Constitution, the government certainly would have tried to send me to one of those camps, and we would have had a lot of unnecessary loss of life in the process.  It would have been tragic.  But because of the Constitution and our ability to defend that law with gun rights behind every door, we still have a functioning country.  Not because of government, but despite it.  And that is why the great machine of America has not been turned off the way our attackers globally had wished.  And now, Americans have seen these intentions for themselves, and it looks like they are finally poised to do something about it.  It’s about time!

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Self Government Starts by Being a Good Person: Politicians are not leaders as Tucker Carlson says, they are representatives

You Need to Be a Good Person to Have a Good Government

It’s not enough to just talk about it or make names for it.  The real problem is a fundamental one of philosophy and not recognizing the basics of human nature.  What is self-government?  Then, how do you fund it, this something that nobody really understands?  For me, it’s about the difference between a republic and a democracy.  It’s about breaking the Vico Cycle.  In a republic, our politicians are our representatives, extensions of ourselves that buy us time to do other productive things in the world. At the same time, they manage the affairs of our country, states, and counties.  We do need government, but what does that mean for people.  Some, especially those who aren’t so bright and are timid about spiders and other bugs, don’t want the responsibility of self-government. They’d rather have a “leader” running things so they can complain about the results, one way or another.  For self-government to work, all individuals must be empowered to understand how to maintain a republic as opposed to democracy and to spend their lives productively, not worshipping others in the process because they fear personal responsibility.  So the key to everything past and future, including the present, is to define responsible living and how that translates into responsible government.  You can’t expect politicians to behave if the people who put them in decision-making positions truly represent the people who voted for them.  If you want a good government, you first need to be a good person. 

These are the thoughts I had while watching a local school board meeting.  I don’t mean to pick on Brad Lovell, whom I have covered in other articles about the politics of changing our school board from a liberal body of government to a more conservative one. He’s a local guy; every school district has its own version of him.  There are many people like Brad Lovell in government at all levels most of the time.  They are little power-hungry attention seekers and are easily corruptible.  Electing people like that and turning them loose, thinking they are leaders, is one of the most dangerous things society could do to itself.  To be mad at Brad for being what he is isn’t really fair.  We elected him at some point in time because we were suckered as a society into what he said he would do, which was bring big government to our community by wasting endless amounts of money in the process.  When I heard Brad talk this past week, it was just as dumb as what we hear from our own congress over budget considerations revolving around Build Back Better.  This article is not the one to talk about the communist intentions of Build Back Better.  It’s about how weak people spend money and are lazy and too unmotivated to manage money given to them as taxpayers properly. They essentially don’t understand their roles as politicians, and the people who voted for them don’t either.  Even Tucker Carlson gets it wrong all the time.   We do not elect our “leaders,” we elect our “representatives.” No politician is a god to be worshipped.  None of them can be elected and turned loose to do all the hard work while we sit around watching reality television. 

Based on my experience in life, especially in a corporate setting, I would say that half the money we spend on taxes at the federal, state, and local level could be cut in half right now.   If we use the same methods used to approve basic overtime in a corporation, we could reduce the tax burden by at least half by asking our political class basic questions.  Now, where I live, and this is not by accident.  People call me the Tax Killer for a reason.  I would say that I’m a pretty nice guy.   My family loves me.  I think people respect me tremendously.  But when I walk into a room, I would not say that people like it.  Everywhere I go, I am called the “tax killer,” which is a nickname that people who don’t like what I do have persisted to call me because I do question our taxes, especially at the local level.  I think everyone should do what I do; it is the primary responsibility of self-government to elect representatives and ask those reps to be responsible in the same way I would.   When I get mad at Brad Lovell, the local school board tax and spend liberal, it’s not that I don’t like the guy as a person. I’m sure his wife loves him and his kids, and that’s fine.  People care about him out in the world, but we are talking about management here, and being liked is not a value; it’s a lazy retreat and a shift of responsibility for those afraid of it.  I would say that I am known as the tax killer locally because I ask questions the same way I would in a business.  I don’t get invited to many Christmas parties because the goal is to get drunk and act like idiots, and I am also known as a buzz kill.  Sometimes you have to pick being liked to being right, and to my mind, being right is all that matters.  If many managers brought me the overtime needs for over 100 employees who needed to work 10 hour days and 8 hours on a Saturday, I would challenge them.  I would ask them why they weren’t getting the production they needed in an 8-hour day.  Are you short headcount?  I would then ask why Saturday was necessary because it’s a lot more expensive to operate on a weekend than during the week.  Now everyone who knows me understands that productivity always trumps comfort.  I expect people to do whatever they must do in life to be productive, even crawling through broken glass naked.  I ask people to do what I would do in life, and it’s my job to set the parameters to define success.  Most of the time, those managers retreat from their overtime requests and figure out how to get the work done without overtime.  Why? Because the overtime requests were lazy and driven by chaos, not logic. 

I could write books and books and books on this topic of self-management and the values of a republic, and over time, I just may do that.  But for now, understand that the areas I live in, the school district, the townships, and my county all are operating at a surplus, meaning they take in more money than they spend because the money they spend is challenged.  Just think of what a nice world it would be if people everywhere challenged their politicians in such a similar way.  The goal is not to elect a leader then go to sleep playing video games.  It’s also not to be liked. “Oh, here comes that person who will ask us all kinds of uncomfortable questions.” But once we manage to understand our role in a republic and not a democracy, we can begin to improve lots of things for the better.  I don’t think it’s difficult at all, but people go wrong in the world when they’d rather be liked than to be respected.  And in that basic function, so many evils in the world are conducted.  What needs to happen often doesn’t because people, including voters, would rather be loved than to be right.  It doesn’t matter if we have term limits or an R next to a name or a D.  If we elected idiots to office, then stop asking them to represent us, allowing them just to lead us, no wonder costs run out of control, and a government develops a bottomless pit attitude about taxation and its worth to society.  The way to fix it isn’t to complain; it’s to demand answers for the spending, then to watch them flail when they can’t explain it, and in that way, the conditions of our republic improve dramatically, and for a fraction of the cost. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Pioneers of Promotion: How the press became so liberal and the need to undo it

Pioneers of Promotion and the Modern Media

I’m a little old to be saying things like, “something changed my life.” Instead, it’s more like I’ve been looking for my car keys all my life, and I finally found them in the least expected place.  And you could probably tell after finishing up another great book called Pioneers of Promotion that I really enjoyed reading that fantastic book.  It’s another one that I picked up at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, this past summer, and it turned out to be a real treasure.  When I first found the book, I held it in my hand for a long time, considering whether or not it would be of any use to our modern times or if it would be just a fun history lesson.  As it turned out, it was the skeleton key I had been looking for to many of our modern problems, the evil we were all witnessing turned on its head in such destructive ways.  The book is about press agents Toby Hamilton for Barnum & Baily Circus, Moses P. Handy for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and John Burke for the Buffalo Bill Wild West show essentially all who wrote the rules for modern marketing, which hasn’t changed at all over the last hundred years.  It was strangely relevant to me as the first professional career I wanted to do growing up was as a film director.  So I have some detailed experience with the inner workings of the media, which I have used for the current freedom movement that was a tough decision for me over a decade ago.  I had many connections forming in Hollywood; I knew agents on Wilshire Blvd, but I had to become someone else to play that game, and I grew to resent those forces.  Now I understand how those forces were put in place and what they are protecting to this very day.  To say it was a fabulous book by Joe Dobbow would be a magnificent understatement. 

Even more relevant is that over those years where decisions had to be made, did I want to form my life around the unsaid rules of a career, or did I want to use my natural talents to fight for justice?  My involvement in wild west shows that impersonated micro versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were central to my life.  For a few decades now, I often talk about my reset weekend at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio, where I participate in the event directly inspired by Buffalo Bill.  I have a personal friend who looks so much like Buffalo Bill Cody that they hire him each year to be their event mascot.  And I got involved in this group because one of my favorite movies was Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood growing up.  I have been thinking about these themes for a very long time.  This lost America was at the heart of the themes I was always in love with.  I saw more of it than most because I had traditional farmer grandparents and parents who exposed me to these dying elements as a kid. But it always left me a little bit thirsty and never quite satisfied.  When I became an adult, I latched onto these old western images for clarity into a time when America was great, was the envy of the world, and was growing into an economic threat to the various aristocracies that had been jealously guarding their power in whatever little groups they resided in.  I have always loved the idea of a Buffalo Bill America, but I didn’t understand why or how relevant it could and would be for me later in life.  It’s just something I knew and, to this day, is at the core of everything I do, more than ever. 

Life moves fast, and I had been out to Hollywood pursuing that career when justice called.  I learned the games and how to play them, but ultimately it came down to me something the Ned Buntline used to say about authenticity, which I’ll talk about later.  But I didn’t want to be one more phony out there just creating images for a commercial industry.  I didn’t just want to be in a show.  I wanted to be the real deal, almost in reverse of how Buffalo Bill came to be, or the promotors who brought pulp fiction to the preservation of the Wild West, which has preserved in so many ways our modern understanding of America and prevented its complete destruction from the various elements of the world who absolutely hate it because they didn’t think of it first.  So going down that path didn’t allow me to travel the west as I had wanted and explore the things that interested me most.  It took me many years to block off the kind of time I did in 2021 to discover everything that was always right under my nose.  Looking back on this year, it was just a bit of a miracle that I was able to spend a day at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West for a day with most of my entire family, grandkids included.  We went to that region in our RV to explore Yellowstone, which we did.  But going to the rodeo there in Cody, Wyoming, then the Center of the West turned out to be like finding those car keys that I had always been looking for.  And it wasn’t just the museum, which was fantastic, but it’s the books I bought from there which were so unique and specific to problems I was always wondering about.  Pioneers of Promotion turned out to be everything I was looking for when we set out west to retouch ourselves with America after the 2020 election disappointments and get a firm understanding of what America was.

The modern villains essentially hated the Buffalo Bill Wild West. They turned the tables on what Burke, Hamilton, and Handy had done to launch the contemporary press agent concept to the world, which is at the center of all commercial enterprise to this very day, including website development.  There was a line from Pioneers of Promotion that John Burke said to critics of the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that I found tremendously appealing and relevant to my own view of the world when he lashed out, “Damn it all!  What we are doing is educating you, people!  I am not afraid to say, sir, that the Wild West symposium of equestrian ability has done more for this country than the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the life of General George Washington.  Its mission is to teach manhood and common sense.  We are not traveling to make money, sir, but only to do good.”  Those who wanted to destroy America copied the methods of these pioneers of promotion and sought to do the opposite.  To uneducate America into a conquered condition, and it’s there that we must focus on undoing the mess.  And that started with Trump, a P.T. Barnum type himself who had served as a platform to return to these American ways of thinking.  Burke and his friends from that period of the late 1800s knew what they were doing.  It was attractive to me all my life, and now it’s quite clear what the weapons have been to undo America through the same method.  And the intentions toward our own demise that much clearer.  It’s one thing always to know it, but it’s quite nice to have it all summed up in a moment of revelation that solidifies thought and inspires action in ways that just weren’t possible before knowing something firsthand. 

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

Its Not About Justice in the Oxford School Shooting: The war against parents, and guns, continues with gross overreach

It’s About Destroying the Family, and Taking Their Guns

I really feel bad for the shooter’s parents in the Oxford school killings in Michigan.  The prosecutor in the case set the stage for what really is a rush to judgment and gross violation of innocent until proven guilty assumption when Karen McDonald essentially stated that she was a mom, and that was supposed to be the reason she destroyed the lives of a married couple already suffering through the loss of their son.  Yes, their son was the shooter who killed four other students in the hallways of their school and wounded seven others. There’s no question it was a tragedy, and upon hearing of the case, the first thing that jumps out is that much of the damage could have been averted if teachers had been armed to stop the 15-year-old kid.  There is plenty of blame to go around for the tragedy, but what the public school and the prosecutor are looking for is easy blame for really the process failures that most government schools are suffering from.  The question of why the kid felt he had no other option but to kill other students is what needs to be dealt with.  But Karen McDonald expects to glaze over all that and instead seek to throw red meat at the situation by prosecuting the parents for buying the shooter the gun he used for the crime, which makes this case something else entirely.  This case is no longer about bringing justice to the shooter, but who essentially is the parent of a child and sending out the message to gun owners that they could be prosecuted just for buying a gun.  There are apparent politics at play which has much more far-reaching ambitions that make this a unique imposition for all of us.

When we hear of these school shooting cases, the kids are usually from broken homes and often have lifestyles that embody heavy marijuana use.  In this case, however, we don’t know about the drug use, but it’s about a father and mother married trying to help their son.  We don’t know the circumstances for which they bought him the SIG as a Christmas present on Black Friday of 2021, but it likely had some motive of empowerment.  Based on the social media postings by the kid and the parents in general, they obviously were trying to overcome some family issues.  Was the kid bullied and the parents trying to help the child feel empowered?  Based on my experience, I would say that will turn out to be the case.  Buying kids guns and teaching them how to use them is an American tradition.  And public schools have made it clear they seek to eliminate that ritual.  Public schools are anti-family, anti-gun, and all about centralizing the management of children.  The school was too quick to blame the parents for not making their recommendations. I could list hundreds of cases right now where schools put themselves in a tug of war with the parents over power with children, so I can see why the parents might not be inclined to listen to what the school was telling them, including not believing that the drawing depicting a mass school shooting was even authentic.  Based on the parents’ reaction in their comments before and after the shooting, it is evident that they viewed the school as intruding on their rights as parents.  Of course, anger often distorts reality, and in this case, it likely prevented them from seeing just how damaged their kid was in the matter leading up to the shooting.

Imagine what it would be like for them to find out they have lost their child forever now that he shot up a school.  It was likely very traumatic, and now the media is outside covering everything you are doing. Of course, they would want to console each other and seek refuge somewhere where they could think the situation through.  Now, not only have they lost a child, but they are now the targets for a manhunt which the media fanned the flames into a national story.  They were hunted down, arrested, and separated when they needed to help each other.  They were paraded around in front of the cameras as criminals, guilty, and must prove themselves innocent from behind a jail cell.  What was the message to the world? If you buy a gun for someone, you could be prosecuted, and the state will destroy every aspect of your life, starting with your family.  It’s for the greater good in this new Soviet-style media culture, which is directly connected to our state and federal government. That’s not to say that the people who lost their kids in the shooting aren’t terribly sad as well, and they surely want justice.  But the government, in this case, was quick to partner with the public school to make a strong case for something much deeper, who controls the child.  Is it the parents or the school?  We already know how the left views the matter; it’s been a national story this year.  And in this case, the prosecutor, because she’s some kind of panicky mom, assumes that all the Bill of Rights for the parents can be suspended and that the state has ultimate power over the American family. 

By the time this case is heard in court, I’m sure we’re going to learn that the pressures of the school on the kid were one of the most significant contributing factors to the violence.  And tug of war between the school and the parents over who controls a growing child’s life will prove to be the smoke of the actual fire.  The state and its government schools view their role as co-parents of all children. They’d like more authority than that, but when they call the parents at home over every little panic, they expect the parents to listen to their “expert” class opinion.  If the parents reject those opinions, as they often do, of course, the state finds this alarming.  In this case, the parents truly missed the mark, and the school and prosecutor have an easy time crying foul.  The parents should have never let their child have access to that newly bought gun.  Part of purchasing a gun and giving it to a child is to have a managed teaching moment with them that they grow in to.  You can’t just give them a gun to make them feel empowered without major instruction.  The gun should have been locked up in the home and only taken out to take the kid shooting, to learn how to use the weapon.  So the parents clearly made a mistake in the management of buying a gun and owning it.  But again, I could rattle off dozens of cases that I know of right now where schools mess up the lives in detrimental ways of their students all the time, and they don’t get prosecuted like this, treated this way by the media.  It often gets covered up when they get caught, especially when a teacher molests students in perverted and destructive ways.  Some students threaten to kill other students that schools miss all the time, and usually, it doesn’t happen.  But because this time it happened to the parents and the school had put out the alarm ahead of time, the prosecutor, the state, and the government ran media, in general, wanted to throw the book at the parents when in fact, it was likely the school that caused the original problem.  And in that way, this is an attack on all of us.  The state has all the power and authority, and if they say we are guilty, we can have our whole lives overturned instantly.  We can be thrown in jail, separated from our loved ones, and isolated from logic.  Then, and only then, can we start the path to prove our innocence, which for these parents may take the rest of their lives.  The state and the school have ruined their lives because they bought a gun for their child.  The actions against the parents’ behavior aren’t about justice; it’s about attacking America’s gun culture and implementing their progressive plan that states that the school is the real owner of the children, and if we get in the way, we will have our own lives destroyed.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Senator Jeanne Shaheen Threatens Revolution: What happens when a death cult gains power

Jeanne Shaheen Calls for Violence over Abortion

We were all having a nice time at Kings Island’s Winterfest, enjoying the Christmas decorations, my family, and making plans for the Holidays.  My daughters, who are now in their 30s, were reminiscing on what we used to do as a New Year’s ritual, and they were thinking about wanting to bring it back.  For most of their late childhood and teenage years, every New Year’s Eve, then flowing over into the next day, we would watch all five of the Dirty Harry movies by Clint Eastwood.  We called it the Dirty Harry marathon.  It was my way of teaching my kids about the dangers of progressivism forming in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s and what needed to be done about it.  Well, now, 50 years later, we all see what happened to San Francisco and how progressive politics destroyed it and California in general.  And instead of Dirty Harry, we elected Donald Trump, a person from that time and still thinks right about things.  Our ritual lasted until my girls were married essentially, and now they have kids of their own, so it’s been well over a decade since we had a Dirty Harry marathon.  But after seeing how messed up the world is, my girls were thankful that I took the time to teach them right, steer them away from drinking on New Year’s Eve, and instead spend time together safe and sound as a family.  And they want to resurrect that ritual again soon.  Maybe not this year because their kids are too young for that.  But certainly, in the near future, which I, of course, am happy to oblige. 

And I see that trend everywhere, really.  It’s not just my kids reminiscing over their childhood and my unique rituals that are so appealing.  All people are going through it; they feel they have been suckered by progressivism and want a redo.  That is most obvious in the Supreme Court cases of late and the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned due to the Mississippi law banning abortions to a large degree.  The Supreme Court took up the case early in December of 2021, which will have a decision in June of 2022.  All indications based on the presentation of the case to the court by observers indicate that the Mississippi law will be upheld and that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, which has the political left apocalyptic.  It’s really something that the left views abortion as a human right to such a degree that they think of it as a benchmark of their entire philosophy.  For them, it’s like gun rights for conservatives, which of course, is absurd.  It’s basing a political philosophy on the premise of a death cult.  The killing of babies.  And they are willing to go to extremes to preserve it.  Now, all this was forecast in the Dirty Harry movies, made in a different time.  Watching those movies and comparing them to our current times is a message in a bottle and warnings of this kind of thinking.  People who want to get back to the basics notice that what progressivism has led us to is not what we want.  That is one of the reasons people voted for Donald Trump, and 75 million people at that because they did not like what progressives have sold the country.  And instead of seeing that, they are digging in harder, which is a massive mistake for them. 

Just like in the Dirty Harry movies, the political left has made most all their gains, including Roe v. Wade, by threatening violence against the courts if they do not rule in their favor.  The communist-oriented left did this by social unrest and riots during the 60s and 70s, and the courts were intimidated.  The Supreme Court back then ruled on Roe v. Wade entirely on false interpretations of the Constitution as the ruling was made through force and fear.  Not the way to win people over to your way of thinking, by threatening to kill them for the right to kill off the next generation.  Do you want to live now, or do you want to live in the future is essentially what the political left said to everyone?  The Supreme Court did what they have done recently due to election fraud; they appeased the mob so that the anarchists didn’t come to their homes to rape them, rob them, and perhaps kill them at the end of a rope.  That is the only reason that Roe v. Wade happened.  It was not a law out of logic; it was done out of fear. That’s why Senator Jeanne Shaheen came out this week as things were looking bad for them and threatened that there would be a “revolution” if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.  It was an astonishing threat, especially given the fact that people like her are trying to make a big deal out of the January 6th protests over the election certification.  What this liberal senator is doing is following the playbook that caused Roe v. Wade in the first place, the public pressure of a mob to incite violence to influence the legal system.  Threatening judges, harassing juries, inspiring criminals to burn down cities if they don’t get their way, its all illegal and is a strategy built on force, not logic, and it was always wrong.  People put up with Roe v. Wade when it happened, but logic says that once people have had time to think about it, they will change their minds. 

If there is violence that results from the overturning Roe v. Wade, it will be the fault of people like Senator Jeanne Shaheen.  People are people, and that law was bad in the beginning.  It was always going to be a states rights issue; the federal government does not have that kind of authority.  It never did, just like the federal government doesn’t have the right to impose vaccine mandates.  The political left turned to violence; then, when that violence was turned against them during the January 6th protests over election fraud, it scared them.  Yet, they should have always known that if they didn’t win people’s hearts and minds over to their culture of death, that cult would eventually be overcome with logic.  People generally understand that abortion is murder.  They might participate in the killing of babies out of convenience.  But that doesn’t stop them from feeling bad about it.  And those guilty feelings won’t result in positive legislation.

Abortion is murder, and those who support it essentially argue that it’s a human right to conduct murder.  And the only way they have been able to gain public approval is through threats of violence.  That is what Senator Shaheen was turning to when she could see where the Supreme Court was heading with its opinions on the Mississippi case. If it wasn’t Mississippi, it would be Texas, Ohio, or several other states which will come up with their own version of protecting life.  The flimsy case of Roe v. Way was a time bomb from the beginning because the opinion wasn’t based on thoughtful law, it was an appeasement of the mob, and those fears have not held up over time.  The political left should have never expected it to.  So any violence that does happen because of it is on their heads, and their’s alone.  Death is death, and what they propose is murder.  Their only counterpoint is either now or later.  But it’s still all about death in the end. 

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why People Don’t Crash Into Each Other All The Time: Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ and the “Invisible Hand”

The Invisible Hand, Why People Don’t Crash Into Each Other With Their Cars

To me, there is no question.  But the Biden administration and the Obama administration before it was all about Keynesian economics, which was a disaster from the outset of the Red Decade when the socialist John Maynard Keynes implemented it in England.  When you hear Biden or any Davos billionaire talk up Keynesian economics, what you are hearing is utter destruction by macroeconomic socialists and students of Karl Marx intending to give government entirely too much power, which is why the most power-hungry of our society like it so much.  Billionaires want this system because they can always control politicians with their money, which ultimately lets them rule the world from the shadows.  It was a disaster from day one.  When Keynes first spoke about it, failure was already percolating, and it is even more so today.  The only reason people don’t have a stronger opinion about Keynesian economics is that it’s the only kind of economics they teach in college, really, and all the colleges of the world, for that matter. It’s the only thing Joe Biden knows, and when he says the world’s top minds all agree with is infrastructure plan, he’s essentially saying they all studied Keynesian economics at the same schools by the same loser teachers, for all the same reasons.  And they never figured it out, and they continue to stand by their Keynesian economics in the way that they promote vaccines for Covid when we all know that they do nothing for treatment.  Only methods like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin effectively treat Covid.  Yet, the government insists on failed methods to cover up their sheer stupidity from the outset.  The government never wants to admit that they were wrong on economics or disease control.  That is why they can’t be trusted and must be heavily managed by the public.  Because government always tends to go astray. 

Of course, my position is not one that I reject everything.  But I reject much of what the progressive era has produced, including the work of Sigmond Freud, Carl Jung, the positions of the media and politics over that span, and most of what people have been taught in university.  It’s not all garbage, but we used to know better.  And the answers are there. The progressive era was essentially the creation of Karl Marks and Edward Bellamy, where they made a global move to micromanage people with centralized control, and it’s been a disaster.  To this day, many still cling to it, but that’s because they are stupid and have forgotten how things really work in the world. When it comes to economics, and America was essentially its creation, the book I most treasure and have read countless times is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.  It’s what all economic theories should be based on. We can see the benefits of American culture as it relates to the rest of the world. It has been the undisputed champion of the great economic theories of our times, including Greek, Roman, and Egyptian societies.  Never did something work so well as the ideas of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Progressives didn’t like it because they wanted central control. Smith’s invisible hand is a repulsive concept to those who want to micromanage others for all kinds of psychologically wrong reasons. 

When I explain The Wealth of Nations to people and the concept of the “invisible hand,” I often talk about America’s car culture.  I tell the story in the video above of me driving my family through the Smokey Mountains with our RV in the fast lane of I-40.  Next to us is a logging truck.  In front of us was a dump truck.  All around them are numerous cars and trucks of all shapes and sizes winding through the mountains and tunnels at 70 MPH.

In many cases, there are only a few feet between us and the next car.  Next to us on the left side is a concrete wall, and beyond that is the opposite lane of traffic going the other way at the same speed.  The whole journey is perilous if looking at how the government looks at things or the Keynesian economic theory.  If anyone person makes the slightest mistake, there could be a 50 car pile up and hundreds of people killed.  But truly, seldom do crashes ever happen, and statistically, we might go through our whole lives with many hours of opportunity for errors to occur and only have a few crashes.  As a society, we have accepted the risk and enjoy the rewards.  If you leave in the morning with your car, you are most of the time going to come home safe and sound at the end of the day because it is in everyone’s self-interest to preserve their property.  So crashes seldom occur—that is the nature of the “Invisible Hand.” Self-interest governs behavior for the benefit of all—the key to understanding The Wealth of Nations and the general success of America as a global superpower. 

Keynesian economics is like the subway, public bus, or the public toilet with people making a mess and never cleaning it up.  When people don’t own the property, they don’t take care of it because it replaces self-interest with shared benefit.  And that means that the lowest value always wins.  If the person dressed in a nice suit is sitting next to some barely surviving bum who hasn’t washed their clothes in weeks, the nicely dressed person has everything to lose in the investment while the bum loses nothing.  They can only gain from such an exchange.  So the net result is that public transportation is dirty, uncomfortable, too expensive, and it never gets you where you want to go because other people determine your travel route.  Everything is centrally planned, so the net result is that everyone is just a bit unhappy with the shared experience.  It’s not by accident that liberals like public transportation for the same reasons, and conservatives love their cars.  They want independence to decide where they want to go and when they will get there.  And they don’t like to share their space with people who aren’t equally invested in their appearance. 

When people are free to come and go as they please and have a stake in getting there, they tend not to run into each other, which might damage their property or their life.  When you look at a highway at 3 AM and wonder where all those people are going at all hours of the day, all days of the week, no central government could provide instruction for all those little details.  Only self-interest could drive such ambition, and out of that activity comes a tremendous economic benefit. I’ve driven all over the United States at all hours of the day, and seldom, even in the most remote section of the country, was I ever alone on the road for long.   That is the essence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  It is the economic means of American life, it should be studied exclusively in high school, starting in the fifth grade, and nothing else matters.  I will never say that Adam Smith was the final word on economic theory. I’m sure future improvements will be made as necessity dictates.  But Keynesian economics was not that improvement.  It was an attack on the free market by centralized planners who wanted an administrative state.  Not people who wish to support or understand why any country is better when people are turned loose to act on behalf of their own self-interest freely.  But we see the magic every day, in our cars, on our roads, anywhere where people travel freely with an extension of themselves with private transportation.  Any trace of Keynesian economics in American society or any society for that matter should be eradicated from our minds forever and remembered for its stupidity and malice for which it was constructed.  We need to stick with what works and has worked.  Not what only gives power to the most insecure and unintelligent among us, the modern progressives. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

They Teach You To Be Dumb So You Don’t See Their Crimes: Thoughts from the Ohio State/Michigan football game

Government Schools are designed to Make You Dumb

If you do a root cause analysis on corruption, you will conclude that laziness is the primary driver.  And when you look at the most common trait of a government employee of any kind, on average, you will find that they tend to seek that type of work because they are lazy.  Therefore, it’s nearly a promise in every circumstance that you will get corruption out of government employees that will need to be heavily monitored.  Yet what do you get when you hire government employees protected by a socialist labor union to educate your society?  Well, you get the results of laziness and corruption on a mass scale.  And to look at it another way, what is the root cause of criminal behavior?  Well, it’s laziness again.  People would instead steal something than earn something because they think it is the easier path to a personal objective.  So guess what happens when you have criminals running your government, and they are also in charge of educating your society?  Well, you get the results of what I saw while watching the Ohio State, Michigan game.  The audience of over 100,000 people there in Ann Arbor all caught looking at the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, the illusions, the smoke, the mirrors, the bellowing projection of fear seeking the blue pill distraction of an exciting football game.  But not dealing with the root cause of much of what is wrong with society, a poor education not because we didn’t fund it correctly, but that we allowed people to learn all the wrong things.  

Education to me is a lifelong experience.  I think everyone should read a book or two per week, during their entire lives.  Graduating from college at age 22 isn’t enough to become an “educated person.” I deal with many people who have master’s degrees and doctorates, and I don’t consider these people educated.  It may give them a good start in a field of endeavor, but education is a daily adventure, not a final destination.  In the times we are in now, there are so many opportunities to be educated; we have access to more books and information than at any point in the history of the world.  And being well-read is a responsibility of all people.  If you want a great society, you need an educated society.  But as it stands, and what was evident at that college football game, all college sports, and even professional sports, is that the criminals of our society have deliberately dumbed down our people through the education process so that they can get away with committing crimes on a massive scale. 

One example of this deliberate ignorance was the expectation of the Biden administration into lying to our face about gas prices.  The Biden radicals shut off oil production in America.  Gas prices went up.  Then we were told that a global cabal runs the oil market and that America was powerless to do anything about it, when in fact, we just had a president in Trump who had the oil price issue under control.  But what is really driving up the costs of deliberately sabotaging the oil market is the Biden administration’s commitment to the United Nations climate change agenda.  Those same officials stood in front of the media and lied to everyone about the cause of the rising prices, and they expected their answers to stick.  They also expect the media to report the information as propaganda out of sheer laziness and the crippled mind of ignorance the public education system had given them.  The best way to hide a crime, or many crimes, in this case, is to teach people not to see it.  That is the result of our public education system and our colleges.  They are mass failures, and they were made that way on purpose by lazy, criminal-minded government employees who would rather live by a life of crime than by the ethics of hard work.  For proof, review the contents of the Biden laptop, and everything will become very clear.

Those poor people at that football game are most upset about the high gas prices. Still, they do not want to shake up any controversy with their friends and family over politics and election fraud instead of turning their energies to a football game.  They spend fortunes at those two prominent colleges, and they want to see something positive for it.  Is their education valuable? Did it teach them anything really useful in life?  No.  If anything, it has crippled them intellectually.  But if Michigan could only beat Ohio State, well, then there’s something to cheer for.  Suddenly, a six-figure education is worth the money if Michigan could beat Ohio State only one day a year.  Or, as usually happens, Ohio State wins and justifies all the wasted effort in those educations with a rallying cry all the students and their parents can enjoy. This dominating sports program serves as the face of the school.  Meanwhile, all the bad work is done behind the scenes; all the wrong things are taught for reasons that only serve a criminal enterprise in public service. 

It’s just something I noticed as the students rushed the field at the end of the game, where Michigan won the game.  The pent-up energy was more than a victory; it was a justification for their belief in a system that has let them down.  The results of the football game at least gave them some lipstick for the pig.  But it had emptied their bank accounts on another kind of theft, the looting of minds that might otherwise function from intelligence.  But it’s not all bad.  Education is the most important thing we do, but its responsibility cannot come from the criminal class, the public servants who do those jobs because they are too lazy for anything else in life.  No, the education for things in life must come from you.  You must not look to others to educate you; you must do it yourself.  And it doesn’t end with a college degree, a $400,000 house, and 2.5 kids in a flat marriage to someone stuck in the same rut.  No, education is every Saturday morning from 5 AM to noon, or every morning from 4:30 AM to about 7 AM, reading books, voluminous amounts of books, the great classics, popular fiction, modern commentary, speculative sciences, sciences, the religions of the world.  Everything that’s going on, I can see it all very clearly, but then I function every day in the manner I commented.  I get up early every morning, and I read.  And on weekends, I usually read for 6 or 7 hours per day before everyone else gets up and does things.

You do that kind of thing all your life, no matter how young you are or how old you get.  You educate yourself by feeding your mind good things.  You can still watch the Ohio State, Michigan games.  It comes on at noon.  You can still do your weekly chores.  You can still run the kids around town and drop them off where they want to go.  But while you’re waiting on things, you read a book instead of wasting time on Facebook updating your profile picture to people who really could care less about it.  They only give you a vote because they want the same from you.  Instead of wasting your time, feed your mind, make yourself truly smart, and only then will the blatant antics of these modern government crimes become apparent because the criminals count on everyone not to see what they are doing.  And the dumber you allow yourself to be, the more you trust the education they gave you, the more crime we will see in our society.  And they’ll do it until we stop it, and the results of the Michigan game won’t prevent it. 

Rich Hoffman

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