Category: National Debt

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

The Ohio Jim and Joe Show: For governor, in the May 2022 primary it’s all about Trump

Jim Renacci picks Joe Knopp as a Running Mate in Ohio

I didn’t know much about Joe Knopp when I attended the special press conference of Jim Renacci on Thursday, December 2nd, 2021.  I knew I liked Jim Renacci and supported him emphatically to run for governor of Ohio.  The current governor, Mike DeWine, had not shown that he was a conservative during his first term, and his Covid response was a disaster against the Constitution.  He was the first governor in all of the nation to attempt to alter election laws and shut down our economy, and we have all seen enough.  He had to go, and Jim was the best replacement.  But this particular event was a bit of a surprise.  Jim was going to announce his Lt. Governor.  Naturally, I was thinking of the apparent picks; it would have to be a conservative woman of some kind because that’s what everyone does these days.  But no, instead, Jim was thinking outside the box when he announced that he was putting Joe Knopp on the ticket, another privately successful person.  The more I thought about it and got a chance to meet Joe, the more I liked him.  He was, after all, the producer of the Trump movie, The Trump I Know.    

About halfway through the Joe Knopp introduction, I started putting everything together.  Joe was the guy who produced the movie showing all the great Trump women who came out right before the election in 2020.  It told the story that nobody covered about Trump, all the little things he does behind the scenes that made him such a great president, and how he treated women in his campaign and organizations.  It all came to an excellent little focus during the press conference, especially during the question and answer session where reporters asked what Renacci planned to do about Ohio being the number 1 state in all of America for corruption.  Sometimes we all start accepting dysfunction to such an extent that we think of it as reality.  But the reason the media hated Trump, as the Swamp itself does, was because of these independent business guys, people like Trump, and his friend Jim Renacci.  Joe Knopp wanted to eliminate the dark money cookies that all the Swamp creatures get to eat off of.  Columbus, Ohio was every bit as much of a swamp as Washington D.C., Just on a different scale, and essentially, Governor DeWine is like the Joe Biden in the executive branch.  A deeply compromised person who has become rich off dark money hated people who challenged that structure.  From the media to the politicians, it was all an addiction to dark money that they considered such a threat.  So much so that they would have destroyed President Trump if they could.  But the Trump women that Joe Knopp captured in his film so beautifully told the absolute truth, which is what voters saw.  And in Ohio, we were going to get to make the same kind of decision in favor of the Jim and Joe Show. 

This is a different kind of race for the governor.  As Renacci will say, he’s not running against Mike DeWine; he’s running for Ohio.  But this is a primary race that would generally be protected from challengers because they are typically low turnout elections. The people who show up are usually inspired by dark money. That’s how people like Mike DeWine get power and keep it.  And it’s everything that’s wrong with Ohio.  So to run against Mike DeWine is running for Ohio.  But we’re talking about swamp creatures who are the only benefactors.  We need in Ohio essentially what Trump was able to do at the federal level, and it takes people who are independent of that dark money to make it happen.  Playing a conventional game of politics that sets up a specific media narrative would not make Ohio any less corrupt.  It’s essentially the media that is in on it all, they set the parameters of the dark money game, and they all feed off each other.  No, what we want in Ohio is freedom from those kinds of people.  Jim Renacci is independently successful and is personal friends with President Trump.  And so is Jim’s pick for Lt. Governor. 

Of course, the media narrative of the Joe Knopp announcement was that he was a Christian filmmaker, which is true.  But that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of who Joe Knopp is.  It’s like saying that Steven Spielberg is a liberal film director.  That may be an aspect of who Steven Spielberg is, but it can’t be argued that Spielberg films generally reach out to all audiences.  And that was certainly the case with Joe’s movie, The Trump I Know.  The media doesn’t like people who make Christian movies that are every bit as good as Academy Award-winning films made in Hollywood.  Joe is very much a product of Hollywood and a realization that the political left has, which makes them very uncomfortable, that they don’t control the entire movie-making industry.  So to emphasize that Joe is a Christian for them is an attempt to limit his reach not only in the primary but also in the general election.  Yet, all this conventional thinking forgets is that for the first time in the history of America, especially under the DeWine administration, churches were closed while abortion clinics were open.  And DeWine put the abortion activist Amy Acton on his staff to essentially run Ohio for an entire year.  Voters have had some cold water thrown in their faces, where the government interrupted their religion and showed the fangs of the state’s power.  Ohio voters are primed to vote for an honest Christian crusader who loves President Trump and pledges to attack corruption without becoming consumed himself.  Yes, picking Joe Knopp was an intelligent move for Jim Renacci.  It’s not business as usual, and that’s the point. 

I left the Renacci event happy.  Finally, we would have a positive choice in Ohio by a few really good people who were independently successful and beyond the corruption of dark money.  And to have a chance to remove DeWine and replace him with Renacci with such staff, people like Joe Knopp start to repair what has been broken in Ohio after the Covid shutdowns by DeWine.  The best justice for all the bad things DeWine did would be to replace his place in the Swamp with the drain of Renacci and Knopp.  These are people that real conservatives in Ohio can truly cheer for and feel good about voting for.  Many of the years in the past when the voter turnout has been low, partly because the candidates are always swamp creatures like DeWine, which nobody gets excited about, options like these didn’t seem possible.  But Renacci and Knopp, well, there’s something that people can get excited about.  It’s great to have a choice finally, and in meeting Knopp, I can only say that he is one of the nicest people I have met this year.  Such a good person, and such a nice family.  To have people like that to vote for in an election is truly a treasure, and I think Ohio will enjoy the option.  True, the dark money monster is out there, but I think these guys have a good chance of getting new voter turnout activated.  And for that to be an option is a huge opportunity that will make 2022 a year of justice to remember.

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Legality of Fake Vaccination Cards: People want freedom from any administrative state

Freedom from an Administrative State

When people say they want “freedom,” this next story represents the reason.  Freedom is more than a cliché; it’s a desire not to be limited to the restrictions of an administrative state that, through history, has shown time and time again to be corrosive to innovation, joy, and advancing society.  The less of any administrative state you have, the better a society and its people.  An administrative state only benefits the people running it, who are always in the extreme minority. It forces people to live within the limits of the weakest links in such a society.  So when people say they want freedom, they mean they don’t want an administrative state of losers running their life.  And that was never more obvious than in a story about Antonio Brown, a wide receiver for my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Over the last week or so, one of his private cooks and a girlfriend of some kind leaked information that the fully vaccinated NFL football player was using a fake card to prove it and that he had bought it for $500.  Since that accusation, Brown and the Buccaneer staff had stood by his vaccination status; when Brown got the shot, a team member was with him to witness it.  The Buccaneers had complied by reviewing the vaccine cards to the NFL, which was doing the bidding of the Biden administration like nice little servents.  So there weren’t many teeth to the story to go anywhere, but it does bring up a whole host of problems that I had been thinking about myself.  Even if Antonio Brown did provide a fake card proving his vaccine status, so what?  What law did he break?  And why was it such a big deal causing the media to attempt to shame him into compliance with quite a lot of news generated?

I have personally witnessed hundreds of people getting the shot and the card at this point, so I’ve had some of these questions from the beginning of the process.  First, I have watched many people get the shot who immediately had terrible side effects from it.  They tell you when you get the shot to stay near the administrator for 10 minutes in case you pass out.  So getting this shot, even under forced government coercion, is the grounds for many, many lawsuits.  Watching the process over these many months, I would say it’s one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen a government attempt to do to its people.  It’s terrible stuff because the government knows the vaccine is dangerous.  When they gave Joe Biden the shot on television, I do not believe that they really gave him the shot because it would have knocked him out for days, perhaps even killed him at his age.  I would not blame a professional athlete one bit for not wanting to get a vaccine shot and looking to get a fake vaccine card to prove it, to avoid the painful aftereffects of the vaccines that might ruin the season for them.  Professional athletes cannot afford to have their bodies shut down the way this vaccine does to people.  So my first thought about Antonia Brown’s actions for me was, “so what.” While the media made it sound like he had just murdered people with his “dishonesty.” 

Then again, watching all those people get the shots, then have some administrator pick up a card off a tall stack of little cardboard vaccine cards and scribble some dates, and the site of the administration as the proof of the event was shaky from day one.  That tiny, unextraordinary card was what the big deal was?  The first thought I had was that massive amounts of counterfeit cards would be shown as proof that they received the vaccine.  There was no traceability to the cards, and given the stakes, where it meant that some people wouldn’t be able to have their jobs if they didn’t have a card showing they had a vaccine, well, of course, they were going to cheat with a fake card filled out with some chicken scratch.  The Buccaneers as an organization said precisely what I had been thinking for months when they were pressed on the matter.  They reviewed Antonio Brown’s card and didn’t see any errors in it.  What were they supposed to check, a proper signature, the correct dates?  It wasn’t the Buccaneers responsibility to check the validity of the cards themselves, just that people had them.  So the government, in all its administrative wisdom, issued this massive mandate with considerable costs to people in their health and livelihoods. Yet, they had no way to know if people had received vaccines or not, based on a stupid, standard piece of cardboard that a child could copy and fill out as proof.  Yet, that was precisely the case. 

I remember how hard it was to get a fake ID when I was younger, showing that people were over 21 when they were only 18 or 19.  Back then, it was perfectly justified to make a fake ID because all the hot girls were looking for older guys who could take them to places 21 and over.  So as a guy, you had to have a fake ID to play the game; the government didn’t know what it was doing when it changed the drinking age from 18 to 21 as I was coming to those ages, so people had to survive like every culture where there is an overly administrative state, a black-market forms.  China has a big one, as do all totalitarian governments, because people want the freedom to do what they need to do in life and when governments come up with too many rules based on their own personal limitations, law-breaking will become a dominant recreational activity.  I knew some sharp cookies who made fake IDs, and they made good livings providing them.  These vaccine cards were not even close to being as challenging to make.  Anybody could make a proof of vaccine card, so given the political climate, there was no question to my mind that there was going to be massive fraud in providing the cards. 

Yet even worse, the government obviously hadn’t thought about any of that as they clamped down on people with Executive Orders and tried to scare everyone into compliance.  Nothing about the vaccine mandates was constitutional, the government got caught breaking the law themselves by implementing such a thing, and the Buccaneers knew it as an organization.   They played along with the made-up rules, but it wasn’t their job to investigate whether Antonio Brown got the shot as the card showed he did on the dates they showed he received them.  It was their job to collect the cards and demonstrate compliance to an out-of-control government and the woke NFL that wanted to bend the knee to an administrative state so they could stay in business.  There were so many things wrong with the whole process that the path of least resistance always has the answer, come up with a fake card and shut everyone up.  There was no legal authority. The government could not enforce any breaking of the rules because they made up the rules like some playground kid making them up as the game was being played, and that’s what the government gets for its gross overreach.  When they force people to comply with their dumb rules, people will find a way to break those rules so they can live life.  And that is the kind of freedom that we all talk about in these kinds of circumstances.  People want to be free of being bothered by this kind of administrative state overreach.  The more rules people have to live under, the more rules they will have to break to live life, and that is the reality that the administrative state of any kind has never admitted to itself. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jim Renacci, The DeSantis of Ohio: Even the Disney Company has benefited from federalism

Jim Renacci for Governor of Ohio

Well, thank goodness for federalism.  If you have read the new book from Geoff Shepard, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, you can see clearly that what happened to Trump and Kennedy is not new tactics.  In the climb to global power, foreign and domestic enemies have thought that they could control the world by controlling the presidency.  They make a mistake in viewing the presidency as a kind of American king, which was always wrong.  But the plot to remove Trump is just the same old power that has been around for a while, and in knowing what we know now and comparing it to the Nixon Conspiracy, there are a lot of ah-ha moments in that book which is very telling.  What has protected America from a complete takeover by these crazy powers, which we might call the “deep state” or the “globalists,” is our very good government balance of federalism where local and state powers are a priority.   The federal government has very little power within the borders of the country.  We could spend hours and hours talking about the vast Covid conspiracies or the quandaries of the “deep state” and their intentions of menace.  In essence, what we have learned after the Trump presidency and the global Covid protocols is that federalism is the way to go all over the world.  A competitive check on powers among the states has shown many economic lessons they had previously taken for granted.  And in America, Governor DeSantis of Florida has proven to be one of the very best governors of a state, where Ohio’s Mike DeWine has shown himself to be the worst.  Both call themselves Republicans, but only DeSantis has truly embraced federalism and the magic of capitalism to solve problems that came from so many directions.  And to this day, Florida is thriving where Ohio is not.  If only Ohio could have a governor like DeSantis.

But wait, Ohio does have such an opportunity.  Jim Renacci is running for governor and looks poised to primary DeWine in May of 2022.  Jim is offering to be the DeSantis of Ohio, using the model of federalism that has evolved out of Covid, where governors of states have shown just how much power they had.  During the Covid lockdowns, which Mike DeWine started even among the blue state governors, the fundamental philosophy of the governors of all states had a measurable distinction in the success and economic recovery of the states.  In red states where governors were strong, the economic impact of Covid had a much less impact.  Cases being cases, all the states dealt with their issues, but in blue states where lockdowns and tyrannical power went to the heads of the governors, such as in New York and Michigan, death by Covid and the rapid spread of the virus had no improvement.  Statistically, they look to have performed worse than in states that were more free and open with much less government intrusion.  And these were valuable lessons.  No longer was federalism debated in a college classroom advocating Marxism and more centralized authority as a capitalist utopia boomed outside the windows preparing for a big college football game on the weekend.  Now all the rules of economic theory were put to the test by the two primary ways of approaching government, and the red states clearly won.  Blue state governors, which Mike DeWine operated as one even though he called himself a Republican, showed the severe cost in misery, economic downturns, and the dangers of letting health departments run the general policy of a state. 

On the other hand, DeSantis decentralized the problem, took away the federal government’s power to stick its nose in people’s business, and promoted an environment where people at the local level could solve Covid problems and economic challenges through their own innovations.  By protecting the diverse state of Florida from centralized mistakes made by the federal government and protecting people with executive orders from further centralized authority mishaps, DeSantis led Florida to a very successful economic recovery coming out of the government-made pandemic.  And the correct measure has been in the reaction by the very liberal woke company Disney in what they have been forced to admit, even if reluctantly.  Due to the severe and lingering lockdowns in California, the Walt Disney Company has moved several thousand employees from the Anaheim offices to Orlando because Florida has been open and is a much more stable business climate where the government can’t interrupt their business operations so frequently.  With DeSantis, companies can at least trust the governor will keep the government out of the company’s management. With Disney going woke for such a long period of time, much of that wokeness came out of mitigation of knowing that for decades, a centralized government coming out of the White House intended complete authoritarian control, similar to what they have in communist China.  So they did what most companies did, appease the tyrants with wokeness so that they could survive.  But in Florida, where the Disney presence is a massive part of the state’s economy, actively and passively, the reality of the situation benefits the entertainment company tremendously.

From the beginning of Covid, Disney led the way just like Mike DeWine by adopting all the government rules and regulations, imposing mask mandates, and all kinds of ridiculous and unscientific protocols, which has hurt their business tremendously.  For them, if everyone had to impose the same restrictions upon themselves, then it made sense.    But because of DeSantis not following all the rules, but in protecting people from those rules, all businesses in Florida did not have to wear dumb masks or socially ridiculously distance themselves.  That left the Disney Company hanging out there alone, and losing money because of it, by their own choice.  When it came time for the unconstitutional vaccine mandates, which the Disney Company wanted to impose, DeSantis had created a business climate where that Biden Executive Order would be challenged in court protecting businesses from an overreaching government that was just spitballing in the wind regarding ways to manage a virus they had in fact through Dr. Fauci released upon the world.  So because of DeSantis, the people of Florida were protected from that level of stupidity, and even the Disney Company had to recognize the benefit.  They announced last week that while they reviewed the legal circumstances, they would not be imposing the vaccine mandate on their employees for the time being.  Essentially, they were putting their finger to the wind and seeing how these court cases play out, which is great for everyone involved.  But if not for DeSantis, there would be no check on federal power, no matter how well-intentioned.  Ultimately, when mistakes are centralized, everyone suffers.  When errors are separated by federalism, then not everyone has to suffer.  That is the benefit of a great governor like DeSantis.

That DeSantis model is now out there, and there is history that can be studied for centuries on the positive impact of federalism during a mass international crisis.  Nobody can put this genie back in the bottle; it’s out, and it’s out forever.  All those who have been pushing governments toward more centralized government, as they were even in the Nixon White House, have seen through Covid the root cause of their massive failures.  They had hoped, like Disney, to hide those failures by forcing 100% submission to their cause. Still, because power was decentralized through federalism within the states of America, to compete, even the mighty Disney Company had to see reality for what it was.  They benefited greatly from DeSantis as governor; even if they didn’t vote for him, his policies made Disney a better company.  And that approach is what is needed in Ohio.  With Mike DeWine, we will never have such a governor.  But with Jim Renacci, we have a chance to have perhaps someone better than Ron DeSantis.  Trump helped pave the way for DeSantis.  And DeSantis has helped pave the way for people like Jim Renacci, whom I think can actually do better in Ohio than DeSantis has been for Florida.  And the time is coming quickly for us to be able to vote for him in the primary.  Which is something we can all look forward to with great zeal!

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Liberals Only Want to Boss People Around: The mental illness of the Democrat Party

People Who are Obsessed with Bossing You Around Tend to be Democrats

Without question, especially after Thanksgiving dinner with family members, some that you may only see a few times a year, politics is always that unsatisfied topic that burns in the back of all our minds.  We have been taught that we shouldn’t talk about politics or religion even though both dominate our lives and thoughts almost exclusively.  And the losers who spread that bad advice to us were liberals who encouraged us to avoid a conflict at the dinner table or living rooms of our homes from people who may be liberal in our lives.  So in the same fashion that we see prosecutorial misconduct among liberal prosecutors or religious ideologies, like “climate change” coming at us with blinding speed, we are not supposed to engage it or talk about it. Instead, we are supposed to talk about Blue Pill stuff like sports or Black Friday sales and hope to avoid talking about supply chain problems caused by an illegal president Biden with a big-government approach that has crippled our economy and put China on a pedestal for world domination.  So in that way, we never talk about the solution to the world’s real problems; we just learn to put up with it, which has empowered them into all sorts of destructive behavior.  Yet, there is a reason we are uncomfortable with these political rules of our day because the rules themselves mask something we all know and feel about the matter, which demands a resolution.  And it all points back to what I always say about liberalism; it’s a mental illness that needs a psychological fix, not an understanding of fairness on the battlefield of ideas.  Liberalism, because of its severe disfunction in nature, shouldn’t even be on the battlefield. 

One thing that all liberals have in common is that they like to boss people around.  We obviously have seen this with Covid and the government’s reaction to it.  Blue state governors have been the worst, and those who want to tell people what to do have heard the dog whistle.  They have acted like that big brother who is babysitting all of us and wants to essentially be the parent out of control with power telling us where to go, when to wash our hands, when to go to bed, when to eat, change clothes, even what to watch on television.  They are obsessed with telling us what to do about everything.  And now that they have captured through all types of political theater, they have the congress, the senate, and the White House at the federal level; they are out of control.  It’s not that the power went to their heads; it’s that they needed power so much that they were willing to do anything to get it.

Another thing I say all the time is that the number one thing that people are most concerned with in life is their status on the pecking order with their peers.  Adults, more than anything, want to climb the social ladder of power and prestige among their peers more to satisfy their insecurities about their meaning of life-based on how it was taught to them as children. You’re born, you do what your parents tell you, what society tells you, and you gain power so that you can acquire the ability to do that eventually to other members of society.  If you work hard, you might become a powerful politician or CEO of some company, and people will respect you and do what you tell them.  Really, when it comes down to it, liberalism, in varying degrees, is one of the most destructive elements of any society, and it can be measured based on how much people want to boss you around.  The more conservative a person truly is, the less they like to tell other people what to do.  The more liberal, the more they want to boss people around. 

But it doesn’t stop in politics such as “elected office.” Still, it extends into every aspect of our lives, such as the nosy neighbor who is always calling the neighborhood association about some flag you might be flying that might bring down property values.  Or the slow person in the fast lane on the highway who travels under the speed limit because they intend to slow you down for what they perceive as safe conduct.  We see it with the mask police now in stores.  We see it in the places we work where some ladder climber boss is always there to tell us when to use the restroom or take a break.   It’s not enough to call someone who thinks they are conservative a RINO if they claim to be Republicans but have the psychological problem of always wanting to tell people what to do all the time.  We have to identify the mental illness for what it is, some form of liberalism that has migrated in name to the current state of severe mental dysfunction. 

The real quandary for many of these people and why their psychological disorder is so destructive to the world around them is that the essence of their behavior is that they must live off the efforts of others.  That is why they want to boss people around because they actually need the efforts of others to survive. After all, deep inside, they lack the courage to do things on their own.  So they make themselves part of the world around them as a figure of authority to mask their own timidity.  And if they appear to be in charge of the pecking orders of our existence, they can hide their most profound insecurities.  So when we find ourselves at some social gathering and there are always these micromanagement types who start telling us we have to take our shoes off to enter a room, or to tell us where to sit, what to eat, how to dress, and so on, avoiding talking about politics only makes the problem worse.  It allows these loser people to live free of judgment while abusing the world with their psychological disorders.  By avoiding discussion about their ailment, it never gets fixed, which isn’t good for anybody.  One of the reasons I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business was to help people deal with the tyrants in their lives.  It may not be Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi who are the worst; it might be some nosy aunt or peeping neighbor going through your trash.  It might be a boss who goes out of their way to harass you so they can remind you that they are your means to a living, and you have to do what they say.  It might be the little Cartman mall cop or the latest local health department newly empowered by the CDC to ruin our lives in their effort to tell more people what to do.  But what it all amounts to is that the desire to boss people around is an illness of the mind, not something that should be respected or even dealt with as a legitimate manner of public conduct.  We don’t need to treat liberals with equality and understanding.  We need to get them help in insane asylums because that’s where they belong.  Not believing they are equal or above us on some invisible pecking order.  They are not our “betters.” They are malcontents and damaged people who need treatment, not a pass of the gravy and a tight lip uttered under sports scores. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vigilante Justice is Better than No Justice: If the government fails to do its job, order can’t be the casualty

Justice is Valuable

The word so far is that the Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisolm had set the bail for the Waukesha mass murderer, James Brooks, artificially low—at only $1000, because of financial contributions from George Soros.  Soros has been doing a lot of that, spending money on district attorneys to shape law enforcement policy toward his goal of destroying the United States through internal turmoil.  No need to send troops to the border to fight invaders like in the movie Red Dawn.  The new villains of the world are billionaires who have had their money go to their heads and drive them to world domination.  They seek to undermine our system of law and order to overthrow our nation and rule us all in place of the values of our republic. It’s a fast-moving story, and if you add that incursion onto the millions of dollars other billionaires have used to buy off the media, it’s not an accident that in the wake of the tragedy of Brooks driving his car through a Christmas parade, killing children and adults alike, that we didn’t see a vigil for all the names of the dead.  They did have a vigil, just not the usual wall-to-wall media coverage that usually happens in tragedies like this one.  Unlike a mass school shooting that drives a political narrative, the political left put Brooks on the streets to commit this crime.  It was part of their strategy, and they wanted nothing more than to move on from the story and get back to talking about how they felt about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict that freed him in his self-defense case.  These attackers from the political left, from international criminals like George Soros to the Milwaukee rapper James Brooks all want the same thing, the destruction of America and all of us who make the nation great.  And they’ll do anything to make it happen, frequently breaking the law as they do it.  And they don’t care. 

This has brought up the concept of vigilante justice in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, where the political left felt the young man should have gone to jail for murder for the rest of his life for defending Kenosha from thugs, scum bags, and thieves with a rifle.  Yet, they support the bail and release of known criminals like James Brooks totally based on skin color and social status. It’s a concept based on insanity, which is a symptom of the Democrat party as a whole.  Liberalism is an insane concept that should be psychologically treated, not supported by philosophic debate for its own value.  I happen to have some extensive experience in vigilante justice; I wrote a book on it called The Symposium of Justice way back in 2004, which was based on experience I had with mayors, law enforcement, and the FBI over drugs that were being sold across the street from my home.  I wasn’t about to put up with that kind of thing, drugs were always something I fought against, and I couldn’t have them sold across the street by a bunch of punk kids.  But the police were in on it, and so were the many levels of government I turned to for exposure and justice.  In the end, if there weren’t vigilante justice, there wouldn’t have been any justice, and I will say all the time that vigilante justice is always better than no justice. 

But it’s no justice that the political left is after in this modern invasion of our country.  George Soros is just one of the many billionaires who have global intentions and see America as in the way of his plans.  So he is willing to throw vast sums of money to bring us all no justice, frustration, and an eventual collapse of our legal system for their tactical objectives.  But one thing they can’t stand is when people insist on justice anyway and take to the streets as Kyle Rittenhouse did with his Second Amendment rights fully intact.  Kyle wasn’t a vigilante; he was a young kid who wanted nothing more in the world than to be a cop.  But, if you are someone like George Soros, getting rid of cops is the goal, just as in my old case of the drug dealers; getting them hooked on the extra income made them less effective.  In whatever case, the goal is to erode law and order in favor of chaos and overthrow.  The political left wants people like Kyle Rittenhouse locked up while criminals like James Brooks are free on the streets to rape, pillage, and destroy American society.  The thugs of society are the army of the elite, as they see themselves, and they expect us to put up with it. 

I learned a lot from my vigilante days, and I don’t mind saying it.  The FBI knows all about it, but they let it happen, so there isn’t much they can do about any of it.  They broke the law by allowing it all to happen.  But I will say this, the wisdom of age is a much better tool than the antics of vigilante justice.  When I was younger, nobody wanted to listen to a young kid.  But as an older person now, I have quite a lot of influential people who listen carefully and value the input. I will always say that the best thing to do is try to make the system work by putting yourself in the middle of it.  You may not always get what you want, but you will find that your action will make it better.  Debate is the way to keep the kind of corruption I mentioned in my case in check.  If someone had been there to debate the mayors involved, the city council people, and many others, corruption could have been reduced.  The head of police who couldn’t pay his cops what they thought they were worth allowed for this side activity openly.  If someone had been there to debate with them, they might not have gone along with so much crime.  And in the case of John Chisolm, someone should have been going to lunch with this radical progressive.  Maybe then he wouldn’t have been so tempted by George Soros’s money if he had a few more friends.  The best way to have justice is to be part of the system, take responsibility for asking the hard questions, and work to make it as fair as possible.  Sitting around waiting for a crime to happen is the worst idea, but you don’t necessarily need to roam the streets as Batman.  I might suggest doing that if you are in your 20s and 30s, but the better way is to develop intelligence and reputation so you can fix it before it becomes a problem.  Corruption happens when good people are not part of the process. 

When Justice by Government Fails

Yet, for anybody to assume that vigilante justice won’t happen due to some liberal rule, they are smoking crack.  By nature, all humans seek justice, and if their society lets them down, they don’t have much recourse otherwise.  Demanding that people put up with bad government performance is simply unrealistic, and the Soros plan counts on that very concept.  People have a sense of justice, right and wrong, and if the government fails to uphold that standard, people will turn to vigilante justice. It’s the correct and moral thing to do.  But it is all of our responsibility to make sure the government doesn’t fail because we are the government.  These days I know lots of judges, lots of politicians, I know lots of law enforcement.   I would say that I have a pretty cut and dry sense of law and order, and they all know that.  And it helps them have a reference point just through relationship building.  We should all try to be more involved before we turn to vigilante justice.  But if all else fails, then we must have justice of some kind.  Putting up with criminal conduct and the media that has prostituted itself to billionaire money meant to attack us all should not be a hindrance.  In the end, no matter what method it is obtained, we will have justice, and we will have justice for all. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Dr. Fauci Learned Too Late: Americans will never accept the limits of an administrative state

The Limits of an Administrative State

In a lot of ways, I’m grateful for this mass chaos that we are seeing today.  I have been warning about it for so many years. Finally, there is context to the warnings.  Now people who don’t think about these kinds of government problems very much can see the cost of what a bad government can bring them.  I wish it weren’t so costly, but I think people needed to see it in a way that impacted them.  In their busy lives of paying the bills and picking their kids up from soccer practice, most people don’t have time to think very deeply about the things that impact them most.  And in many ways, the pressure put upon Dr. Fauci under the coronavirus management has been a fantastic exhibition of why the concept of the Administrative State is a perpetual failure every time it was tried.  But too often, these failures have been hidden behind successes that happen by accident.  Because President Trump left the White House and Biden came behind him, it left Dr. Fauci exposed.  As soon as we took away the positive sales talk of Trump, Covid-19 and its perpetrators were left open to their commitment to administrative failure. I’ve been talking about the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward because it was the formation essentially of big government at the start of the Progressive era, from the perspective of 1888.  And its stupidity in assuming that creating an all-powerful administrative state would be the cure-all for corruption and door for all future progress was misplaced from the start.  Many have always known this, but not enough could see it clear enough to act on that knowledge, that is, until now. 

From the Sunday Morning interview with the defender of the progressive administrative state, Ted Koppel, Dr. Fauci was exposed.  It’s clear that during all the lead-up to the pandemic crises role-playing that had been done at events like Event 201 in New York during October of 2019, that the American constitution was not discussed as a limiting factor to crises management on a global scale.  No matter what role Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci had in creating the Wuhan virus through gain of function research in partnership with China, it is quite evident that they did not understand how Americans would react to their protocols.  At first, people gave Dr. Fauci the benefit of the doubt.  They allowed lockdowns.  They allowed for masks, social distancing, and all kinds of crazy ideas created by the administrative state Edward Bellamy and Karl Marx had always dreamed of.  One world functioning under the rules and regulations of medical professionals to essentially nationalize all industry under a Covid emergency.  But Americans expect a plan to solve a problem.  They were never going to accept a perpetual change state where the medical industry that we count on to keep us healthy would become some parental government figure telling us what to do all the time, over everything.  And that ultimately is what Dr. Fauci didn’t understand at the beginning, which he is learning about now. 

Do I think Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are the intentional embodiment of evil?  No, I think they are typical bureaucrats who create evil by injecting themselves into a process as an administrative impediment to innovation, which is typical in all bureaucratic management bodies.  From their perspective, they were doing the right thing.  But see, that’s the problem.  The definition of the “right thing” is always determined based on the limited understanding of the characters involved. The administrative state that manages all that activity, as Edward Bellamy fantasized about, and progressives for the last 150 years have been trying to implement through our education system, was always going to be determined by the weakest links, which is something Americans ran from in Europe.  It was the cause of westward expansion.   Whatever anybody thinks about the destruction of the Indian nations, or the battles to free people from slavery, the revolutions, the piracy in the Caribbean, it all came from people wanting to be free of the administrative state, not chained to it more.  People like Dr. Fauci followed rugged Americans to their homes and now, through the media, were in every part of their lives.  So when there was no plan for getting rid of Covid, it would only be natural that people would grow to hate Dr. Fauci, as they hate all people who constantly intrude on their lives.  It’s clear now that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates never understood how Americans think or why, among others, in the administrative state. 

To indicate that Americans have a misplaced belief about individual rights over the demands of a public health crisis is not to understand the essence of our country.  Progressives like the billionaires attacking America like Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and many others have shown why we all want freedom from an overarching administrative state.  Whenever a thought process is siloed, as it is in the case of a heavily bureaucratic government where someone like Dr. Fauci sets a policy that everyone else must follow, then you are limited in your life to the limits of such people.  If they are not the smartest in the world or even the best, people will get frustrated and get stuck behind them.  For instance, I say this often, but when people tell you to stay in your lane, what they mean is that they expect you to stay behind some big truck on a highway that is only going 40 mph up a big hill, and they don’t want you to pass them.  They want you to follow the rules and to lower your own speed limit and expectations to the weakest link on the highway.  But Americans like to travel at their own speed, and if they come upon such a slow-moving vehicle, they expect to pass.  When the administrative state says they cannot give them room to pass, there will be angry people.  And Dr. Fauci obviously never planned for that reaction, which he should have considered from the outset. 

Before this debacle of the Biden administration and Dr. Fauci’s massive failures, by sticking himself into all our lives so recklessly, people tended to forget about the slow-moving trucks once they could pass.  By the time they got where they were going, their tempers lowered considerably, and life went on.  But now, because people have been restricted for so long, and there are no plans for a fix, people are getting justifiably angry.  America was founded as a solution to the administrative state.  We left the world to start our own life in North America.  We did it to be free of people like Dr. Fauci.  Not to become more managed by them.  Free people will give them the benefit of the doubt until it goes on too long and they get tired of being stuck behind the slow-moving truck. “They will not stay in their lane forever.” It’s a lesson Dr. Fauci and the rest of them learned too late.  No matter how good the intentions were, the rule in America is that administration state incompetency will not be tolerated, whereas it’s generally accepted in the rest of the world.   They accept it in other countries because they have learned to.  But in America, the nature of the people who make up the country and have a constitution that limits the powers of government on purpose, the concept of yielding to infinite authority isn’t in the cards.  Eventually, people will pass the administrators, and if their goals were to slow down society with their slow-moving truck, they would always end up disappointed.  The hatred of Dr. Fauci and the political division that has erupted over Covid is healthy, and it’s good for people to see it this way instead of through actual violence.  Perhaps this lesson will sink in and make us a better society.  But it won’t change America into an administrative state. Instead, maybe now people will listen better when we warn about it in the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Corruption: Uncovering history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

The Nature of Corruption

I can’t say it enough, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, turned out to be a treasure trove of philosophy that was just what America needed at just the right moment, at least for me, so that I could explain it to other people.  It was interesting; my family was mad at me for the breakneck pace of a big trip we were all on together.  We had just spent the day before seeing all the big sites in Yellowstone.  Every day, we had been getting up early and doing more in a day than most people do in a week of vacation.  Not only were my two daughters with me and their spouses but all my grandchildren as well.  I was on a mission; I was uncovering rocks putting together the essence of what was happening to our country.  The election year of 2020 had presented us all with lots of unusual problems, and I was looking for answers in 2021.  In June of that year, my family was deep in the rugged buttes of Wyoming several miles from the East entrance to the park outside Cody, Wyoming, which convinced me they needed a break from all the adventuring.  So, we agreed on a compromise; we’d take a day off our adventure and go to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in town and take it easy to let everyone catch their breath.  It was their idea, actually, but I didn’t tell them that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was one of the places I had on my list that was always at the top, and I wanted to go there badly.  So quite unexpectedly, I found myself there with my entire immediate family, and it turned out to be one of the great highlights of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those wonderful days with my family that intersected with questions I had been asking all my life, and suddenly there were answers. 

My concern was in asking the nature of corruption; we had just seen the removal of President Trump by a rigged election and hostile Democrats hell-bent on socialism and communism.  They had seen how well Bernie Sanders, the socialist, polled among young people during the presidential election the year prior, so now they were pulling off the masks and showing themselves to be the socialist they always were.  They were behaving the way I always said were their true intentions, and for many Americans, they were shocked by it.  At that time, I was also working on my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I had finished on the road that year and was in the editing process.  At the center of that book was an understanding of the nature of corruption.  My point was that some of the best years of American life that was least corrupt were the one where the modern socialists were declaring to be one of the most, the Victorian age, the end of the Gilded era, and the start of the Progressive.  For me, it was the other way around, so I was very interested in why the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was so popular among Americans for the closing decades of the 1800s and how Trump was an interesting call-back to that Make America Great Again sentiment that also was there with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

I have an interesting relationship with Buffalo Bill, each year in Ohio; I participate in the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County during the last weekend of July. I have done that for most of my adult life.  It’s always been a throwback to the Buffalo Bill show which Annie Oakley was the trick shooting act.  When I was a kid, the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy touched me deeply, and I wanted to be a part of that life, so the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio, gave me that chance, which I have always seen as the essence of American life.  I used those experiences to paint my book’s unique point of view to what America was, especially from business life.  So a lot was culminating there at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that the average visitor wouldn’t have experienced.  But the museum didn’t disappoint.  It was top class, one of the best of its kind in the world, and I brought back from there a real treasure of books and art that I would spend the rest of the year studying, which is the usual way I do things.  I visit places; then I learn all I can about those places long after I’ve gone.  In that way, my visits last a long time, but I get to know a place months and years after the initial visit.  And it was in this exploration that I ran across the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward and discovered precisely what I had been looking for, the link to many of our modern problems.  That book had been trendy during the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it held the answer to the long question of why that show had been so popular with people, even in this modern day.  It even explained why Trump was such a good president and why so many people on the socialist left wanted to see him utterly destroyed. 

Bellemy’s biggest mistake in his book Looking Backward was that he assumed that an administrative state of the central government could regulate corruption out of existence.  This idea of a socialist utopia was very attractive to some people, and they became progressives that would shape the Democrat party we see today early in the 1900s. Ironically, many Americans, without realizing it, understood that the life of Buffalo Bill and his show had touched on the essence of America, and they wanted to see more of it before it vanished as progressives had been promising.  There was honor and invention in the Wild West that Buffalo Bill showed in his displays.  America was remarkably uncorrupted for a few years of western expansion until corruption took over on the heels of Progressives and the work of Karl Marx sought to sabotage it right out of the gate, which is a battle that is still being waged to this day.  As it turned out, and it’s evident at the Buffalo Bill gun museum on the Center of the West campus, gun ownership in America had punched a window into the long history of corruption in the world. Buffalo Bill represented the best to have come from that philosophic period.  This bit of history was so remarkable that Plato and Aristotle would have never conceived of such a thing. Still, there it was in the American west, the defeat of corruption before the world’s governments could taint it with their looting presence.  And the left never figured it out. It’s an easy answer “Looking Backward” at how childlike Bellamy was in his assumptions within his book.  The socialist utopia that Karl Marx wanted and the Bellamyites who followed him for years after that book instead made corruption worse through the administrative state.  We were all a lot better off when the world was, as Buffalo Bill showed it.  And people understood that when they went to see his show. 

The nature of corruption comes from any organization of people who are put in power over other people. The other people have no means to check the power inflicted upon them.  The magic of America that no other society in the world had figured out is that with Americans having gun ownership, they could control the influence of corruption as it grows within any centralized authority. That centralized authority might be our corporations or our local, state, and federal governments.  Corruption was always going to happen, but the ownership of guns kept it checked in healthy ways that worked best before the works of Karl Marx infected American academic circles with a completely foreign concept from Europe that fed corruption rather than controlling it.  And that was something new for me to think about.  I think it’s normal to have thoughts about something where you know it’s right or wrong, but we often don’t understand why.  Well, at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, they had recorded “why,” and it was just the right thing I had been looking for.  It’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work for emotional reasons.  But in the context of history, we have preserved facts that we can study and apply to our modern-day.  And within that study, we have our answer on the nature of corruption and what we can do to control it.  It’s in the minds of all societies to have corruption.  For the liberal, they think they can educate it out of people.  But in the process, they make much more of it.  Yet, in the proven history of western expansion, we did control corruption for a healthy period, and the world was much better for it.  History proves it so.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business