Tag: Bullwhips

It’s Not Sophomoric: It’s a matter of life and death–Trump is their last chance at peace, I hope they take it

Trump’s grounding of Pelosi’s plane sparks political outcry” one sophomoric response does not deserve another” was the headline at Fox News and was repeated from the mountaintops of every other publication. Well, yes, of course it does. Anybody who suggest otherwise is smoking crack. You can’t negotiate with below the line thinkers who have lost their intrinsic motivations in life. It’s impossible for people of value to contribute anything useful to a loser if that loser insists on being a loser. Nancy Pelosi started the whole thing by suggesting that the president cancel his State of the Union speech because of the government shut down. This after she already poked the fence by offering only one dollar for the border wall. Then she and many in her caucus flew down to Puerto Rico to attend a play with lobbyists. She then flew back in town and tried to appeal to the 800,000 workers who weren’t receiving a pay check before embarking on another European tour while the shutdown loomed without any negotiations toward a border wall or even reopening government. That’s not how the world works Nancy. Not even close.

Of course, an eye for an eye is appropriate, it should be expected. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a loser trying to empower more losers like Nancy Pelosi to have more power than she should or deserves. As my representative in this great republic (NOT A DEMOCRACY!!!!)—(people keep calling our system of government a Democracy when that’s not what it is)—Trump is behaving exactly the way I want him to. I don’t want to be pushed around by loser below the line thinkers and for the first time in my lifetime, except for maybe when Reagan stopped the air traffic control strike—I have a president behaving the way I want him to representing me in the White House. I want someone who fights back against the loser mindset, because I’m tired of people like Nancy Pelosi playing these games and winning because everyone else insists on taking the “high ground.” Below the line thinkers cannot be allowed to rule above the line thinking with a seat at the table. When she tried to stop the State of the Union speech at the House of Representatives, she invited this response for which Trump acted perfectly.

The closet that Republicans ever game to winning against loser Democrats in one of these shutdowns was in the 90s when Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole tried to stand up to Bill Clinton. The Republicans blinked first and it was embarrassing, so much so that when I had a chance to meet Newt during the 2016 campaign, I didn’t have much to say to him. I enjoy his news commentary but generally view him as a loser because he was beaten in the 90s when he was Speaker of the House during that shutdown. My wife was still so angry over it that she refused to even shake Newt’s hand, so we are not come latelys on this topic. Republicans typically represent above the line thinking by their nature, Democrats below. The two are not equal and if below the line thinkers are led to believe that they are, then they will have leverage in negotiations every time, and Republicans will always lose because just like in mathematics if you multiply a zero by a valued sum, you still get zero. Below the line thinkers cannot contribute anything to a negotiation because their positions are always loser ones, they are always a sum of zero. They always want to spend more money, erode the Constitution more by their positions, they always want to destroy what we have so that their below the line positions can be covered by value which is constantly eroding.

Trump clearly has the right to ground her military plane for a public relations exercise when he has done the very above the line thing by staying at the White House showing that he was willing to negotiate all along with the House of Representatives over the border wall funding. And I’m glad he did it. Very glad! To my way of thinking Nancy Pelosi and her House socialists can get it this way or through violence. I haven’t written much about the new socialist radical Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because I view her as just a stupid young kid. But if she thinks she’s going to rally a bunch of stinky millennials to a national gun grab and tax expansion bringing socialism openly to our capitalist nation, well she’s in for a fight much worse than just grounding Nancy Pelosi’s European vacation. And we’ll have far worse than a government shutdown. We’ll have an armed insurrection that rivals the previous civil war in this country, and a lot of people will get hurt. I don’t go around looking for violence but if these new House socialists in the Democrat party think they are going to take over our government without violence and shots fired, they are living in a fantasy world. It ain’t going to happen, let me put it that way. They can talk tough in the city streets of Seattle and New York, but step into the heartland in Kentucky and start rattling cages and empty cars will return to Washington D.C. and the Beltway types will cry into their lattés. I can promise that.

Trump was elected by me and people like me to do this very kind of thing, to stop Democrats from taking over our government and to sift out the RINO Republicans who had been giving up above the line thinking so they could negotiate with below the line thinking. I didn’t hire Trump to negotiate with Nancy Pelosi. I hired him to destroy her. Not because she’s a bad person, which she is—she’s a bad person because she’s a below the line thinker that has lost her intrinsic passions which makes her a social menace. It makes anybody functioning from those attributes a similar menace, it’s not just because she’s a woman or anything, it’s just her character. And now she is the leader of many such characters, and she has made a move against my president and ultimately me. So she needs to be slapped down and I’d go so far to say, destroyed. Have no illusions about it, below the line people cannot be negotiated with. They do not have an equal seat at the table in our “democracy.” We don’t even have a democracy. We have a representative republic and Trump is my representative. He’s been staying in the White House to negotiate wall funding and he’s not there to play games. It’s for the health and safety of all involved to listen to him because if he isn’t successful, and law and order doesn’t prevail, then people will start getting hurt. I’m not going to allow Democrats to take over my government and plant a socialist takeover of our capitalist country. How’s that for “sophomoric?

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The news outlets assume that the outcome of all this is something we’ve seen before, but I would suggest not. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of history, Republicans cannot negotiate with Democrats when one side is clearly functioning from above the line thinking and the other, below. When Democrats like Nancy Pelosi play the kind of games they are now, they need to be slapped down so hard that they can never get up again, and that is my message to the president and what I expect him to do on my behalf. If he isn’t successful, which I think he will be, then Nancy will have much bigger problems. So for her own health and safety, she needs to listen to the President and keep her mouth shut. Because the next alternatives are not good for her socialist caucus. We are not in a battle of ideas. We are in a battle of life and death—and there’s a big difference. Law and order protects them, but if they continue to attempt to erode that law and order—then there will be nothing to protect them. Do you get the meaning, “Nancy?”

Rich Hoffman

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The Nature of Intrinsic Value: Why Nancy Pelosi comes out looking like a phony while Trump does genuine

Its one thing to identify below the line thinkers and to associate them with losers, but what’s needed is to understand what makes them the way they are. Why are they losers just for thinking in a negative way aspects of their existence which brings everyone else down? A few great examples are the current teacher’s strike in California, the government shut down and the Nancy Pelosi desire to keep Donald Trump from giving his State of the Union Speech in Congress. Can anybody imagine what would have happened if Republicans controlling congress had not invited Barack Obama to give the State of the Union speech? And that’s kind of the heart of the matter, losers are people who are functioning all the time below the line, and usually the reason they are in that position is because they have lost their intrinsic value for the things they do in life. People who only do things for money for instance are creepy because we recognize that they are not driven toward accomplishments that are aligned with their intrinsic values for their part in economic activity.

I have been going through old notes of late to solve current problems that were conquered long ago, but in the wake of current circumstances, have great meaning. In that regard I have been thinking of Daniel Pink’s work in the great book Drive, which explores the relationship that people have with intrinsic value versus carrot type motivations. For instance, since many people wonder about it, this blog site is an intrinsic state for me. I love writing, but I do it for free to the public because the value of it personally exceeds what anybody would pay for it. This leaves my motivations a mystery to people who are still functioning from the point of view that financial rewards are the only reasons that people do what they do. In that book Pink uses the example of Microsoft building a fantastic encyclopedia with many of the great minds of our day as paid contributors. I remember that project, I loved it. But along comes Wikipedia which has unpaid contributors building the whole thing and that business model beat over time the Microsoft encyclopedia concept. As the Internet has matured it has unlocked much more of mankind’s intrinsic desires than the predictable modes of thinking that preceded this current revolution. These days YouTube videos done by amateurs are outperforming large feature films and television broadcasts because the intrinsic value is undeniable. When people do things because they love them, it shows and people quickly gravitate toward the passions that come from those products.

To put it in a more proper context, currently there was some controversial comments by Donald Trump about the nature of Nancy Pelosi continuing to get a check from the government during the shutdown. The reason it scored points with people was that people understand President Trump is intrinsically invested in the job as president. He is currently not taking a salary and when the Clemson football champions came to visit the White House Trump bought them all hamburgers out of his own pocket which set off a firestorm of anxiety. Trump in the eyes of below the line losers had committed the worst kind of crime, he had blown their cover story all these years. Nancy Pelosi would never dream of giving up her salary as Speaker of the House because she is not functioning in her job from the perspective of intrinsic power. For her the financial compensation and the power that comes with it is very important to her, because she is personally lacking intrinsic value, so the monetary compensation is a motivating tool for her. But as we know from the book Drive, typical carrot type motivations are not the driver of human behavior in a positive way, in fact, it usually gets you worse results because intrinsic value is pushed out of consideration making the overall product produced inferior, and too expensive. On the other hand, Trump loves his job and it shows, his intrinsic value as President is something people can relate to, especially in this modern age where intrinsic value is being unlocked in the increased freedoms that technology is bringing us. You don’t have to go through the New York publishers if you want to be a writer in 2020. All you have to do is have the intrinsic value to do so and a site like this one will outperform a typical news and opinion site by a factor of 1000s because the paid writers aren’t doing what they are doing out of intrinsic value for the subject.

That’s why teacher strikes these days have lost their power. We are living in a time where education can easily be done online and by less than human resources. A striking overpaid teacher only demonstrates to the public that they don’t have intrinsic value for the children in their care which is a major turnoff to any voter. Many people these days may be photographers, artist or independent researchers due to the freedoms that online activity and smart phones have given them. While they may have jobs that pay them money and thus their bills, their real intrinsic value is often in their recreational activities. National Geographic may not be paying them to be elite photographers, but modern photo taking is made much easier allowing people with an intrinsic desire to photograph the world to do so without all the special skills that used to be required and the path to a paycheck that used to be associated with that endeavor. Intrinsic value has always been there, but it has only been recently where technology made personal preferences much more of an option that humans started expecting those choices to be part of their everyday lives.

When it is wondered why people are more interested in their smart phones than in the real world with real people in them it’s because the customization that is afforded to modern smart phone users gives people more intrinsic options than the real world typically does so its more interesting to them. People more than ever are driven by intrinsic needs more than financial ones and that is an aspect of these government shutdowns that just isn’t being covered. People don’t have much sympathy for workers striking or marching in protest because they aren’t getting a paycheck because it shows a victim status of below the line thinking which in the new age of intrinsic motivations is increasingly a negative impression. If someone is off work or not getting paid, then they are free to do what they really enjoy, and that is what the public sees more and more. That’s why Trump was popular in spite of the government shutdown while Nancy Pelosi comes out looking more and more phony, because she is functioning from motivations that are not aligned with intrinsic value. It’s good to get paid for the things you do, but if you are only doing them to make money, people are quick to think of such people as a phony because they have options in life to exhibit intrinsic value, but instead of functioning from that vantage point, they are complaining about what they don’t have and why they don’t have it. And nobody likes that type of person which is a newly identified condition of our present circumstances.

Rich Hoffman

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Professionals are Predicting a GDP Loss over the Government Shutdown: I think not

It is interesting that many investment firms and others connected to the financial world are predicting zero GDP growth in the first quarter of 2019 due to the government shutdown. I am not so sure that will be the case, in fact, consider what might happen should we discover that GDP growth remained at 3% to 4% in spite of 800,000 government workers stuck in limbo over the budget problem between the Trump White House and House Democrats who are refusing to make any concessions on a border wall. Gas prices are lower than they’ve been in years, taxes are lower and money is flowing quite robustly. If the GDP doesn’t fall as many are predicting, what would that do to future leverage that Democrats have over government shutdowns? What would happen once people realize that the government working or not doesn’t affect them very much and where it does, new methods of service should already be in place to prevent a loss in services.

Let’s face it, much of this “no work extortion” was designed by government labor unions to make it painful for voters to not pay for government services, by attaching very static services to consumer needs without regard to economic expansion. Actually, the goal of GDP stagnation was always the hope because it forced people to continue paying taxes and extraordinary fees for government workers in an inflated fashion just because people didn’t want to deal with the loss in services. But we live in the day of the smart phone, of Amazon where you can get anything anywhere at any time. Why should government be able to impede goods and services artificially—and why should a loser like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi be able to use a government shutdown as a means of bringing the American economy to a halt?

In reality, I don’t think the world cares about the shutdown. I don’t think the GDP of the United States will even notice—in one report I heard one of the reasons given was that government workers weren’t flying around doing business and that would account for a loss in GDP. Well, with fuel prices down and more expendable income in people’s pockets, I don’t think any of those losses in government transportation is going to amount to much and will easily be offset by the civilian sectors. So where is all this loss in GDP going to come from? Government doesn’t make anything and what they do interact with shouldn’t stop productivity from happening except where they have been artificially inserted by law, as opposed to a genuine need by market forces.

As I have been saying for many years, the socialism that has been taught in our public schools is hitting a critical juncture, many of those little kids are now in the market and interacting with the world, and socialism is very much their political platform. You can see that easily by some of the new members of congress. Additionally, many of the new Democrat 2020 presidential candidates are openly socialist and talking about confiscating businesses to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those who want it. They are openly talking about these things these days instead of hiding it. I think that is because of Trump’s victory in 2016, it forced the radicals working in our government to accelerate their long time plans and the same thing is happening in regard to this government shutdown. There is a race to make the final case for socialism before people discover that everything they have been taught their whole lives in public education was a lie. The election in 2020 is really the last time that socialists are going to have a shot in the United States before people realize that the economy is much better off under capitalist influence rather than centralized socialist mechanisms by incompetent insurgents.

That is after all how so many government jobs were placed in the way of the free market, to hopefully stop an economy if the government led by some conservative radical wanted to shut it down to make a point. The safety valve would be to wreck the economy and prevent conservatives from ever doing such a thing in the future. But what if conservatives stuck together and forced the revelation of such a scheme to be known with continued growth of the GDP even during a government shutdown? Then what happens? Of course, the answer is that government doesn’t really do anything to help our economy, it actually hinders it. With government out-of-the-way, the GDP should increase and that is the big secret that nobody wants to let out to the public. And with the market watchers leveraging their investments knowing the world of government and how much pain it can give them, they are saying all the things to make the beast happy and off their backs. But they know that free market forces unleashed will continue to expand the GDP of a nation, not whether government workers are there to stand in the way.

At the heart of this debate is the role government plays in the economy, socialists want to think of the government as a major employer, capitalists want the government out of their way as much as possible. That means that for the first time in American history we are about to learn to what extent the government actually plays in the economy because we have a president who actually understands economics, better than any advisors in the matter. And we’ll see how it turns out, but I’ll make a prediction, I don’t think its going to make much difference. The economy has a lot of money flowing through it, the trade deals that are being made are generating revenue for the American treasury and China is drowning currently. Instead of all that money flowing into their economy, its flowing into the American economy and that is something that the big government types just can’t bring themselves to an admission. The issue has a duel cut for them, first it shows that the communist Chinese were never as powerful as everyone had projected them to be, and second, it shows that government really doesn’t have any power. Government is not the king makers that liberals had always dreamed of, a free market system can’t be stifled when pure economics are applied.

Only when artificial constraints are placed on the ambitions of a nation’s GDP can an economy really be stifled to a zero sum. And Trump knows better than to buy that line of dialogue. He’s holding out so that the truth can be witnessed and when it is, then what? What will Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer say on that day in March and April when it’s revealed that GDP actually was not impacted by the government shutdown. What happens in the future then? The answer is that the extortion racket will lose its bite and I would think we’d all be happy for that. Except for those who want to see a government dominating all aspects of life. Their illusion will be crushed by such a revelation. That is what I’m predicting will happen, and as President Trump waits out the storm, I would be willing to bet that he knows it too.

Rich Hoffman

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A Quiet Place: Hollywood’s disfunctional relationship with guns

I thought the 2018 movie; A Quiet Place was a really good horror film that was compelling. However, it was hard for me to sit through because if I had been in that story, I would have only have lasted about 30 seconds. In the movie the main characters revolve around a family that has survived some kind of alien invasion and the antagonists are some really terrifying creatures who are completely reliant on sound to move around. This leaves the survivors of earth to move about in complete silence to avoid being eaten by the creatures. I thought it was an interesting concept that made for an entertaining narrative experience, but I couldn’t help but ask the question, why didn’t the dad just shoot the creatures and kill them on day one? The movie would have been over in the opening scenes and many more people would have lived.

This movie reminded me why I’m not in the movie business. I had the same conversation after The Blair Witch Project came out many years ago where I asked similar questions. I never get lost so becoming lost in the woods and being hunted down by some strange monster is just something that I can’t relate to. In A Quiet Place if I had to deal with a situation like that defending my family against some strange creatures that suddenly appeared and ate people maliciously for every sound they made, I would have simply shot them with one of my big caliber guns. There was a scene at the end of The Quiet Place where I was literally jumping around my living room screaming at the television for Emily Blunt to shoot the alien creature as it had her family trapped in her basement. It was a compelling scene for anybody who isn’t used to firearms and for Emily who is a citizen of the United Kingdom she acted as if she were more terrified of the gun than the monster. All she had to do was pull the trigger and the thing would have been killed and her family would be safe.

I’ve been to some of those Santa Monica dinner parties and spent the evening with actors and actresses like Emily Blunt and listened to their diatribes about how guns are so bad and honestly, I couldn’t handle it. Associating with people like that wore me out. And I could see John Krasinski who directed the film working with the screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck to string out the narrative of the movie into a compelling two-hour event based on their experiences with the soft tissue Hollywood types that frequent those Santa Monica bars at midnight on any given day. It was just over halfway through the movie that we learned that the dad actually had a pump 12 gauge shot-gun hidden away in the house. But in reality, the dad should have had that gun with him for the entire film and been using it to kill the monsters.

Emily Blunt looked way too comfortable holding that gun on the monster at the end of the film and not pulling the trigger that it revealed so much about what is wrong with Hollywood today. The movies are made by scared, timid people who are lacking real experience with firearms, and it was pretty sad. Guns are not part of their culture so when one is put in their hands, they appeared to be more scared of the guns than the terrible monsters. But in reality, if guns were more a part of the story then the dramatic tension of the horror film itself would have been different. If a story like A Quite Place were real, people all across America would have just shot the things. There is no way those blind bastards would have taken over our country the way they did in the movie. Normal people just aren’t as terrified of guns as the Hollywood filmmakers were.

Prior to watching A Quiet Place I watched the Bruce Willis version of Death Wish, and that was a fun movie that was lacerated by the entertainment media because it was a very honest homage to the old Charles Bronson Death Wish movies. Now in those days I could have worked in Hollywood where the story tellers were not so terrified of guns, but understood them as a narrative advancement. For instance, Indiana Jones would have never have been the great character he was if not for that one scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones shoots the swordsman in cold blood just because he didn’t have time to run all over Cairo looking for his girlfriend if he was wasting it fighting him. Back then, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were still on the outside looking in within the film industry so they could do things like that in movies. But once they were invited into the Hollywood social activist club they stopped doing those kinds of things in their movies and people gradually stopped watching. A Quiet Place walked that fine line between ultimately using the gun to solve the problem of the story but they took the entire movie to arrive there. Because the human sacrifice count was high enough the Hollywood community gave A Quiet Place a pass, but to me it was pretty disgusting. It was a movie made by Hollywood types about a world they are afraid of, but for the rest of America where guns are as common as a glass of water, the movie was a useless exercise in stupidity.

The dad played by the director was a pretty good character, but of course when he needed a weapon at the end of the movie, he didn’t have one and he was killed. If he had been carrying his shotgun around, that stupid monster would have been dead quickly, and efficiently and they all would have lived happily ever after. Guns are a huge part of American culture and when Hollywood shows their ignorance, movie goers let them know it. Even though A Quiet Place was considered a successful film critically and at the box office the real numbers show it only made $188 million domestically and $152 million internationally. $340 million is not very much money for a movie at the box office these days, the movie would have done better business if it had embraced the gun culture more instead of trying to appease the anti-gun Hollywood types.

The last scene of the movie A Quiet Place was a hoard of the alien monsters converging on the house as Emily Blunt smiled at her children with her cocked shotgun ready to shoot them all. OK, so where was that attitude at the beginning of the film? The point of the entire movie seems to be to get the parents to overcome their aversion to guns so that they can defend themselves. Because the sonic device that the deaf daughter only appeared to agitate the monsters, it didn’t kill them. Only the gun did. So that is my problem with this whole Hollywood vantage point. They literally want their cake and to eat it too. They want an anti-gun message when the gun is the only thing that people want to pay money to see. But to appease the Hollywood gods who drink too much in Santa Monica bars, the filmmakers have to avoid using the gun as much as possible, until the very end of course.

That’s the way you do it.  Death Wish was a great movie!

Rich Hoffman
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Of Course Sheriff Israel Should Have Been Suspended: Democrats fly to Puerto Rico during the government shutdown

Not to be overly simplistic but politics these days could be said to be of two representative groups, Republicans represent above the line thinking as defined in the great business book, The Oz Principle and Democrats representing below the line thinking. Of course, there are plenty of Republicans who are below the line thinkers but their social aims point in that direction, so let’s use this example to have a discussion. The issue of the new Governor DeSantis suspending the bumbling fool Scott Israel over the response during the Parkland massacre is a perfect example of what we are talking about.

In the world of a typical Democrat accountability for one’s actions are never part of the consideration, below the line thinkers are always victims who are never responsible for anything. Everything to below the line thinkers is someone else’s fault, so when Sheriff Israel was given a very expensive budget in one of Florida’s wealthiest counties to protect the people there, he blew it. The shooter who would eventually attack the school had a long-troubled past which the police knew about and when the guy finally instigated his intended violence toward the kids of Parkland High School Israel’s police force wasn’t ready and behaved less than gracious under fire. Many more people died as a result of Sheriff Israel’s incompetence than otherwise would and it was a truly sad situation.

But in the aftermath, it was Sheriff Israel who was leading the charge to have guns removed from society by attacking the NRA hoping to deflect responsibility away from him and his law enforcement department. His radicalism in advocating below the line positions was excessive and even political moderates were getting tired of the excuses from Sheriff Israel. After eight months of excuses once Governor DeSantis took the official office as Florida’s next governor, he did what most Republicans seek to do, and that is provide accountability to a situation—above the line thinking.

And that is where the real difficulty is in deciding what kind of country we want to be, because we can’t be both. Below the line thinking is easy and destructive, it is far easier to destroy than to make, so that is why Democrats with their below the line thinking and overall victimhood mentality attract so many losers and can activate them to advance on a cause so quickly, because their fear is always accountability so as long as there is chaos and blame, they are quick to hide their incompetence behind violence and mass driven protests.

Accountability is hard so its much more difficult to stand up and accept that responsibility when there is always a parade of below the line thinkers to throw more animosity in your direction deflecting that pressure away from them as much as possible. This is why it was hard for even staunch NRA defenders to advocate for sanity after the Parkland shooting because the mob of below the line thinking had taken over. There was power in the masses for below the line thinkers who shared together a fear of responsibility. There was power in victimhood, in using the death of the innocent to advance a below the line political idea, such as the confiscation of guns. Guns themselves didn’t kill people, they are tools for above the line people to take responsibility for their own safety and property. But for below the line people who would never dare use a gun to defend themselves because they don’t want the responsibility, its easy to call for the elimination of personal firearms and the expansion of the state with more laws. But in the case of Parkland there were police on the scene as the gunman was killing and they did not engage. Sheriff Israel had allowed their daily routine to become too soft they were not ready for the danger when it came. But rather than take responsibility for their ill prepared training, Scott Israel deflected all responsibly to gun possession and he helped launch a national campaign against them.

If we want an accountable, and successful nation, below the line thinking just can’t be allowed—which essentially eliminates one political party from the discussion. We can see the same example of how Democrats behaved in Mid-January after they had just returned to Capitol Hill to the House and Senate only to charter a plane to fly to Puerto Rico to watch the play Hamilton. President Trump as a businessman understands leadership and accountability so he purposely stayed at the White House as the government shutdown dragged on and debate over the border wall persisted. Democrats being below the line people devoid of personal accountability don’t want to see how their actions can have an impact on the world around them so they tried to coax Republicans into playing along, but under Trump’s leadership they stayed put. While the news stories went out that government workers weren’t getting paid due to the shutdown Trump was in the White House ready to make a deal but the Democrats just off a Christmas vacation took another luxury trip to Puerto Rico to attend a high brow play. Typically, Republicans get caught in these kinds of things trying to defend themselves from a negative position, but Trump kept the discussion on above the line topics with true leadership—leading by example.

That is truly the battle of our day, the difference between personal accountability, and below the line victimhood. Losers are known as losers because they are never responsible for anything in their life, they make themselves perpetual victims because they lack the courage of personal accountability. The reason that Democrats want to expand government so much is to cover up their notion of accountability deflection. The more people involved, the more chaotic the bureaucratic chain of decision gates, the less people know that the real game is in protecting below the line thinking so that political leaders can sneak off to a luxury play in the tropics during a government shutdown and nobody would notice. And that is exactly what Democrats did in trying to protect the incompetency of Scott Israel after the Parkland shooting. The NRA which is an organization all about above the line thinking, personal accountability and the defense of American ideas became the scape-goat by default. Above the line thinking was attacked because the masses were afraid of what role they played in the mess and would rather expand government and pay more people to stand in front of them and help redistribute the blame game to everything else.

Governor DeSantis like President Trump was making a point in suspending Sheriff Israel, the intent was to demonstrate above the line thinking, just as Trump stayed at the White House to show leadership under fire. Accountability is the key to all successful enterprises, and Democrats just don’t have it in them. By their nature they always seek below the line solutions to above the line needs, so there will never be peace and joy in politics so long as this is the case. Everyone in our nation needs to at least be working toward the same objectives. One part of the country can’t take responsibility for everything while all the below the line thinkers fly off to Puerto Rico to attend a play while bitching that the President won’t budge on his needs for border wall funding. And what Sheriff Israel did, which is typical of all below the line thinkers was reprehensible, he tried to blame the very good NRA for his own incompetence. And if he had been successful, it would have had a terrible effect. Its bad enough that many people died because of him, but what’s worse is that he refused to take responsibility. That is his crime and why he had to be suspended. He’s lucky that was all.

Rich Hoffman
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Tear Down the Statue of Liberty: Understanding what immigration should be and knowing real history

As a very strong advocate of President Trump and his policies I am in a good position to defend the reasons that we want to build a wall. Only stupid people thinking in a negative below the line way would think that the reason is racism. The actual cause is to inspire more above the line thinking which stupid people are terrified of, so their only defense is to accuse above the line thinkers of racism. But in all honesty the need for the wall at the American southern border is to defend the values of the nation from those who don’t share those values and it has nothing to do with racism. Even deeper than that however is the need to defend America from its domestic enemies, any below the line thinkers who seek to destroy the concept of America who are now gathered under the clear tent of Democrat politics. I’ve had the benefit of watching my son-in-law go through a naturalization ceremony where he had to swear as a new American citizen to defend our Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, and it was quite serious when placed in that context. Well, the Democrats have positioned themselves as clear domestic enemies and they are on full assault, so its time that we make it clear what this fight is really about. Don’t negotiate with them, destroy them!

The Statue of Liberty is a part of recent American history, there is a lot more to the concept of freedom and liberty that were in place well before the French gave us that statue which resides in the harbor of New York. It was commissioned in 1886 by President Cleveland at the start of the progressive movement in New York City so any references to the Statue of Liberty and the role it plays in immigration are tainted at best. Elis Island where the Statue of Liberty resides then became the first immigration station in the United States from 1892 to 1954 where roughly 12 million immigrants passed through on their path to citizenship. This is why progressives are particularly fond of the Statue of Liberty and keep using it as a reference to illegal immigration at the southern border, because the whole concept of a processing station with the Statue of Liberty looming over the process is one born in the heart of progressive politics in America to begin with in the very recent past.

It was Emma Lazarus who wrote the famous words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

She was part of the movement that was trying to raising money for a permanent home for the Statue of Liberty as it had been touring around since the French gave it to us. She was close personal friends with the progressive economist Henry George who wrote the terrible book Progress and Poverty, which ultimately inspired Emma to write what she did. That is why progressives in our modern era are so quick to point at the Statue of Liberty and attempt to unite the entire country behind their cause. Personally, I think we should tear down the damn thing. If you want to put up a symbol of American values in the harbor in New York for the world to see, it should be someone like John Wayne who much more embodies the values of America rather than the statue of a French designer who was part of the progressive era as it was born in New York society to grow like a massive disease to attempt to destroy American civilization.

There is a reason under capitalism that people are poor, it’s because they are lazy. In a capitalist society, which is something Henry George was debating, effort is the key to earning a good living. If you have that basic approach, you can do well in America. If you don’t, then you won’t, or wouldn’t until the progressive era corrupted politics with all their social reforms that made it so that people were less inspired to work hard and more inspired to think below the line such as is common in the labor movement which is another progressive era invention. Henry George and Emma Lazarus were some of the first people in America to propose a land tax which came directly out of this quote from his 1879 book Progress and Poverty:

Take now… some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: “Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city—in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage-coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any higher?” He will tell you, “No!” “Will the wages of the common labor be any higher…?” He will tell you, “No the wages of common labor will not be any higher…” “What, then, will be higher?” “Rent, the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession.” And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.

–Translation, Henry George is proposing that the hard-headed businessman must be compelled to donate their riches to the “community.” That the wealth they create isn’t a value of its own which makes a town into a city or electricity to replace the candle. What the Statue of Liberty represents isn’t freedom, but compulsion as proposed by early progressives who are below the line thinkers trying to hide their negative vantage point behind do-gooding.

The below the line progressives and their modern Democrats are what early Americans fled from in Europe yet they followed with immigration the efforts of those frontiersman and adventurers who came before and built New York City with ambition and capitalist yearning. Below the line thinkers like Henry George saw this wealth and wanted to tax it, and his little girl friend Emma Lazarus adopted his ideas and stuck them on the side of a statue the French gave us as if they understood American capitalism and that is how the first immigration station started in America, which was a disaster from the beginning. Immigration is a fact of life when something has value and people are leaving areas of low value to seek a better life. But Emma missed the point, her entire quote was inspired by an economic below the line thinker who wanted to tax land owners as his great contribution to thought.

Resistance to illegal immigration isn’t to protect America from a “browning” of it from people south of the border, but in ensuring that the people who do come into America want to protect its Constitution and not to overthrow it. Hidden behind their proposals are the below the line efforts of the Statue of Liberty founders who were not rugged American capitalists. The debate isn’t about preventing all people into America through immigration but in letting in the best and brightest, not the perpetual poor, lazy, and drug addicted. Some people you don’t want in your country. People lacking value are some of them, and its time to have that debate instead of retreating back to some stupid words that Emma said on the Statue of Liberty. In fact, its time that we just take that damn thing down and use some other symbol of American value that is more properly representative of our present circumstances, like a gun that is there to protect the land owner from bleeding heart progressives like Henry George from using public resources to steal money from those making it, because he thinks he’s morally inclined to do so and to distribute that wealth to below the line thinkers who didn’t earn it to begin with. The debate is really about values and who has them and who doesn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Hired Donald Trump: Negotiations with below the line people are not possible when people of value are the only ones that matter

Regarding the government shutdown and the border wall funding debate I keep hearing that there are supposed to be bipartisan discussions and that our government of checks and balances require compromise. Yet it is permissible for Democrats to only contribute one dollar toward border wall construction and we are supposed to laugh and accept the behavior. No. that’s not how it works. Here’s how it does, in the United States, the greatest economy in the world and the best country providing the most freedom and personal lifestyle choices of anywhere on earth there are many companies that routinely investigate their cultures for improvements. The United States has produced more literature and analysis on business technique improvements of any sector of any economy anywhere, so a lot of consideration should be given to the abilities of change agents within production cultures and studying how those effects can cascade into our political order for the better. Because it is impossible to take a culture that is full of bad stuff and expect it to negotiate with good stuff and generate a reasonable outcome. And the Democrats and even RINO Republicans in this current debate are bad people as defined by the process of needs associated with our present circumstances.

No consultant in their right mind would think to go into a large company in serious need of reform and expect to make peace with the losers of that culture. Losers in this case are defined as below the line thinkers, people who finger point, do not take personal accountability for their actions, are perpetual victimhood advocates intent to hide their poor practices behind chaos and mayhem. That is precisely what the modern Democrats are in the American political system. When companies need to get healthy, they do not sit down and negotiate with the trouble makers. They get rid of them. First of course you invite them to the table to be a part of the improvement process. But it is never a thought to surrender good productive output to the demands of the below the line thinkers. It’s just not in the realm of possibility.

Yet that is precisely the assumption of these modern Democrats, they expect Republicans to be blamed for the government shut down. They expect Republicans to be blamed for border problems. They expect value to always cover for poor conduct the way delinquent employees sit in the shadows and nit pick at leadership without doing anything but destroying opportunities at productivity so that the expectations of success never swing in their direction. We are supposed to expect no performance out of Democrats, and to give them an equal seat at the table of respect. That is their actual premise which to any sane person would be laughable.

It is simply amazing how much of this “open border” money has been trickled into our media environment intent to manipulate young people into believing in a giant borderless world. After the interview that President Trump gave to Sean Hannity on January 10, 2019 the response from the print and television media was outrageous in support of that open border position. There was real fear in what President Trump was talking about as it was obvious, he wasn’t backing down and nobody in his Republican party was really putting pressure on him to do so. Then the fear escalated when it was obvious that supporters like me, the part of Trump’s base that in numbers of 30% will stand with him no matter what. The panic on Friday morning going into the weekend was full-blown and nearly animated beyond reality. They were flipping out the way most below the line thinkers do when they are exposed to the light of day and realize that they will be measured to a level of performance whether they liked it or not.

But let me add to this discussion as a warning for all those below the line thinkers who have been thinking they understood the game that was being played, a continuation of that way of doing things was always off the table. You should be happy that its Donald Trump, and you’d be wise to shut your mouths and listen to what he wants to do. Because the alternative is much more violent. Putting up with the same old Chuck and Nancy show is not an option. Continued budget problems and continuing resolutions that just kick the can down the road are not part of the discussion. Only growth can solve our debt problems and only in protecting American sovereignty can we take our country back to a healthy state. An acceptance of all the chaos and violence of the open border push that anti-American forces like George Soros have been imposing on our free market system are not going to be tolerated. America has to be brought back to a healthy state and that requires above the line thinking to destroy below the line thinking. Not negotiate with it.

All across America right now and even in other countries there are very smart people acting as consultants who go into and fix the operations of those companies once they have been identified as unhealthy. It takes a strong vision from a leader to evoke the changes needed and it takes removing below the line thinking from the process and replacing them with above the line thinkers. Negotiating a peace treaty with below the line thinkers is never an option. Changing their behavior is, or simply getting rid of them. The leverage on the border wall and the government shutdown is completely in Trump’s power. The best thing to do in this case is to crush the below the line thinking from everyone in the media down to the political pawns involved in the matter, and to either destroy them or show them the door and force them to exit the political arena on their own. But there is no leg for them to stand on, the arrogance of Nancy and Chuck and the people who follow them who think they have a right to a seat at the table indicates they have no idea what is going on. Just because you are in a political party and that’s how things have been in the past does not mean that’s how its going to be in the future.

As one of Trump’s 30% base I wouldn’t care if half the government quit their jobs tomorrow and found work at a McDonald’s drive through. I like seeing the government shut down. There are too many employees in it to begin with. And I am certainly not an open border guy. If we want to help people in their domestic countries from the crime and poverty they are fleeing from, well let’s send them some good ol’ capitalism and some guns and turn them loose with their own experimental republic. Forget about asylum, build them a shopping mall and some guns to protect their banks so they can actually have an economy and give them a civilization they can build a home with. The current political order uses them as pawns to flood our current border and loot the wealth of America for a big political military assault that has been in the works for many years. But Trump supporters elected him to the White House to stop that assault, and that doesn’t automatically give everyone a seat at the negotiating table. I hired Trump to destroy that old order. Not to play with it. Keep that in mind.

Rich Hoffman

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The Losers Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer: More reason to keep the government shut down

More and more the only way to really describe the current political condition in the world is by above the line thinking and below the line. The Democrat response to President Trump’s border wall case made on national television on January 8th, 2019 was as below the line of anything I have seen in many years openly. Usually these types of negative, loser types conceal their intentions much more carefully, but not anymore. The Democrats empowered by what they think is a big victory in winning the House in 2018 are moving toward open socialism, which I have been warning about for many years. I remember when many below the line people in the Republican party thought I was being dramatic and even embarrassing in pointing the matter out with my bullwhips and YouTube videos, and my novels and media interviews. Back then many conservatives were reading from conservative publications that were caught in the grand socialism story themselves, and they thought they were too high brow to consider such a thing. But I saw it because to my perspective all the thinking was below the line, victimization and consolation of one another through group affiliation, both in Democrats and Republicans. Party politics for such below the line people wasn’t for some tactical implementation of political philosophy, it was for their own sanity maintenance. And like any below the line thinker, they seek to remain there and do not want to be challenged into any other concepts, even if reality dictates the necessity.

Watching the arrogance of such below the line people to keep the country hostage to such a mindset really angered me, because if you really listen to what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were saying in response to President Trump it was as bad as it gets in politics. It is they who are using the government worker shutdown as a bargaining chip. It is they who think that people will blame Trump for the loss in jobs and for the shut down in general. Don’t essentially stated that they weren’t going to budge at all, that they were clearly using this issue to try and knock the President out of office in 2020. And they are willing to go all the way with it. That’s why no matter what comes from Republicans, they are going to have to break the back of the Democrats on this shut down issue once and for all. Above the line thinking is going to have to destroy below the line thinking, there simply can’t be any other ending. Failure to do that will only get more of the behavior. There can be only a glorious defeat of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in 2019 over the border wall and the government shut down.

Any above the line thinker sees the situation clearly. The American people really don’t care about the government shutdown. It doesn’t affect them and they are too busy to care. It’s the middle of winter and people don’t care if the national parks are closed. People like me would argue that government workers shouldn’t even be tied to any of this. Airlines should cover their own security costs; the government shouldn’t be in a position to shut down anything in American commerce. Government job growth is and has been for years part of the problem. Government has inserted itself where it doesn’t belong and that is part of the issue. Government has created this below the line monster so that it could send out some of its sales people, like Schumer and Pelosi and beg to be fed like some homeless person sitting at the side of a highway intersection pulling on the heartstrings of those passing by. The leverage they seek is to not only grow government and its below the line influence, but to destroy the political order from any above the line thinking.

If you really were to peel back the onion and look at the open border suggestion that is at the heart of most of our modern media and political system, you would find that the real war is between above the line and below the line thinking. The goal is not peace and to help people from impoverished countries live better lives in America, but to overrun people in America who think above the line with depressing reminders of humanities loser mentality, drugs, cheap sex, graffiti, tattooed gang members—essentially an age of anarchy intent to send mankind back to the mentality of social order over 4000 years ago. Below the line thinkers do not like advancements in thought and they love to hide their misery behind collectivist endeavors so that is why they use politics to advance their loser state. For them they would oppose Donald Trump if he gave a speech on saving the world from hunger because they simply don’t want to give merit to any above the line thinker, because they don’t want to live up to the standard.

I learned a long time ago that most politicians don’t want to solve problems. I have the honor to know a few locally who do like to solve problems, and to live above the line, but they are a pretty recent phenomenon. I think there will be many more like them emerging in the years to come because there is a natural human desire to have their political order functioning above the line as opposed to below the line. Trump’s election in that context shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but to Democrats not willing to accept that the movement is one of above the line thinking chose to see what they want. Democrats trying to run for office in 2020, especially for president think that the charm of Trump is that he can associate with anybody, which is why Elizabeth Warren thought drinking a beer on a social media video would gain her points with a base of political supporters. But what she and many of them are missing is that Trump’s selling point was always above the line thinking as opposed to loser victimhood and that’s what Americans wanted from the beginning. All Democrats are offering at any level is victimhood, and that is not appealing to voters.

It Republicans can hold together with that understanding of what this issue is really about, they can destroy the loser mentality that is driving the entire Democrat party, and they’ll win this government shutdown battle. Trump will have to get his border wall money from declaring a national emergency which will be risky, but he’ll have to do it because Democrats would rather die than give him anything close to a campaign promise, because they are losers and can only think in that fashion. Democrats are not for American growth and border security, they are about global assimilation so that the worst of us can bring down the best and the level of expectation for everyone be lowered to more below the line thinking, where they are most comfortable. To them they have nothing to lose because what they are fighting for is the right to be a loser and to do that, they just have to keep saying no. And that is what everyone needs to understand about this particular breed of Democrat.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s Good to be Hated: Consider it an honor

It is actually quite a compliment to be hated. Being hated is a very healthy thing. Its one thing to point to a big national figure like Donald Trump and say that people hate him, and for good reason. It’s quite another to look at a new executive in any business who brings in their wake great change and to say that they are hated. But in essence, the hatred is a needed element and is something that should be sought out, not avoided. If everyone loves you, you are doing something wrong, and not pushing the world around you as much as you should be to above the line thinking.

It never made any sense to me why we have taught people in our culture that the most important thing in the world was to seek being liked by our peers. I suppose for me it has taken roughly ten years of writing articles over 1000 words each coupled with many interesting life experiences to hone the issue down to simply Above the Line Thinking and Below the Line Thinking. I had to re-read The Oz Principle for a business need, which is a brilliant book. But after all the personal work that I have done, it really made a lot more sense to me now than it had previously. Its one thing to read a book like that and agree with it. It’s quite another to understand it at a deep philosophical level and be able to use it. Many of our problems in the world do simply come down to below the line thinking and above the line thinking as proposed in The Oz Principle.

But that wasn’t the first time that humans figured out the problem, The Oz Principle is a business take on The Wizard of Oz which was a very empowering story about not being a victim in life, and getting what you need at the end of a hero’s journey. Dorothy and her little dog didn’t do anything to be hated by the Wicked Witch but exist, much like the rest of us. All Dorothy did was get caught in a whirlwind and land on the sister of the Witch with her house. It was an accident, yet Dorothy was made to feel she owed something to the evil spinster. All Dorothy wanted to do was return to Kansas and help people along the way. Nobody in the world should have hated her for it, yet they did. It was unavoidable. It always is for people who are good to be hated by those who are bad.

So what is good and bad, well, simply bad people are below the line thinkers who scheme and plot to get others to join them there. Below the line thinking is victimhood mentality, thinking negatively about things, trying to keep the world suppressed to your weaknesses so that you as a below the line thinker are not outmatched by others. Below the line thinkers love the idea of equality for all because it gets them off the hook to perform. This is why politics is such a below the line activity, and why we instinctively think of it as an evil enterprise. Above the line however is where the good are, they are positive people always looking to improve the world around them. They take personal responsibility for actions and are always advancing intellectually because of it. Judging the good from the bad is simply that easy.

In the corporate world it happens all the time, a consultant is hired or a charismatic new CEO who comes in as an above the line thinker and changes the world of the below the liners, and it is safe to say that those employees hate that new element. They hate above the line thinkers because it demands on them performance, they are too lazy, or too corrupt to compete with. So the dominate emotion is sheer hatred. I grew up with a pretty good understanding of these things before I ever read The Oz Principle, but as I got older I understood the futility of making other people happy really early in my life. Instinctively I understood that if people disliked you, that you were doing something very right. Now in my life I understand that the more people do dislike me or hate me, the better I am doing in the world. If everybody loves you, then you are socializing with too many below the line thinkers and are becoming one of them yourself. Above the line thinkers, good people, are much fewer in number among populations because of the difficulty in being an above the line person. It is much easier to be scarecrows in life using The Wizard of Oz metaphor a bit, just doing our jobs and staying put where people tell us to be, then in going down the yellow brick road to a moment of self-discovery to find out all along we had everything we needed within ourselves. Its much easier to blame others for our problems than to take responsibility for them and to solve them. Most people spend their entire lives like the tin man or the scare crow blaming others for their withering condition when all they really need to do is to follow Dorothy to their own personal freedom. But guess what, they want to keep it that way, because it’s easy to just stand in a field and rot away. It takes a great effort to walk around and change your circumstances and when some above the line leaders crosses your path and evokes you to move along, great resentment and hatred do become the dominating emotions. But so what.

Once you understand that everything essentially comes down to above the line and below the line thinking, everything in the world makes much more sense, especially in politics. If the world believes that Donald Trump is a good president because lots of people love him then merit would be given to his faults due to so many below the line thinkers hating him. But as my way of thinking persists, since lots of people hate him, he is doing a great job as president because he is encouraging them to think above the line and they clearly don’t want to. That isn’t his problem, its theirs.

Everyone should aspire to be an above the line thinker, there is nothing good that comes out of below the line thinking. Forget about political affiliations, gender roles, skin color, nothing matters more than people who are above the line thinkers. Everyone should aspire to be one. Everyone, without exception. But so long as there are below the line people functioning in the world, there will be conflict and hatred. And that conflict is good, it’s needed, and its very healthy. Without above the line thinkers there would never be advancements in human society. And without them there would never be a challenge to evil. The true definition of the battles of good and evil come down to above and below the line thinking. The two are not compatible, they cannot negotiate together, and one must destroy the other. So the hatred that is directed at good, above the line thinkers is one of the greatest compliments that can be given. It means that you are doing it right, and good things do come about as a result—so long as you can teach yourself not to care about their opinions.

Rich Hoffman

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China Can’t Even Afford iPhones: Understanding how the game has been played and will be in the future

I warned everyone, China the big communist country had nothing without the United States. They would have no leverage in trade talks and their inflating economy was purely fictional, created by global efforts to prop them up. I’ve especially pointed this out when box office talks about movie releases have studios paying more attention than they should about the communist country’s ability to make or break a movie. Back when a big movie like E.T. The Extraterrestrial came out in the 1980s nobody cared if anybody in China saw the movie and it was considered a success. So what has changed in the three decades since is purely an internal communist push through American education to give China a seat at the economic table that was entirely made up by political forces trying to change the kind of world we all live in. They wanted to say, “look, China is killing all of us, so we need to be more like them.” And that was how communism was being pushed into western culture. If everyone wanted to compete in the modern economic world, they’d have to get on board with that line of thought. But, as I said from the very beginning, it was all made up crap.

I can see why everyone believes that China is or was going to be the big world power to chase. The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis as in other places as well has a huge dedication to the new China economy tying to prepare young people on how to live in that type of world. By the time I had seen the exhibit it was already aging so it was a little easier for me to see than the millions of visitors who had been there before me. If the topic of economic power and global politics was not the topic of the average family’s dinner table, then most people wouldn’t think much of it. However, in essence, the Chinese economy was never going to be all scary and domineering of all cultures on earth. The way our school systems proposed the problem was a lie from the start, China was never going to dictate the way we live life in American and that smoky reality that they had been trying to create with our young people came to a crashing end with the rise to power of President Trump, who knew better. Anyone who understands markets and money could see the problem but often those types of people are not allowed anywhere near political policy making, that is until one of them managed to get elected into the Executive Branch, which destroyed near six decades of planning by the political insurgents working against American sovereignty in full pursuit of globalism managed by China.

Personally, I love Apple products, my wife just bought the latest iPhone from them. They are an American company that has been pushing great technically innovations. They are too liberal for me, and I don’t think Tim Cook is a very good CEO, but the company itself is a good one as it was created by Steve Jobs. And I get it, there are only so many Americans who can buy iPhones, so the billions of people in China is a lucrative market, just as movie companies have fallen into that trap, but the entire industry is built as a sand castle meant to look impressive long enough to trick the world into accepting communism before the real waves of economic power came along and washed it all away. Thank goodness that happened much earlier than projected with the election of President Trump. Due to the continuing trade war the Chinese people just aren’t riding the wave of extra money that had been fueling a fifth of all iPhone sales pushing Apple stocks down 5.1% for the week as investors had to brace for the loss in projections. When people don’t have the expendable income to buy an iPhone it is an excellent measure of their economic health so there is no way that the “state” of China can hide the problem because the sales are published by an American company.

Of course, Apple’s not happy about it, they feel they need to have a rate of growth that can continue to support their trillion-dollar evaluation and in order to do that they literally need to touch everyone on planet earth in some way or another, so it’s a tough gig. Apple can’t afford to have too many political opinions and to divide up their bases. They trust that conservatives will buy their product because what they have is the best, so they do lean left. And like Google, all the big tech companies had been thinking that China was the way the world was going so they started kissing up to them over a decade ago. But Apple should have never counted on a fifth of their entire market to come from that region of the world. Apple phones are too expensive for a country that relies on its economic power to be stolen from other places and given to them through politics, which is exactly what has happened. American companies were penalized with burdensome regulation so they fled to Asia and took those jobs to those economies. But the origin market was North America where the goods were really purchased. The only big difference was that instead of products being made in America and then being sold back to America, the products were made in other parts of the world and sold back to America. Trump fixed that problem by stopping the cause, over regulation and tax incentives which is why over 300,000 jobs were created in December with a GDP rate of nearly 4% to finish out the year. Meanwhile, China can’t even afford to buy iPhones.

There were a lot of villains in on the game but that’s not important now. China has to steal intellectual property because their communist system does not spawn creativity just as it doesn’t elsewhere in the world. Great thinkers and dreamers like to get paid for their unique visions. They don’t do it for free which is why China has a major creativity problem. All things in business come from creativity, so a society that isn’t very creative is not going to have a strong economy. China could never steal enough intellectual property to stay relevant in an economy now led by the United States again. They are going to gradually fall further and further behind because all their economic gains were created by stifling America with policy and regulation and giving that opportunity cost to China so that the chess board of the world could change. But it was all built on phony values and now Trump has played the card everyone was afraid he would, and China is falling apart.

China always depended on the American economy for its sustenance. What they had was not real value but stolen. And that’s what everyone is having a hard time coming to terms with. China was not a superior culture dominating economics, they were just a third world country artificially made first world with looted wealth from the west so that the idea of communism would be accepted by all global markets. Apple knew it, so does Google, and now they are paying the price for hedging their bets. If Tim Cook were a good CEO he would have started backing off expectations the moment that Trump entered office because anybody aware of the situation knew what was going to happen. Now its time to pay, and likely time to get a new CEO.

Rich Hoffman

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