Tag: Capitalism

The Miracles of Free Market Capitalism at Put-in-Bay: When the market seeks to satisfy customers, good things happen

My wife and I have a great appreciation for the RV life. With our fast-moving lifestyle, it is the method that works best for us, and it’s uniquely American in that we have as part of our lifestyle an expectation of freedom that is certainly dominant with RV travel. We like taking part of our house with us when traveling, which we do extensively throughout the year. It is great to have your own bathroom, your own refrigerator, tools, and storage. And as far as camping, I prefer it to the static existence of hotel life where you depend on everyone else for everything, from food to rest. My camper has my own pillows and sheets that my wife keeps very clean. It makes travel much less stressful when you have your own stuff while staying in places far away. And that’s how we found ourselves up near Put-in-Bay, Ohio. I was at a competitive fast draw competition near that area, so my wife and I camped in our RV for a few days to participate. Then in our downtime, we went over to South Bass Island, where Put-in-Bay is, to look around. I wanted to go to the Perry Museum because I love the Oliver Hazard Perry story of stopping the English during the War of 1812, so because we were camping, we had the flexibility to do that kind of thing while in the area. Plus, there was a really nice campground over on South Bass Island that we have been thinking about as a family trip, as a way to explore all the area islands in the near future, so we wanted to see how the ferry system worked for taking RVs over to the island. 

Of course, Put-in-Bay is very nice, they call it the Key West of the North, and as everyone knows, I like Key West for the audacious independence that it expects, as related to other island lifestyles elsewhere in the world. What’s astonishing about Put-in-Bay is that it’s so close to the border of another country, yet it’s in Ohio, and it has all the island vibes of Hilton Head Island and Key West all wrapped up into a kind of Charleston presentation. It’s a very unique place, and my wife and I enjoyed our visit after doing well in the competitions. For me, it was a rare down day that I greatly appreciated. But what was most impressive to me was the Miller Ferry system itself. I have had the benefit of traveling worldwide and have seen many ferries, many of them creatively stuffing as many people as possible onto their boats to make as much money as they can. But the Miller Ferry had the added complication of maintaining a high American lifestyle. South Bass Island has cars and, as I said, RVs. There is a really nice campground where you can RV camp, and people take their big rigs over to the island routinely. While going over and coming back, I watched the Miller Ferry crew completely load up one of their craft with many millions of dollars in personal RVs, and I couldn’t help but think of the complexity of insurance risk. Most places in the world, especially communist countries, would discourage such travel, where people expect to haul their own personal property over to a tiny island with such an expectation of freedom. That expectation is a particular trait that you find at RV campsites all over the United States and is very consistent as opposed to the type of people who stay at hotels and are dependent on that type of entertainment structure.

Those elements came together nicely on the Miller’s Ferry, where dozens of RVs, many of them over 53 feet long, loaded onto the ferry quickly and traveled across the lake as casually as people ride an elevator up a skyscraper. It was astonishingly competent to watch the ferry crew, which are all very good, load and unload the many millions of dollars of personal equipment so casually. Most organizations and countries that govern them would be much slower and more regulatory-bound. But within moments of landing, the ramp came down, and giant RVs of great worth were leaving the ferry to resume their journeys wherever they intended to go. I found it an astonishing display of competence driven by high personal expectations of customer service based on a lifestyle of freedom. It was audacious to have the ability to take your house to an island to stay for an extended period. Most places in the world would have a lot of regulatory burdens to overcome, and by the time they did, the option would have just been thrown out the window. Why do all that just so people could take their RVs over to a little bitty island? Why couldn’t people just rent a hotel room or stay in a condo? Why did people have to haul their RVs over to a place for such audacious expectations of freedom that were clearly the core of the lifestyle? The island is so tiny, only a few miles across in any direction, that golf carts are the most dominant form of travel. People do drive their cars around, but golf carts are the way to go. The exhibition displayed the difference between government-run facilities and private ones.

The Miller Ferry organization, a private one that has grown to meet the market demand, had no trouble handling even the most complicated loads they did all day without incident. People loaded onto the ferry without crashing and causing other people any trouble, and they did it day in, day out all day, well into the evening. The crew wasn’t overly regulatory and panicked, as you see in many government facilities when they have to deal with crowd management. With the Miller Ferry and the culture of South Bass Island, the expectation is to take care of the customer experience as well as possible, which certainly is not the case with any government-run endeavor. The market serves the consumer and doesn’t seek to control the consumer. If the consumer wants something, then the market finds a way to satisfy that market need, even if it’s as audacious as taking your own home over to a remote island for a day or two so that the traveler can enjoy the comforts of home in their own private way. The amount of cost and investment needed for that experience to happen is ostentatious. Yet they facilitate that life at South Bass Island with the option of the Miller Ferry. As we were experiencing all this, I had to think of where in the world such a display was shown in this way, the level of competence, the expectation of delivery with such a large payload, and people’s private homes. Europe and Asia do not facilitate lifestyles that even have those options as tangible. Their roads aren’t big enough for our RV lifestyle in America. Let alone have a ferry that can take those big vehicles over to an island for vacation. And if the governments were in charge of the ferry, it would take all day to just run through all their regulatory checklists. But at the Miller Ferry, everyone loads up in minutes. They are off just as fast. Nobody crashes. Nobody fights. Nobody worries. People just do what they do and enjoy doing it, which is a wonderful example of how it should be everywhere in the world if only free market capitalism were as vital as it is at South Bass Island.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Fox News Cutting Tucker Carlson: Corporate structures failing everywhere and trying to hide why

It was no surprise to me that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News, even as the number one guy. I’ve been saying it for weeks; it’s almost as if Tucker was trying to get them to fire him so that he could be free of that corporate structure. We are all getting ready to go through a highly unusual period in world history that was a long time coming. There is a belief, especially among the communist-minded, that they could be as rulers, the center of all thought and activity. And that if only they captured the corporate structure, they would always capture economic flow. But the truth was that corporations existed to fulfill market needs and that invention was only part of that discovery. The condition always existed; people needed food, recreation, security, and social and intellectual advancement, so it was the problem of corporate structure to fulfill those market needs as they presented themselves through the measurements of money. Money, particularly capitalism, was the best measure of this incentive-based economy, so corporations would rise to meet those needs and attempt to make a profit from those efforts. Since America had the capitalist system, it obviously made more money than the rest of the world, leaving other economies struggling to figure it all out. But there was a problem; it was getting harder and more complicated year by year for CEOs to stand before shareholders and explain a lack of quarter-to-quarter increases. Because if an economy doesn’t continue to expand, such as in America, where our 19 trillion dollar GDP continues along an upward spike, then CEOs can’t tell shareholders where those subsequent profits will come from. 

Over the last several years, CEOs and corporations, in general, have turned toward globalism to reach new global markets and continue to expand that upward trajectory of profit-based reporting. But the problem was, the rest of the world didn’t think like America. They were struggling with some balance between outright communism, complete centralized control of their governments, and socialism, where the “state,” a collection of mindless bureaucrats who have yet to prove anywhere in the world that they can do anything right, is going to control the means of all production. So there has been a collision that most in America haven’t noticed too much because they only really care that they can get a Happy Meal from McDonald’s at will when they want it. So long as they could do that, they didn’t care much about globalism, communism, the World Economic Forum, or what John Kerry said latest about worshipping his long lost mother, Earth, with a sacrifice of our capitalist economy to the gods of communism. And along this process grew the belief among corporate circles that they controlled social fulfillment and not the other way around, where market forces were determined by social need. Communists have always gotten it wrong. Yet more and more, our colleges, our board rooms, and our CEOs have read all the wrong books, listened to all the wrong people, and have turned more and more inward to share the belief that it was corporations that decided the fate of economies. Not something they had to work with to find their place in it. And that’s what has happened to Fox News. They started their organization as an alternative to corporate media, dominated by CNN and the mainstream outlets that leaned politically left at the time. Fox offered a center-right option that Americans were hungry for. They put on some attractive news anchors and turned loose a market need that was much in demand, and they had success until they tried to change that formula. 

That formula really began to change when Glenn Beck was removed from his 5-6 slot over ten years ago, mainly because the billionaire tycoon George Soros was tired of Beck doing stories that showed what he was trying to do to America through finance. Fellow billionaire and progressive pal Rupert Murdoch listened to Soros and the New York Society of upset progressives sent Beck packing. A few years later, they would do the same to Bill O’Reilly, another number one talent that they removed essentially because they felt that Bill legitimized Donald Trump by allowing him to announce his presidential campaign on his show. Then from there, the ball really started rolling, whether it was Dan Bongino, Rudi Guiliani, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Ed Henry, the list goes on and on. The more effective the MAGA movement was, the more desperate progressive radicals who always intended to spread communism worldwide and into corporate structures became. Like self-centered children who believe the world centers around them, they thought that Fox News had created Donald Trump, and it was Trump’s sales of capitalism that were interrupting the plans of globalism most, and they had to destroy that means of communication. 

That government beast serving globalism is very attractive to the American intelligence agencies who were caught allowing election fraud in the 2020 election, so they had to do something to attempt to bury their complicity in that massive crime, so they blew on the mind of Ray Epps to provoke an insurrection on January 6th. But people saw it for what it was, and Epps has been well hidden from the public since that January 6th event in 2021. After Tucker Carlson did some excellent reporting on Ray Epps and the general condition of government activism around January 6th, it was evident that Fox News would cut him too. They didn’t care if he had the number one show. They had fallen into the belief that they “Fox News” had made Tucker Carlson. Not that Tucker—and those like him—made Fox News as is usually the case of market-driving influencers. Then Fox News had to settle the Dominion lawsuit because they were actually all complicit in the election narrative, which would have been exposed in court, so they settled a massive payout to keep the case private and not released under the lens of public exposure. Remember when Fox News called Arizona for Biden when people were still in line voting for Trump in 2020? Yeah, there’s that and much more. So 60 Minutes doing the work of the Deep State, globalists who are terrified that Trump will win the Republican nomination played their part in resurrecting the Ray Epps story so to set up the next lawsuit against Fox News, which showed itself to be willing to settle lawsuits making it a prime target for everyone who has an ax to grind to get a little money in their pockets, so the rest was history.

The next day after the 60 Minutes story, Tucker was released, and the political left cheered, thinking they had done something substantial. They had eliminated the voice of the MAGA movement, and now they would be one step closer to keeping Donald Trump from winning the nomination. But that only shows how stupid they all really are. I’ve said it and said it over and over for many months now; Fox News was holding back Tucker Carlson. Tucker would be better off away from Fox. Fox was lucky to have a guy like that. But Murdoch knows he’s not going to live very much longer. His kids are radical New York lefties who will destroy Fox anyway. So now is a chance to sell off Fox News before they screw it all up. Likely Murdoch has in mind Larry Fink’s group at BlackRock because through Fed activism, BlackRock, Vanguard, and StateStreet own most of all the corporate boards that are out there, and they are all equally failing to meet market trends versus the imposed ESG measures. So Fox is ripe for buying, primarily if they can protect themselves from another lawsuit, this one coming from Ray Epps, and sell the company while it still has value before the kids destroy it anyway. And the progressive radicals, like Larry Fink, can hang the head of Fox News over their fireplace. And they all think they will have then stopped the MAGA movement. Yet, in reality, all they will have done is decentralize that MAGA movement, which will then make it much more powerful and less restricted. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Need More Capitalism in Healthcare: The government ruins everything and they need to stay away from trying to fix people

Another thing that has come up a lot lately is the condition of our American healthcare system. Now I have a special relationship with this topic, too; some unusual perspectives that I think are humorous, as I have been warning about this industry much like I have been warning about the public education system. I have several family members who work in the healthcare industry. One of my sons-in-laws came from England, where their healthcare industry was already worse than we see in America now, with long waiting lines for operations and selective care. All kinds of really stupid rules collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy. He was with me when I had to get ACL surgery; the entire family went to the hospital because seeing me in such a vulnerable condition was pretty tragic. I have always had a “don’t go to the doctor unless it’s an absolute emergency” policy, so it was hard for them to see me go into an actual operation that involved anesthesia.   But it was the only way to repair my ACL. I had torn it during an intense basketball game. I worsened the situation during an entertaining stunt where I jumped through a wall of fire with my bullwhips slinging, one in each hand. When I landed, the grass was wet, my footing slipped, and my thigh bone ultimately came out of the knee socket and drove itself deep into the dirt. I popped everything back together using my MCL to hold my leg in one piece so I could limp away. But a lot of damage had been done, so I went to an outstanding surgeon who worked on Cincinnati Reds players to fix my knee. 

I’ve had hundreds of stitches, so going to the doctor has been common. But every time I have hated the experience so much, I have taken extreme measures to avoid going to the doctor because the service in the healthcare industry is so bad. When I have been cut really badly, my policy has always been to Super Glue everything back together, literally. I’ve been doing that for my entire adult life.   I used to work in a hazardous metal stamping factory, and it was common for people to lose fingers. I had a lot of bad cuts, and whenever I could, I used Super Glue rather than getting stitches to get right back to work. Even with bad injuries, I never missed work. And when my kids had really bad cuts, my policy was to glue them together. There were a few times when they were bitten by animals, both times in the face. Particularly a nose injury where a good part of it had been ripped away. Another time an ear. In both cases, I was concerned that the stitches would pull the skin together in hard ways that would leave a terrible scar, and these were girls; they would need their faces as pretty as possible. So I glued them together, and everything healed nicely, with very little scarring.

In the aftermath, people can barely tell. It comes to my mind because I recently had a birthday, and the family was gratefully joking about these kinds of things. My approach was certainly unorthodox and, ironically, way ahead of its time. It was interesting during that ACL repair to hear my son-in-law talk about the horrors of the English healthcare system because he was amazed at how efficient ours was in America. But I hated it. I hated the assembly line feel of surgery, and I had the best that Cincinnati had to offer. But to me, it was garbage. Our health care should be so much better, and I know it can be.

My extreme measures are born from my hatred of it. My wife just broke a bone in her hand the other day, and she was asking me what to do about it because it hurt. She fell and hit the ground hard after playing with the grandkids in the way that kids under ten typically play. She plays with them, and that usually involves falling. When you are a kid, and the bones are still rubbery, they can generally get away with hard falls into the concrete. But the bones get brittle when you are over 50, so she broke a bone in her hand while bracing for a fall. I reminded her of a recent motorcycle accident I had where someone ran into me at a high rate of speed while I was just sitting there, merging into traffic. The accident totaled my very expensive motorcycle. The driver who hit me wasn’t looking for motorcycles and hit me at full speed. I watched her closely in my mirrors and determined that she would hit me, so I jumped off the bike head first just in time. I would have lost my legs from the impact if I hadn’t jumped off my bike. I broke my wrist just below the pivot joint to the hand when I hit. I instinctively popped it back into place because I couldn’t stand to look at it. And once the paramedics and all the police left the scene, the woman who hit me was crying in a massive panic. I assured her I was going to be alright. Her lawyer called me immediately to offer whatever assistance they could, and so did her insurance company. Nobody denied anything. They wanted to take care of me. I told them just to pay for the bike, and we’d call it a day. 

I probably could have obtained a lot of money for that accident because there was significant damage, and the lady who hit me was dangerously complicit. But I had a critical overseas conference call that I was late for with Spain, so I did the call, took care of the people I was working with, and I told the insurance people about my broken wrist but that I would wave any medical care on it. I would just fix it myself. I didn’t want any further delays to my life; I was busy and wanted to return to it. Once you enter the medical system, they want to live off your life, and I want nothing to do with what they offer. Anywhere the government has gotten involved in anything, it turns to crap. And health care is terrible. We could do so much better. I think we should have medical care as common as fast food restaurants, where if you want a hamburger, you can get one from McDonald’s instead of a 50-dollar hamburger at a nice restaurant, But you ultimately have a choice. Now with all the government interference in health care, it’s all garbage. Medicare is a scam, the pharma companies have the economics all rigged as fancy drug dealers, and it has ruined the entire industry by making people sick who otherwise would be healthy. Anything that involves the double snakes of the medical industry is something I avoid to the extreme because I consider going to them far worse. So when people say, “We need more government health care,” I say, “No, I’ll just do the care myself because those idiots working in it are dumb, slow, and incompetent, and I want nothing to do with them.” Just like everything else the government does, from public school to license bureau work. There is too much socialism and communism in health care and not nearly enough capitalism, and until they change that ratio, it will always be terrible. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

It is Joe Biden’s Fault that there Isn’t .50 A.E. ammunition at Cabela’s: Democrat Party communist tampering destroys supply chains from eggs to ammunition

There is an old Ronald Reagan joke, which I will include with this article, that talks about how ridiculous buying a car in Russia was during the open days of communism. Because of the tight government controls on the means of production, the joke went that it took ten years to get on the waiting list to buy a car. But that a person would have to know whether the car would be ready in the afternoon or morning because the plumber was scheduled in the morning, which might pose a conflict. The essence of the story is that government tampering with the marketplace causes production delays, and no matter where in the world it is tried, communism and socialism slow down production. But wait, what about China, you might say, or Vietnam? They are very productive and are the fastest-growing economies in the world. Well, two things are happening there; first, they are very industrious people, not afraid of hard work in most Asian countries, and they have a lot of people to overwhelm the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. The other thing is that the World Economic Forum has artificially propped up all Asian countries through corporate manipulation, so the money they enjoy and investments they see coming in are a direct result of market tampering by hostile forces hell-bent on taking over the world. So the value of Chinese manufacturing at all levels is smoke and mirrors. Communism is the pick of the Desecrators of Davos investors at the World Economic Forum because they like it, and banks like centralized control. So despite the realities of President Reagan’s jokes about Russia, there has been a global push to outspend reality and force the world into communism anyway.   

And there is a reason those same forces felt they had to steal the American election, just as they did the one obviously in Brazil. The world is on fire, and there are protests everywhere, Paris, London, Mexico, and just about anywhere that large populations are struggling to reclaim their capitalism from global commitments from finance into socialism and outright communism. And Joe Biden represents the Democrat’s deep desire to install Chinese communism in America and to rot away Americans’ expectations about production and market value. Now we are seeing the effects of this Democrat Party push for Chinese-style communism everywhere, whether we are talking about baby formula, gas prices, or the latest crisis, the price of eggs. Something many of us take for granted, eggs, which are easy to get in large numbers in America, are now rising in price to dangerous levels because the Biden administration policies have tampered with the market to such an extent that they have interrupted production and delivery which can’t keep up with demand. But for me, this is a much more serious issue going much further than the price of eggs. I see the destruction of the Biden administration differently every time I go to Cabela’s to buy ammunition. I have had through Covid thousands of rounds of ammunition for my .50 A.E. Desert Eagle, which is my carry gun, and it has taken me a while to burn through them. It hasn’t been an issue in a few years, but I used to be able to go to Cabela’s in West Chester, Ohio, and buy all the .50 A.E. ammunition I could want. It was just as easy to buy .500 Magnum S&W ammunition, my other carry gun I take with me everywhere I go. But on this particular day, I couldn’t find them, so I asked the store clerk if they had any, and he just laughed as if what I had said was the funniest thing in the world. “I haven’t seen any of that kind of ammunition in over three years,” he said as if me asking for it was the most absurd thing in the world. 

Now, I can make all aspects of ammunition on my own. I don’t need an ammunition manufacturer to do it for me. Most of the time, ordering all the components, I can assemble my own ammunition by reloading at my home. But I could just as well do it in the middle of the woods with no power grid. The government has obviously done what it can’t do with gun laws; tamper with the supply of ammunition by making it hard for manufacturers to produce it, and they have tampered with the supply chain. The result is that Cabela’s, which is one of their core competencies, has had a hard time getting any ammunition. For a long time during Covid, they struggled to get some of the most common ammunition in the world, 9MM. As I looked at the shelves, I thought they had managed to get most ammunition from .22 through .45 caliber, and equally rifle ammunition as well. But the really big stuff, the exotic stuff I like to use, has dropped off the radar and is likely interrupted forever. You could tell by the way the clerk talked that he had already accepted the limits of global communism and had made himself a victim to those lowered expectations. Whereas, under President Trump, during the year of 2019, the year before Covid, I would have asked for .50 A.E. ammunition, and he would have proudly said something like, “right over, there are six boxes of 20. And if you want, you can get a free hamburger and a 2-litter of Coke for free if you buy five boxes today.” Excesses are expected in American culture, which makes things cheaper.

But for the global market tampering schemes of communists, they want what is happening at Cabela’s. They can’t pass laws to get rid of gun rights, but they can make it hard for people to get ammunition to use. So they have attacked that sector of the economy for personal activism. I’ll still shoot my guns, but they have made it harder and much more expensive to get, and the efforts have been on purpose, clearly. It’s part of the overall communist philosophy of why the Biden administration was put in place, to begin with. Unlike the store clerk at Cabela’s, I don’t accept these ridiculous restrictions that have been artificially imposed on us by out-of-control, stupid government and their tampering desires. I expect to live in a country where I can buy a chicken sandwich at Chick-fil-A and stop by Cabela’s, which is right next door, and buy up several boxes of .50 caliber pistol ammunition all in about 10 minutes so I can get back to doing other things in my life rather than looking for ammunition. The real reason that communist countries have less productivity is that people waste time waiting on the government to do things, and that gives them less free time for personal pleasures. I don’t waste time in my life, so it is quite insulting to waste time looking for things like ammunition that should be easy and quick to get. It’s bad enough when these market restrictions start to emerge with common items like eggs. But you can best see the effects of globalism and the Biden administration’s communist philosophy on luxury items, which are always the first targets of attack by overly centralized governments. When the store clerk laughs at the assumption that we live in such a competent world that .50 caliber ammunition would just be sitting on the shelf, you know you have a big problem on the supply side of an economy. And it was made worse by government not by accident but by purposeful activism that is part of a global strategy. And it’s far worse than many people realize. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The NFL Experience: There are things more valuable than safety and security

The very next game after the Bengals had the Monday Night Football game canceled, I had a chance to go and see them in Cincinnati play the Baltimore Ravens for the last game of the season. It had been a busy year where literally every weekend was spoken for. But knowing that the Bengals were going to be in the playoffs and that, especially during this time of the year right after Christmas, this is when I like the NFL experience the most, I wanted to go to a game and enjoy what that product did for the entire city on a cold winter afternoon. It’s hard to experience the NFL product fully; it involves more than just watching the game for three hours out of your day like you do when you watch the games on television. Even that is hard for me and is often difficult. I get pretty mad when the team I’m cheering on doesn’t win because I feel that I wasted my time on them only to end up feeling not encouraged. So attending sports events for me is a lot like gambling. With my life so carefully managed from one moment to the next, investing in an experience where I don’t control the outcome is a lot of risk. But once the Christmas lights come down and we enter the full clutches of winter, I love that our culture produces the NFL playoffs to edge us through the hardest winter months. By the time the NFL playoffs are finished, and we have the Super Bowl, which I consider a great American holiday, we are almost ready for spring. The maple syrup starts flowing, and we know the days of extreme cold are ending. So the NFL experience is very valuable for all kinds of reasons, and they are best viewed from the Club Seats in Cincinnati. 

I was not supportive of the NFL calling off the game against the Bills literally just a few nights earlier because the game itself means so much more to people than just the events of a player who happened to get hurt. The NFL is a very progressive corporation, what many call the No Fun League, putting on the field a uniquely American product. So the NFL is always in an interesting tug of war between appeasing their fan base and marching to the beat that comes out of the World Economic Forum’s strategic intentions for world domination. And, of course, the attack comes from where nobody really understands the direction. While fans watch the military flyovers during NFL games, which are quite spectacular in their own way, and complete the National Anthem with hats over hearts, the tide of the game, which is entirely out of the NFL’s control, takes on a life of its own. And it’s something you can only ever really see in person by experiencing firsthand. During this particular game, I had a very personal relationship with the military craft that was used, and they flew over very low, so low and slow that you could see the pilots. With all the fireworks, I had my grandson with me, which was quite a ceremony. Clearly, he was having a moment with the whole stadium, and patriotism was fully in the air. The haters of American culture might have the ear of the NFL and are pushing for its destruction through woke policies, but the current of American society itself was on full display all around us, and I found it very refreshing, worth its own currency in those cold January months.   

Ultimately, the NFL is like a pioneer trying to cross the current of a raging river. They started something that Americans genuinely love, and that made them happy until their masters of finance leveled an attack against our culture, trying to use that love as a device of hate, to destroy that very culture by luring innocent people near it, then to influence them with extortion to social behavior changes that were controlled by the Desecrators of Davos as I call them, the Bond villains who are a part of the World Economic Forum. And those types of people called off that game against the Bills to remind people that safety and security were more important than the results of a game, which I will always argue are oppositely true. The result of a game, or an event in life of any matter, is far more important than safety and security. American football, represented by what the NFL puts on the field, is a dangerous sport that represents capitalism at its finest. It is different from European soccer in many ways that are critically important to our culture. Soccer is a kind of pinball game where skilled players get a random chance to kick a ball into a goal uniquely. American football is all about planning and precision. You get four downs to get 10-yard increments. Every play is like a business plan, and success is the end zone of all that planning and coordination paying off. The offense on the field is all of us. The defense is life itself, trying to keep you from scoring. Football in America has much more going on than most sports. People have an unconscious understanding of it, even if their conscious reality manifests into too much beer drinking and dancing to booming music. Football in America has a unique relationship with capitalism, and we have a perceptual understanding of that value, which is why globalist forces are attacking the game the way they are. If you want to bring down America, which many forces in the world do, then American football is the way to do so. That leaves the owners of NFL teams in a strange place. Do they follow the rules of wokism from the World Economic Forum, or do they listen to the fans who continue to make them rich and allow the currents of capitalism to wash over them in a way they enjoy and can thrive in? 

I tend to be very free with the wallet at these kinds of events; I like my children and grandchildren to know how vital NFL games are to Americana itself. I don’t complain about the expensive drinks or hot dogs. I like the very expensive jerseys and hats. I like to tip the guys out front of the east entrance who are playing the drums. I love the energy and the celebration of life that is obvious at all NFL games. And I wish everyone could win every time. It is much like gambling to investing so much time and money into the NFL experience, but I see it as nothing but positive. And after going, I was reminded how dumb it was to cancel that game just because a player was injured. When bad things happen, we want to take time to see them taken care of. But there was more going on with the Bills player who suffered a heart attack on the field during Monday Night Football during the first game of 2023. Likely the heart attack was brought on by the NFL’s push for untested government vaccines, playing their role in the Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and the gang of destroyers who gather every year in Davos about this very same period. There are a lot of hostile forces in the world, and fans at NFL games are uniquely prominent in their effects, which is obviously frustrating for those forces. That’s why games should never be canceled, no matter what. The show itself has a value that transcends the way antagonistic forces shape logic, and the rebellion against their wrath is very much the core of the NFL experience, an unintended consequence. It’s what people cheer for during the game and why going to the games is such a cherished activity. And it’s why we must fight to keep our corporate products out of the hands of global politics intent to rule us all behind bureaucratic rules and regulations centered on safety and compliance. Those are the real enemies, and we love to cheer when our football teams score, regardless of what defense is set up to stop us. In the end, that’s what people celebrate, and it’s certainly worth doing.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Liberalism Behind ‘Avatar Way of Water’: It won’t turn out the way Disney hopes

Usually, the people reading the tea leaves on television and radio get it all wrong because the leaves they are reading aren’t the right ones. I would suggest a different approach: to read the leaves of media currents themselves and to study what the public likes and doesn’t like as a much more accurate measure. And to that effect, much of where the world is going by way of populism, corporate control, and the way many treacherous characters hide their acts of malice behind liberal causes are on a crash course with destiny and collapsed diabolical intent. With that in mind, I’m talking about the new Avatar film, Way of Water, as if the world is being steered back to nature, into some oriental wisdom from the ancient past to reveal to our modern selves how far we have fallen from the tree. Because the tea leaves that Jim Cameron, the director and writer of the film, and the parent company of the new Avatar films, Disney, are reading the tea leaves of a wilted plant from the past that has long died. The world is a much different place from when the first Avatar movie came out, which earned a record-breaking 2 billion dollars at the box office. I was doing some work with Hollywood then, specifically with RealD 3D, so I knew what many producers and distributers wanted to do with 3D to convince movie goers to put their butts in seats instead of staying home watching movies on their magnificent home theater systems. And the first Avatar movie benefited from a good story, a great filmmaker, and outstanding cutting-edge 3D technology. But people at that time were comfortable with their lives; they trusted that America would always be there and that government wasn’t nearly as corrupt as we know it to be now. And the World Economic Forum was something that nobody knew much of anything about. People lived their lives and were open to strange ideas about environmentalism because there was room in a comfortable life to accept such ideas, so long as they could go home in their gas-powered car and had a full bank account. Church on Sunday put their minds to ease about what would happen tomorrow. 

It will be interesting to watch how audiences accept this new Avatar movie, released over a decade after the first. Disney hopes it will make a lot of money like the first, but I think it will be far short of the original. As will the subsequent films that are already planned will be. People will go see the movie for the same reason they are waiting in line for more than two hours to ride the magnificent ride at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom because they want to step out of their lives and into a unique experience. The Avatar ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida is one of the most outstanding technical achievements I have ever seen for human imagination. The whole Avatar land there is a monument to what the human imagination can produce, and I think it’s great. But, the cat is out of the bag now on Disney and Jim Cameron, who are both much more liberal than they used to be, and the country of America isn’t that liberal. The Desecrators of Davos “back to nature” message is not the priority for the people living in the world. With an overt message of environmentalism versus technical achievement, humans tend to cheer on the products of their minds, not the pagan superstitions of the past, which is the true intent of liberalism and its desire to reset the Vico Cycle into anarchy and back to a theocracy where nature is worshipped as the modern Earth Goddess. The first Avatar walked a very fine line between overt lectures about the terrors of corporate greed and the majesty of nature’s wisdom. And that redeeming message is the heart of the Desecrators of Davos plan to unite all the corporations of the world behind their pagan religions and to drag everyone in the world who uses those products with them to the Liberal World Order priorities for existence. 

It’s not that the new Avatar film The Way of Water will be boring. I’m sure that after ten years of making the movie, Jim Cameron has done some great things in film. But the message itself, this Dances with Wolves in space concept of rejecting technology for the idea that we are all cells within the body of something greater than ourselves, is a political message that people don’t want to hear. It’s been crammed down their throats for a long time now. Since the first Avatar movie in 2009, we’ve been through the Obama presidency and all the terrible things that happened as a result. That led people to vote for Trump in 2016. And when the great America that came from the Trump administration was taken from people in 2020, the Desecrators of Davos through their election tampering, especially with Facebook, they gave us Joe Biden, an embarrassment who has declared war on fossil fuels and represents the forces which essentially want to create Pandora, the land from the Avatar films, here on earth and as a political platform. Through public relations trickery, they can attempt to show that elections are close in America, just as in other places worldwide, such as Brazil. But in reality, people do not vote against their best interests, and this evidence shows in other aspects of our culture the kind of things people choose to be entertained by.

And that’s ultimately the problem with the new Avatar films; they are essentially the Biden political platform, the new religion of the globalists around the world of earth worship, presented as entertainment behind top-level special effects and all the magic a movie theater experience can provide. There are movies scheduled all the way through Avatar 5 that I think are getting way out over their skis. If they were just entertainment, people might enjoy them. But if you have read Klaus Schwab’s books from the World Economic Forum, you would see that Avatar and Disney’s production of them is essentially the world they want to get to hear on earth; it’s a political platform and their goals for the transformation of the world. They want us all to strip down naked, make love to our animal powers, get right with nature, and bend to its will, like the characters in Avatar do. And because of that, I think people will reject the films aside from their initial spectacle and the lack of anything else to see at a movie theater. I predict that all the hard work that Jim Cameron has put into these films will ultimately be lost on a public that is sick of the politics of liberalism being pushed into their lives from every direction, especially in their entertainment. And the results will be embarrassing for Disney and Cameron in the end. It is one thing to visit the Avatar World at Animal Kingdom and to marvel at the technical achievements that essentially attempt to make a primitive life great again in the minds of the Desecrators of Davos. But when you get tired of it, you can go back to your nice hotel, get a nice meal, sit by a very modern pool, and enjoy the world of technology and business with all the audacity that American capitalism can provide. But the point of the Avatar films, and the liberalism behind them, is to get rid of that comfort and to return mankind to a primitive state, so there is nowhere else to go. And people don’t like that message at all, and it will show in the box office results and, ultimately, Disney’s stock.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Root Cause of all Political Problems: Playing the cards to win, not letting the cards play you

One of the reasons I had to talk about superstition in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is because one of the failures of Lean manufacturing, which has become the industry standard in process improvement across the world, is that it fails to recognize the most important detriment to all process failures, human behavior. Rather than deal with the detriments of human behavior, Lean seeks to create processes that remove human variables and build group consensus around those resolutions. Because the main problem with human behavior is that in the East, and even in Europe, workforces are much more compliant naturally due to their long histories with kings and overbearing governments. But in America, a different kind of human being emerged. And we can easily see those differences in the type of card games that we play. I specifically use the differences between Tarot cards and poker cards to accentuate the point often to clarify the differences in thought. And this is spectacularly important in our present time specifically because globalists have assumed, as many have with Lean manufacturing, that all people are the same. If the same rules were imposed upon them, then a universal kind of sameness could emerge and could then be easily controlled. But that has turned out to be vastly untrue, and the failure which follows is what we are seeing playing out in our present time. 

Lean manufacturing, as it turns out, which is a problem I have always had with it, is that it was a kind of pre-ESG score way to bring eastern thoughts to western cultures and then launch a global approach of sameness to all industries. I have taught Lean for over 30 years and have always run into the same problem; American cultures tend to push back on it while those in Europe and Asia tend to be much more accommodating. This has been a mystery to all involved because they failed to consider the most important aspect of human behavior and how they transact with their peers. So in my book, I break it down in ways that people can understand, which essentially comes down to tolerance for superstition in a culture and how those beliefs manifest into a business climate or a political one. In the book, I give a history of superstition across the world and talk about the use of horoscopes and Tarot cards to predict the future as some fortune teller might professionally do around a crystal ball. The thought was that people were helpless to the greater scheme of things and could seek help in the stars or in the spirit world of card reading to better navigate through the complexities of everyday life. When a string of luck occurs in business, even the most resolute executive might say, “knock on wood,” hoping not to jinx a project into failure when all has been going well. Behind such thoughts is the fear that humans are not in control of their destiny and that they must subjugate themselves to some “greater good” to function at even basic tasks in life. 

But in New Orleans, during western expansion, the card games of Europe evolved into something much more conducive to the lifestyles of Americans. Poker was invented, and over the next hundred years, the very American game of Texas Hold Em’ emerged and is extremely popular presently. Poker tournaments are common on sports programming such as ESPN, and every casino runs a Texas Hold Em’ game. Likely, they are running dozens of them. Meanwhile, the fortune-tellers are always on the outskirts of such activity at the fairgrounds and sidewalk attractions which offer a different kind of game for the more faint at heart, Tarot card readings. It is often interesting to go to a casino and witness the types of people who play poker and the kind who line up to have their fortunes told to them by someone else. The point of the matter is that the poker players can win the game even if they have a bad hand. The poker players play the cards, whereas the Tarot card reader allows the cards to play them. The fortune is in the cards, but the game is played to win in poker even if the cards are bad. Both are card games, but their rules of conduct are magnificently different to reflect the cultures that play them. 

In the movie Titanic, still one of the most successful movies ever made, this idea of making one’s own luck was a centerpiece of the story. Many women loved the love story between Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet; they could relate to the overbearing mother, the “too perfect” fiancée who was projected to be a great and wealthy business leader. It was, in essence, an East meets West story, where the business leader was a person who made their “own luck,” which he actually says at the end of the movie as his projected wife leaves him for the unfocused exploits of the hero played by DeCaprio.  Only to find herself floating on a door in the freezing north Atlantic after the Titanic sank and her lover sacrificed himself so that she could live. The story’s villain was one who self-determined his reality while the heroes surrendered themselves to circumstance. We see those same politics playing out daily in our news cycles, in our business process improvements, and certainly within our own families. But what the American poker players figured out was critical to the truth of the universe.

Even when you are losing, you can still win, and poker was invented to reflect that new way of looking at things from the perspective of an American, which much of the world admires, but secretly resents because they don’t have the courage for it. It is much safer to have the cards tell them how to live, consult a horoscope, and look to the stars for guidance. But to the American, not all of them, but to the bold ones who figure it out, every moment of every day is an opportunity. Even bad luck can be turned into fortune if you know how to play the cards right. But failure often happens because people let the cards play them. They don’t live their lives in a way where they play the cards. That is why Lean manufacturing always falls short, and companies end up throwing vast amounts of money at process improvements when they should be dealing with the psychology of interpersonal relationship failures. This is why Republicans and Democrats essentially can never work together because they have entirely different ways of dealing with the same problem. One is passive, and one is very active. And this is also why the MAGA movement is growing, why people elected a casino owner with a supermodel wife to the White House twice, and why much of the swamp hated them for it. Politics wants to read the Tarot cards. Trump supporters want to play to win. And those approaches will never go together. The problem was never one of simply political belief. Instead, it all comes down to superstitions and how to manage them. Do we let the cards play us, or do we play the cards? In America, we play the cards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Cash Out Your 401K Plans While You Still Can: The scam of Stakeholder Capitalism

I think it’s the biggest scam in the history of the world, even a bigger scam than Covid was, which was a virus made in a Wuhan lab and released by China. Stakeholder Capitalism has been buzzing around for a few years now, and it’s a creation from the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum guys. We haven’t cared much about it because it was always kind of a foreign thing from “over there” in dirty old aristocratic Europe. But after the election take-over of 2020, where many conspired to get President Trump out of office, the imposition of Stakeholder Capitalism is very much a part of the Biden agenda. It’s a progressive trick meant to do a lot of things. Not only is it just a new way to change the name of Marxism in our culture to something that people might be more willing to accept because it has the looted word “capitalism” in it, but it has a much more sinister intention. One that will impact each and every one of us with a 401K plan. I’ve been watching this bubble building for a long time, and what I’m about to say will be painful. But at the very least, I would recommend you pull your money out of all 401K plans currently managed by Vanguard, BlackRock, Blackstone, or State Street, because they are all arms of the Desecrators of Davos Klaus Schwab gang. After their meeting this year, they are planning to go full-court press with this Stakeholder Capitalism concept and to replace the way we measure money around the world with this scam they have come up with to hide their vast crimes against humanity.  

If you are a CEO, one of the scariest parts of your job is to stand before shareholders and explain what you have done to increase a company’s profits and raise its stock portfolio. Of course, socialists and communists around the world hate this method; they hate the idea of measurements of value. That’s why they are trying to prepare us to have a no-value culture where we don’t judge anything. They see applying value as bad because their desire in life is to be lowlife slugs hiding always in the shadows. And they don’t want to be judged as lowlifes, but as equal to everyone else. So they have consistently attacked the basic premise of Adam Smith capitalism, which built the United States’ great economy. From the time they came to America from Europe, they have been trying to get us to accept their European socialism from Marx as a new way of measuring economic activity. This Stakeholder Capitalism idea is just the latest means of doing that. It proposes that we replace measuring value with what it is now as a monetary measure to replace it with social value. An ESG system, where value is placed on environmental concerns, social responsibility as defined by political progressives, and how an organization and individuals govern everything based on those ideas. This is how so many CEOs have become trapped into accepting woke thoughts into their companies. Many companies are in a kind of shareholder bubble where their stock price is inflated based on growth, which has become stagnant. This is especially true after Covid, where the social order of everything has been disrupted. CEOs have been quick to adopt woke politics even if they disagree with them politically because ESG scores get them off the hook if society starts changing what they consider value to be. If they no longer have to worry about profits and instead can worry about putting purple-haired losers on their board of directors, then maybe they can survive as a CEO. 

But it’s actually worse than all that, and Klaus Schwab, Larry Fink, and many others know what they have done. Just ask Jerome Powell at the Fed about the pinch he’s in, where there is over $8.5 trillion on the Fed’s balance sheet, made that way by quantitative easing. A Federal Reserve that Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke essentially applied Keynesian economics to since the crash of 2008 and allowed Fink and others to buy up fake assets created by the Fed policy of printing endless amounts of money, then selling those assets to all of us, so they could use that power to buy up stock in most major companies, to impose ESG scores on them to make this whole stakeholder capitalism idea stick before its too late. And by too late, that’s where that +30,000 the stock market is currently at busts because it’s all based on inflated value directly from the Federal Reserve and exploited by the Desecrators of Davos, for which Larry Fink sits on the Board of Trustees, since 2019. The game is to change the way we measure value in the world before people find out about it so that when that bubble does burst, shareholders won’t be upset because they’ll be stakeholders by that time. Their value will be changed to this new way of looking at the world. 

This is precisely why I wrote my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I saw this trend negatively through the Lean Manufacturing movement, where everything was about nature as the East considers it. “Be like nature, and you’ll have more efficient manufacturing plants.” I have had major CEOs ask me about this stuff as they are perplexed about what to do about it. “Are we trying to make money, or are we supposed to be at one with nature. Nature doesn’t care about money.” That’s why I wrote my book, to help people like that understand what’s going on and how these Desecrators of Davos types are just the latest snake oil salesmen. They have looted our cash, spent it into oblivion with Keynesian economic theories, now they have these liberal Modern Monetary Theory ideas of endless money supply that has no value in itself attached to some gold standard. Because society’s values won’t be possessive, they’ll be social, how accepting we are of gay rights or cultural diversity. Or how many solar panels we have on the roof of our factories. And they need us to accept this snake oil before we figure out that we’ve been ripped off, that our 401K plans are actually worthless. The entire reason the stock market jumped in value so much over the last five years or so was not because of Trump. I want to say it was, but obviously, more is going on. It was all inflated money allowing money managers to buy up so much corporate stock, to get control of fossil fuel companies, entertainment companies, everything. And to get that control, the goal was to change how all companies measure value. To replace classic capitalism and to replace it with this Marxist idea of stakeholder capitalism.  In the end, it will fail, but everyone needs to understand what the problem is. The Desecrators of Davos want a one-world currency that they control. They want a one-world government which they will manage. They want to control all human behavior with ESG scores, and they have been planning it for decades. However, as I say in my book, the value of something is determined by the people playing the games of life. I like to use poker metaphors.   A poker chip is just a piece of plastic if you carry it around in your pocket. But while playing the poker game, it represents actual money and decides who wins and loses the game. Ultimately, that will always be the case; this stakeholder capitalism concept is from lazy Marxist types who don’t want to compete in the world and wish things were different for them. So they would rather destroy the game rather than play it. But fortunately for all of us,

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Intellectual Currency

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The Looted Wealth of China

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

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

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

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

 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business