Tag: Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

‘Looking Backward’: Where the liberal snipers have been hiding

Finding the Snipers by Looking Backward

I talk about it all the time, but if you are new to all this and have been getting your news from more mainstream sources, well, maybe you didn’t know about the successive tyrants of the world, the World Economic Forum who recently announced their Great Narrative from Dubai.  That is, of course, the same group behind the Great Reset, which Covid was created to implement across the world to shut down all the world’s economies simultaneously.  Then to have a managed restart under the United Nations using climate change fake science to drive the need.  I was catching up on all the latest climate crises, United Nations propaganda, and Davos Great Narrative updates while playing the new Call of Duty: Vanguard.  I was on a specific mission where you had to cross a vast field with broken-up buildings off in the distance full of snipers.  You had to work with a teammate to draw out the sniper fire, determine which windows the snipers were in, and quickly shoot them to advance.  I couldn’t help but see the parallels to what I was listening to.  The political left has kept themselves concealed in darkness for a long time, forcing us to focus on their specific positions.  As we put our sniper scopes on them, they’d shoot us from a different place.  When we changed our priorities, they’d shoot us yet from somewhere else.  But I like to look at the whole battlefield and pay attention to all the muzzle flashes from the various snipers to see them as one big story.  And that’s what the Great Narrative revealed to me; it was essentially a word-for-word utopian update of the old Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward.  This time, climate change was the driver toward global socialism and communism, taking over government over private enterprise so that the state could justify the power grab.  Since people resisted the first attempt, which took over 100 years to try, the political left has now turned to climate change to drive the justification, and it is evident to anybody who had a mind to look at the big picture. 

Looking Backward was essentially a short evolutionary novel meant to soft-sell Karl Marx to America and was in 1888 the third most popular book behind Ben Hur.  There was a massive following for the socialist utopia that the book describes when the hero wakes up 130 years in the future after being put to sleep with hypnosis only to suffer an accident in the process.  When he finally wakes up, the world has evolved into a socialist utopia, complete with the state taking over ultimately the means of production. There is no crime, everyone is equal, and the government maintains that fairness at the expense of all else. It’s a fluffy sort of fiction that, looking forward, was every bit like science fiction as Star Wars. Still, the premise was intentionally real, and a considerable following erupted from 1888 to 1900.  It only ended because Bellamy had died, and the movement took on a new shape.  But it’s a period of history that hides behind other things like the Civil War, the invention of the airplane, the electric bulb. The Model T. It’s a socialist movement that completely infected our education system at all levels, starting with John Dewey, who designed our public education system around the premise of Bellamy’s book.  So this wasn’t some fringe movement, it was the evolution of Karl Marx right in front of our faces, and it happened at the turn of the century.  What evolved after it became the stuff of nightmares, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the centralized control of money, progressive taxation, the big government politics that would lead to the New Deal.  The attempts at creating the League of Nations, then finally the United Nations.  It all started with that little book that replaced the gunfighters of western expansion and the liberalized easterner’ desire to assimilate the new nation’s success. 

People called these strange new socialist lovers “elite” because, at the time, they were the ones who were in our education system and teaching us.  They were the education system, the professors of our colleges, and they were our intellectual guides in a time when many people still couldn’t read.  Because many who founded America as a new country were suffering from an inferiority complex with Europe, these socialist lovers had the ear of many people we trusted to teach us things we didn’t know due to our lack of culture and history.  We didn’t know that much of what they were teaching were things we didn’t want or need to know.  We just knew they knew something we didn’t, so our society listened to them.  This went on for several decades, getting worse and worse over time.  As communism took over in the Soviet Union in 1917, then socialism moved into the collapsed German government with Hitler in the 1930s. China with a total communist takeover in 1949, Cuba in the 1950s, then Iran in the 1970s, the long march of global domination of communism has been moving along at a predictable pace.  Liberals in America’s own government were always sympathetic. They sought to teach Americans the ways of socialism and communism in our public schools and colleges the entire time, so there is a bit of socialism in just about everyone these days.  And always, the turn toward communism was through financial pressure and forcible military conquest.  That is certainly the case in Germany, where their financial system completely collapsed after World War I, and China after fighting in World War II.   The same playbook was at work on America now in 2020, and if you know how to sniff out the snipers to see where they are shooting from, you can see what’s been happening quickly.  I read the book that they are still following almost verbatim.

Of course, there are flaws to this plan that these losers have never worked out.  They don’t understand where socialism went wrong from its beginning plans, which Bellamy never figured out.  The failure of these so-called elites is that they assumed that if the world’s governments could unite and issue fairness, they could take over all industries and never miss a beat.  But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, all the flaws from the beginning all the socialist academics were in love with were never resolved.  The Bellamy novel was fiction at best when it first was shown to the public.  Because it appealed to the below-the-line people out in the world, they ignored that socialism defied the essence of human need.  It was a fantasy written by the mind of a child, and it had migrated into a governing force that still insists on trying it over and over again, even though it never worked.  These educated elite have shown themselves not to be very smart.  We gave them the benefit of the doubt looking forward, but looking backward, as the book suggests, they had it wrong from the beginning, and they never had a chance ever to get it right.  Yet that is the very premise of the Davos crowd of the World Economic Forum people.  They are as lost as they ever were, and they, in their most profound thoughts, want to rule the world as all tyrants have over the many centuries of warfare.  And they expect America to fall like all the other places in the world have, especially since they’ve spent over a century building the momentum.  But I would argue that we see where they are shooting from now, we know where their snipers are, and we can win this game now that they are exposed.  They may have hidden that book, Looking Backward, from history, but they can’t hide the result.  It’s time to pay, and the evidence points to a bad day for all of them. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Where Did “Build Back Better” Come From: How the United Nations is using Biden to rule the world

Build Back Better and the United Nations

Yes, the United Nations are at the heart of the Biden administration, behind election fraud, behind Covid-19.  The United Nations aren’t a bunch of scary bond villains; they are somewhat more like passive-aggressive sissy socialists from armpit countries worldwide who want to assert themselves as powerful but only dare to do it through more rules and regulations.  They infiltrated long ago our education system with a jealous lust for the yesteryear of aristocracy in Europe, where they much prefer to talk about the names of wines rather than the content of philosophy.  I heard their work just the other day at a zoning meeting in my community of Liberty Township.  When people say that the United Nations isn’t that powerful to be wrapped up in our local zoning, they don’t understand global politics’ history and the intentions.   A resident of my community had just bought a house that had some property.  He had some four-wheelers and some boats that he wanted to house under a new pole barn.  So he was seeking a deviation from current zoning laws, which are dripping wet in Agenda 2030 United Nations sustainability recommendations.  He was then lectured by the board of trustees of Liberty Township into how it was not “their” responsibility to provide a safe harbor for his “many toys.” The jealousy and grabs for power are a typical story for socialist-minded zoning boards. This was just another example of how the United Nations attacks our residents who resent how private property is used through rules and regulations toward sustainable development.  This guy had a house and space to build a barn, yet he had to beg for his right to do it with many power-hungry government pin-heads who have a master plan created for them by liberals who love the United Nations strategy. That’s how the United Nations end up controlling what happens to you in your driveway in suburban America. 

The zoning boards are an easy example of something people generally don’t pay much attention to until they need some zoning variance.  So, people are suddenly shocked at this Biden administration’s commitment to “Build Back Better,” which is the centerpiece of the entire administration.  For one thing, people generally didn’t vote for Joe Biden.  It was a contentious election, and to say the least, the vast majority of people didn’t vote for Biden.  But Biden acts as if he won the election with an overwhelming mandate to work, and he has progressed to impose these reckless economic policies on everyone under the flag of “Build Back Better.” Americans didn’t sign up for that, yet there it is in our face every day.  It’s why the current congress wants to spend trillions of dollars on some United Nations objectives for a sustainable future that traces back to European socialism and their commitment to tying all our economies to the medical industry and green energy production.  It has been crammed down our throats against our will and conveniently poised onto the Biden administration after the wreckage of Covid-19 has pretty much destroyed the world.  Like I say about local zoning and the poor guy who wanted to build a pole barn to protect his four-wheelers and boats, the United Nations zoning people trained into sustainable development in their liberal colleges know the game plan.  And that is the same radicalism behind Dr. Fauci’s NIH funding of the gain of function research in the Wuhan lab to create the virus and the pandemic that would follow.  They meant to tear down the world and rebuild it back “better.” Do you see now, dear reader, what’s been going on?

For those who don’t know, Build Back Better was first adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on June 3, 2015.  It was about then that President Trump was making his pitch to run for President, and people were laughing at him over it.  The BBB, as they call it, was a strategy aimed at reducing the risk to the people of nations and communities in the wake of future disasters and shocks, such as restoration of physical infrastructure, social systems and shelters, and the revitalization of livelihoods, economies and the environment. That all sounds fine until you realize that the intentions are to convert capitalist economies into socialist ones and attack the premise of private property at the ground level, such as local zoning.  The poor Liberty Township property owner would be mystified why he couldn’t get approval to build a pole barn on his property. He wouldn’t know that the zoning people are trained socialists intent on hating private property ownership.  They want to tax that property, but they don’t want property owners to feel they can do anything they want on their properties.  After all, sustainable development means that power-hungry bureaucrats will manage all affairs of people everywhere.  So they say no to a pole barn to the private treasures of a hard-working American who has some four-wheelers and boats, those fossil fuel-eating artifacts of evil capitalism.  Of course, the panic by the United Nations and their boot lickers of government bureaucrats across the world is that Trump did get elected.  So how could they convince the world to Build Back Better when Trump was doing “America First?” That had to go, which is why I say that the United Nations is one of the most dangerous outfits globally, especially about personal liberty.  They are intent on tying us all together, not to allow us to live our own lives. 

So now we all know what they did.  The World Health Organization is a branch of the United Nations, and they pressed for something that would cause a Great Reset around the world.  So Covid-19 was born there in a Wuhan lab with Dr. Fauci guiding it along.  By the time the virus was ready to transmit to the rest of the world, everyone knew the United Nations script.  Just like the zoning people who want to harass property owners from building pole barns on their properties to protect their “toys,” the intent behind the Covid pandemic was to stop the economy, then reset it with a Build Back Better option.  That is how the Biden administration came to use the United Nations slogan as its own.  The Biden administration is simply an arm of the United Nations to implement Agenda 2030 sustainable development options that were not created in the United States, but at United Nation’s summits, going way back and being adopted in 2015 as a strategy for the entire world.  So you can see, this is not just something that happens on the other side of the world, but the United Nations is everywhere.  They are everywhere that bureaucrats like to gather, like zoning boards and as trustees who often don’t have any idea what’s going on. They never read Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 United Nations strategies but followed the liberals’ rules handed to them.  Whether it’s a pole barn in Liberty Township or the unleashing of Covid-19 out of China with the United Nations seeking to implement their Build Back Better strategy by getting rid of Trump through election fraud and inserting an administration friendly to the United Nations with Biden, the intentions cannot be ignored.  And for those who wondered what all this Build Back Better talk was and where it came from, well, now you know. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Shooting From the Hip: The cost of socialism in any society

Don’t Learn to Stay in Your Lane

While I was working on the themes for my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, one of my most important stops was the British Museum and sitting in the places where Karl Marx had written his books that literally changed the world.  While in London for this investigation, I took my family to the best restaurants and spent some time investigating the areas around parliament to understand the radical swings of their class structure and how anybody could even think that what Marx put down in his books was good.  After sitting in Marx’s same seats in the museum, I confirmed what I already knew; Marx was lazy and worked his ass off to prove it.  Yes, that is a paradox of terms, but that was what the guy was suffering from.  While his family sat at home, broke and hungry, Marx and Engles at the British museum tried to show the world why the capitalists were evil.  And many in British society who enjoyed the nice things in life felt guilty because they either acquired a lot of power from socializing or other methods, and it rotted their minds with unearned doubt.  So they formed political parties like the Labor Party in England and the Democrat Party in America.  Other places around the world, too, adopted Marx not because they thought it would make a better world but because it gave more centralized power to governments. Hence, the idiocy of Karl Marx spread like wildfire in a dry forest, and rage of destruction swept over the world.  But to my thinking, fires are good, and it benefits people to see things for themselves. That’s why what I wrote in my book was necessary.  Without the stupidity of Karl Marx to highlight the benefits of capitalism with a defense of it in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, people may never have seen the differences between the two. 

Learning to Get Better

That’s what has happened with Marxism mixed in with capitalism; people didn’t notice the little things slowing us all down and constraining productivity.  Marxism has embedded itself in almost everything we do, but people did not see it as it was happening because as long as they could buy their cars, get milk at the grocery, and send their kids to school, they didn’t pay much attention.  But I did notice that it has been a source of constant frustration for me during my entire professional life, which started when I was still a teenager.  One thing about me that has always been criticized was that I “shot from the hip” too much.  People would say that I didn’t take careful aim in my life and take my time when shooting at targets.  That, of course, was a metaphor for my thought processes in how I manage things.  To others, I have always been the reckless cowboy who was too impulsive to be trusted.  Yet mysteriously, everything I have always touched succeeded.  I understood it on a conceptual level, but years later, when I would finally write a book about it, I had to understand it.  Like Marx, many people in the world are too lazy to become truly good at anything.  They grow up, they grow lazy, and they are content to be average.  So they bring this attitude to their businesses, and for their lazy minds, Marx was a kindred spirit.  While they wanted to make money in life, they didn’t want to work too hard to get it, so they adopted little bits of socialism along the way to make it so that they wouldn’t have to work too hard.  This point became very obvious to me once I started the sport of professional gunfighting for competitions.  I watched for years how real gunfighters could draw and shoot a gun by drawing from the hip in under a second.  It seemed impossible to me, but I wanted to learn to do it, so I began the learning process, and once I figured it out, all these other elements became very obvious.  Obvious enough to write a book about what I learned.

Shooting from the Hip is Good

One of the premises of communism is equality, which we hear about all the time now that Biden has been inserted in the White House to preserve these gains Marxists have made around the world.  But for equality to indeed happen, we must cripple those who are the best and fastest in life at certain things.  I often compare this metaphor to a hay bail truck full of farm animals traveling down the road at 45 miles per hour.  Up behind them, storming down the highway at 120 miles per hour, is a fancy sports car that can take curves on a dime and run all day long at 200 mph.  Socialist society says that the fancy car has to stay behind the truck because that is the constraint, that is the average, and to be fair, everyone needs to build their life off the average.  The speedy car is supposed to slow down to 45 mph and not pass.  Socialist society creates rules like double yellow lines to keep everyone staying in their lane so that socialism and communism can occur.  However, in America, the rules have always been in reverse.  The fast car was encouraged to pass or have a speed lane to travel in to go as fast as possible.  Speed limits aren’t made for the best and most competent; they are made for the average, the slow, and the lazy-minded.  Those who can’t or won’t think too fast to avoid an accident.  Therefore, the speedy car is penalized and encouraged to be less than it is in a democracy where the majority of the people decide what the average behavior should be.  This is how our businesses have been crippled and how the government has enforced converting America from capitalism to socialism over time.  Through rules and regulations intended to force people to stay in their lanes, not shoot from the hip, and ignite Karl Marx while suppressing Adam Smith.

I’ve always been that guy who shot from the hip, and I’m very proud of it.  Even now that I’m later in my life than when many of these things have been said about me, learning to shoot in Cowboy Fast Draw activities has shown me the essence of becoming better each day.  What seems impossible today may be quite possible tomorrow if only you put a little work into it.  That is what America did best in the past and still is better than anyplace else in the world mired in socialism and communism.  This is also how many of our corporations had become so woke, just as the politicians of England did when scrappy old Karl Marx worked himself to death trying to create a philosophy of government that justified his laziness.  I didn’t feel I could say that based on just my opinions of reading his books.  But I could say it after I sat in his seats and saw the world from all of their perspectives.  Marxism and its birthplace there in London intended to be in the world that hey bail truck going 45 miles per hour.  They created rules in life to protect the feelings of the slow and lazy from the speedy and competent.  And when they called me names like “cowboy” and a person who “shoots from the hip” too much, they might as well have been calling me the most derogatory names humans could call each other, hoping to peer pressure me into accepting average behavior.  But I never will.  Instead, I’ll explain the differences to people with a mind to hear it, and I’m not about to ever accept getting stuck behind slow traffic on the highway.  The goal of all of us should always be to get faster, wiser, and better.  Not to accept the lazy and dim-witted who want to rule the world but are too lazy to do it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Fund Science: Get government out of the process so they can’t corrupt it

We need to get government out of funding science

If we have learned anything from the embarrassing Covid experience worldwide, it’s the validation that you do not want government funding to be the lifeline to the sciences.  Because when it is, such as what we saw with the NIH under Dr. Fauci, we have the all too tempting scenario where scientists will say anything to get that funding, including whatever governments want them to do.  For instance, to control elections, like made-up death totals, false models, bloviated cable news statements about the danger of a virus, the origin of a virus, and the long-term consequences of a virus to secure that funding.  What we have in modern times is not the best science that a rich country can buy; what we have is essentially the Institute of Science that they had in the famous book Atlas Shrugged.  A superficial branch of the government which attempts to quell people’s concerns as the government seeks to dominate every aspect of our lives.  And that is partly why it took me so long to write my latest book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; it’s not because it takes a long time to write a book. Still, instead, it took a long time to look at our world and ask and answer the hard questions about existence, how money is made, and what kind of world we should build for this next century.  To do that, we have to surgically take out a cancer called progressivism that started to seep into America during the end of the 19th century and advanced to critical mass before the roaring 20s.  Most of us wouldn’t know any better because it happened slowly over time before many of us were even born.  So nobody even thinks to ask the question as we build our assumptions on failure after failure disguised as success.  Yet, I had the fortune recently to travel most of the United States, particularly in the Old West, and dig into our history and consider what a healthy government should look like instead of what we have.  Two fine examples of why the government should not be funding science emerged, but that private industry should, became evident. 

When Andrew Carnegie told the famous paleontologist Earl Douglas that he wanted something big to fill the great museum that the steel tycoon was building in Pittsburg, it set Douglas west into the Morrison Formation site to achieve that goal.  Carnegie didn’t know what Douglas would find.  He just knew what he needed and discovered the fabulous quarry that is still there to this day and continues to tell the world much of what we know about dinosaurs.  If it hadn’t been for Andrew Carnegie’s money, the giant apatosaurus that Douglas brought back to fill that museum would have never been found if the government had been funding that endeavor; likely, the giant sauropod would still be lost out there in that Utah mountaintop.  It took a prominent thinking capitalist like we used to make in America to give science a platform, which was the case for most of the early development of the science fields from archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, even astronomy.  Remember when the Obama administration told NASA that they should be studying Islamic contributions to science in the past instead of thinking of going to the stars yet again?  NASA listened and did what they were told because they wanted continued government funding.  See the problem? 

Teton National Park at Jenny Lake

Another example is the long story of making Teton National Park possible because essentially John D. Rockefeller started buying up land in Jackson Hole to make it possible for the government to set that area apart for a national park eventually.  He wanted that site to stay pristine and undeveloped.  In a video I show here from Instagram, you can see just how beautiful the Teton’s are.  The amenities at Jenny Lake, for instance, are incredible.  Now I could make a lot of arguments that Jackson Hole would have been better off developed and that I might want to enjoy Jenny Lake from a condo porch rather than a National Park.  But the concept of our National Parks is a good one.  It is good to see these places as they have always been, undeveloped.  It’s suitable for scientific study to discuss the socialism of these National Parks managed by the government another time.  After seeing the Tetons up close, it was good that Horace Albright was able to convince Rockefeller to spend a small fortune to buy the land then donate it to the government to create Teton National Park as a separate park from Yellowstone.  It was then signed into being by the great president Calvin Cooledge because it gave us what we see today.  But it took a personality like John D. Rockefeller to do it.  Without big-time capitalists operating with such large amounts of capital, places like the Teton National Park would have never happened. 

This idea that rich people are evil, or that they should “pay their fair share,” as determined by some socialist government viewpoint or the lazy and wretched in society who are naturally below-the-line thinkers, is the sure way to secure failure in all aspects of life.  In July of 2021, it is not an accident that three private industry tycoons of significant capital are going to space.  Richard Branson is about to personally fly to space himself to demonstrate the safety of his Virgin Galactic company.  Right after him, Jeff Bezos is flying into space with his Blue Origin rockets.  And Elon Musk is planning to get his Starship into an orbital test flight on a fast track to get back to the moon.  The government is not doing these things at NASA.  Government funding shapes what they do, which is why they have been stuck in a holding pattern of innovation for such a long time.  Private industry driven by great capital enterprises is how science is best developed.  It’s also how you get the best answers to complicated problems. We see the failures with Covid and how big pharma tied directly to FDA approvals have to play the government game if they want to exist, so they will do so whatever the government wants.  The key is to separate these problems, not to join them together as one entity.

That is the offerings in my book to identify these problems and separate them as they have before for a better approach for the future.  I could speak all day about the need for more understanding in science.  We are learning a great deal about our past that makes our assumptions here and now seem silly.  Which needs attention in just about all the sciences.  Truthfully, where we are today is embarrassing when comparing the rate of discovery to what it was when private funding drove most of the results, such as in the examples provided here.  But that is the case with all scientific fields.  Instead of intelligent scientists finding the freedom to discover, they are more like prostitutes catering to the desires of perverts in government. If the government had discovered flight and stuck its fat socialist ass in the development of it, we would never have gone from flying a kite to landing on the moon in just 70 years; we’d still be looking for the string for the kite in the garage of the Wright Brothers.  Government is slow, unmotivated, and essentially corrupt no matter where it is formed in the world.  They are needed to some extent for a free society to function well, but they must be as small as possible to stay out of the way of actual progress.  And we’ve done it well before.  Our task for the future is to look at those times where we did get it right and learn to remove the cancer of progressivism that is now threatening to kill us as patients.  That’s essentially the problem of our times.

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Miracle of Capitalism: Why every country should try to be like the United States

The solution to helping others in the world is not to keep throwing money at them, or in letting them live in the United States as immigrants—its to help them make their own countries better than they are now by exporting American ideas that could help them become better. Let me tell those people a little story about life near my house this week so that they can understand why capitalism is such a wonderful thing and why they should adopt it in their own lives for the great improvements that it could bring them. In telling this story I have to start with the gun shop at the end of my street, Right 2 Arms which is located on Rt 4 in Liberty Township, Ohio that I use often, especially when I make a new gun purchase because everything about capitalism starts and ends with gun possession. It is the reminder to the government that they should tamper with the American economy as little as possible and to let the free market determine successes and failures and it is what made for a pretty remarkable day that I had recently.

I had hit one of those milestones in my life where it justified the purchase of a gun I’ve wanted for a very long time, a .50AE Desert Eagle from Magnum Research. I first decided I wanted it way back in 1988 when I was a newly married 19-year-old, and the guns have only gotten better over the years. It was something I have wanted for a whole bunch of reasons, manly the technical value of it. I’m looking for a good concealed carry gun that can deal with the unique challenges of our modern age and for me it’s just the right thing, a seven shot semi-automatic pistol that shoots like a high-powered rifle within the tight confines of a pistol frame. Why would I ever need such a thing? Well, thugs, goons, radicals and terrorists these days wear body armor and should there come a circumstance, having the ability to neutralize them is what would be the strategic objective. So when it came time to buy it, I went to the gun store at the end of my street and purchased the .50AE Desert Eagle to add to my assets.

But that wasn’t all I needed to do that day. I additionally had three trees that I needed to cut out of my yard and I had a major brake job that was pressing me on an older vehicle we have. The 12-year-old Town and Country has been a workhorse in our family since we bought it new, so I’ve kept it running nicely all that time with occasional repairs. But my dilemma was that I was concerned that the new rotors I needed to fix the brakes were just too old to be on the shelf at the O’Reilly auto parts store I go to often across from the great Elk’s Run Golf course. So after I bought my new Desert Eagle, I swung by to see if the O’Reilly guys could track down some new rotors for me to put on that old van.

Like gun stores one of my favorite places are auto parts stores. One thing about American culture that is unique in the world is their personal automobiles. The ability to own two or three vehicles per household is unique in the world and are directly attached to our insistence on personal freedom. If firearms keep politicians honest in America cars give us the freedom to use our time for whatever use we choose. We can literally go anywhere, any time of day any time we want and that is a big deal that is not common elsewhere in the world. So to have auto stores so common in the United States is a real treat because that’s how we keep our vehicles running and I love going down the aisles and looking at all the different products intended for that purpose. I go to an auto store about twice a month, I love the way they smell, I love the colors, and I like talking to the people working there who know things about cars. We always have a car in our family that needs an oil change, spark plugs replaced, or fluids topped off, and I enjoy doing the work. But I had no hope that O’Reilly’s would have the rotors I needed on the shelf in their inventory.

But guess what, I inquired about the rotors and the clerk went to his computer to check the status and I was quite shocked to find that O’Reilly’s had them. So I bought two for $40 each and left amazed that I was going to be able to get that brake job done that day instead of having to wait for an order to come in. I continue to be surprised that O’Reilly’s most always has the things I need for auto repairs—even items that given the number of different cars on the road, they seem to always have for both new and older models. The inventory control to always have that type of stock is amazing, and you would only find it in a capitalist country that has a lot of wealth to justify the personal investment by the store itself. I can’t imagine there are many Town and Country cars left that need major brake jobs as most of them are headed for the scrap heap now—not being rebuilt from the suspension outward. Yet they had them proudly on the shelf when I needed them, and it amazed me.

However, I wasn’t done for the day. The last time I used my Huskvarna 455 Rancher chainsaw was during the previous fall when I did some tree work. After I put it away that day I knew the chain was dull so the next time I used it I’d need a new chain. My philosophy on these types of tools is that I like big and mean so that they have all the force needed and then some for whatever I’m doing. My Desert Eagle is part of that philosophy. Most of the time you’d never need a semi-automatic .50 caliber magnum bullet to stop a problem, but if you do need it, it’s there. That’s the same philosophy behind my Huskvarna 455 Rancher chainsaw with a 20-inch blade. When I first bought it most everyone said that it was too big to work with, which I disagreed completely. It’s big and known to be a bit of a beast. My wife has been after me to cut out a tree stump of an old ash tree that was on our property which fell victim to the Ash Bore insects that killed it a few years ago. It was a big mature tree so it had a large stump. Just big enough for my big chainsaw with a 20-inch blade. To do that type of job, you really need a sharp chain because you have to keep the saw horizontal without hitting the ground while making the cut so once you get started you don’t want to pull out.

I literally pulled out of the parking lot of O’Reilly’s and drove a few hundred yards down Rt 4 to Tractor Supply which is another store I love going to for similar reasons as the auto stores. That’s where I was able to get everything I needed for my chainsaw job. Of course, Tractor Supply had everything I needed as they have a nice Huskvarna chainsaw section and all my blades where there along with the oil I needed. For that big chainsaw I need the 20” 72 drive chains which are the largest they carried, but I found a two pack for about $37. I was able to get home and do all my jobs within about three hours of buying all that and I still had time to enjoy my evening. Would you believe that everything I described was within one mile of each other, including the gun purchase?

Part of being a wealthy country means that there are options like this near most of our homes, and the things I described are more specialized than the average types of things that might be needed typically on a Saturday afternoon. That is the magic of capitalism—those things were all there for me when I needed them because of the free market system and because I didn’t have to waste a lot of time looking for all those items, it made my time much more productive which is always the name of the game. If my time is not wasted, it provides more opportunities for me to make money so that I can do more things like buy guns, fix cars and do landscaping in my yard. Most places around the world can’t do one of those things, let alone all three in the same day and still have time to binge watch a show on Netflix later that night. Life in America is the best and other countries would do well to adopt what we do here for their own benefit, and that all starts with embracing capitalism. To really improve the lives of people around the world, capitalism is the magic trick they all need to learn. Its something we take for granted in America because we are used to getting what we want when we want it, but on days like I have described I realize just how special all those abilities are. And I’d like to see that for everyone.

Rich Hoffman
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Quick Cal Eilrich on WAAM 1600: Rich Hoffman hosting January 9th 2016

 

In a capitalist society it was always supposed to be like this, the best and most competitive are supposed to be free to perform at their maximum potential without being restricted by inferior minds.  The Internet may have been invented as a means for population control by government influence, but it has turned out to be one of the best aspects of laissez-faire capitalism to emerge essentially since Adam Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).  And in the United States, it has been one of the finest examples of free speech.  It allows someone like me, who can run circles around most people with sheer effort to by-pass the gate keepers of the “professional” media to get a message out that would otherwise not be heard.  I have known a lot of reporters over the years and I can’t think of any who live the way I do, where they may work 12 hours, read about two hours each day, then turn around and do 2 hours of live radio on WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan.   Typically, they only do about a quarter of that work per day, and that’s why their reports often are terrible, and lazy. In that regard, largely because of the power of competition, new media, and the productive acquisition of massive amounts of information, I have the opportunity to be on WAAM radio with Matt Clark for three weekends in a row.  Matt and I did a live radio show on Wednesday December 23rd which was used for the next two Saturday shows on WAAM 1600. Then on January 9th while Matt is in Disney World for his annual marathon run, I am hosting in his place with a very special guest.  If you missed the Wednesday live shown, broadcast around the world, here it is—along with a few sample video clips as teasers of the content.  As usual, we covered a lot of ground.

https://soundcloud.com/clarkcast/the-force-awakens-review-and-the-fate-of-disney-12-26-15-podcast

Regarding that special guest, of course when given the opportunity I’m going to give listeners at WAAM exactly what they want.  I’ve done plenty of radio in my life, and I’ve listened to talk radio for longer than I’ve participated on the air.  As a kid who grew up in sight of The Voice of America radio station towers in Mason, Ohio I understand the power of a voice over the airwaves.  I also understand how wonderful it is to work on a car during Saturday afternoon in a well-lit garage next to a double stacked Craftsman tool box full of gadgets and gizmos accumulated over twenty previous Christmas seasons and to listen to the soothing sound of logic from talk radio.  Both of my grandparents had farms and constantly had WLW radio on in their barns—it was for them a kind of verbal newspaper that they could listen to as they milked cows or prepped equipment for bailing hay.  So to thank the WAAM audience and the technical crew at that fine “independent” radio station which is a rarity these days in the marketplace, I’m going to give listeners a special treat on January 9th at 1 PM.  Click the following link to listen live at that time.

http://www.waamradio.com/

If there is trouble at that link for whatever reason, then try this one.

http://www.clarkcast.com/

As readers here know, I work very hard—as I always have.  I also push myself often by stepping out of my comfort zone.  My name is typically equitable with bullwhip work as I am one of the few in the world who have mastered that particular weapon.   Bullwhip artists are a very small minority of the global population and I am among the best of them in competency—but—that’s not enough for me.  I’m entirely too young to be satisfied with just that on my résumé.  It would be safe to do so, and to point at my record of personal successes, my public speaking, my family and a half-dozen other hobbies and say that all those things were enough.  But they aren’t.  There is something I’ve always wanted to do, but didn’t have the time or resources to apply to it, so it’s always been on the back burner for me, and that is Cowboy Fast Draw.  In a lot of ways, I became good at the bullwhips because it was a western art that I could practice in my backyard, or in the neighborhoods I lived in without scaring all the people who lived around me—too much.  But I have always loved guns as I have seen them as natural extensions of Adam Smth’s invention of capitalism.  While the rest of the world wanted to maintain an aristocracy on production, capitalism freed the best and brightest to conduct their efforts free of restriction, and the gun ensured that personal protection from third-party authoritarian intentions.   Much of the anxiety that the world outside the United States has toward capitalism and guns can be traced back to this basic relationship between the two.  So I’ve always had a love for guns and wanted to make them a larger part of my daily life.

I recently conquered a project that I had been working very hard on—a business enterprise that was very difficult—and I promised myself that if I got through it to a successful conclusion that I was going to purchase a Ruger Vaquero and take up the skill of Cowboy Fast Draw.  I could have done it a few years sooner, but I had to complete one major task before beginning another, so I waited to force myself to complete the targeted intention—which took several years to punch through.  I knew some of the shooters from the Ohio Fast Draw Association as they competed next to me at the annual Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio each year while I performed with bullwhips.  But I wasn’t sure how to get started.  The very day that I completed the business task, I purchased my Vaquero.  Then I contacted the organization that my guest runs, the Cowboy Fast Draw Association and I joined as a member.  Then I purchased a practice shooting lane system, and ordered a custom-made holster from Bob Mernickle. 

I was quite impressed by Cal Eilrich, a.k.a Quick Cal who is the executive director of CFDA not just because he is a very accomplished professional shooter, but because he is running Cowboy Fast Draw as an expanding sport that is very organized and well-equipped.  As my packages began to arrive from CFDA I was impressed that everything I needed, the .45 casings, the wax bullets, the timers and targets, virtually everything was able to be obtained from CFDA—and everything worked.  The quality of the products had the markings of a man who was very meticulous and polished at a field of endeavor and that elevated my interest greatly.  Cowboy Fast Draw wasn’t any longer just something I wanted to drive myself into a new skill set, but it was a way of thinking that I considered important to the American way of life.  I found out months later that Quick Cal was also a fan of the novel Atlas Shrugged, so I have been able to plunge myself into this new sport with a voracious hunger knowing that the end result falls within my overall philosophy.  It wasn’t just another skill to learn, it was a way of life.

Quick Cal has been a competitive shooter since joining the Chicago Colts FDC in 1968, at age 15.  He won his first World Championship in 1972 and in 1973 hosted his first contest. He went on to be the Match Director of two National Championships and three World Championships during the 1970s at the Hacienda Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas along with several state and regional tournaments.  He served as an officer in the Mid-Western Fast Draw Association, Western Fast Draw Association and served as Chairman of the World Fast Draw Association.

In the 1980s he became very active in Practical Pistol Shooting.  While competing at the top-level of the sport he built the largest IPSC club in the country and founded and served 9 years as Match Director of the Western States IPSC Championship in Reno. He was an original Range Master and Instructor for USPSA, while also being a top competitor and earning a spot on the National Team in 1990.  He has been a firearms instructor for law enforcement and security companies and still teaches defensive shooting and is a NRA Instructor.

In the late 90s he started getting very involved in SASS and won a national championship as a top shooter.  In 1999, he created the original SASS RO Program and served as Chairman of the RO Committee for 9 years, he was inducted into the SASS Hall of Fame in 2011.  He also founded a SASS club, The High Plains Drifters, and built a shooting range that is still in use and created and served as Match Director of the Western States CAS Championship for 10 years.

In 2002, Brad Hemmah called Quick Cal for advice on guns and holsters in setting up what was to become CFDA.  In 2004, Quick Cal attended the National Championship in Meridian, ID and won the event, and recognized the potential that Cowboy Fast Draw had.  Fast Draw had been Quick Cal’s first love in shooting sports, he dreamed as a young man that the sport could somehow become much bigger than it was if only given the chance.

Quick Cal has always believed in giving back to the shooting sports because they have added so much to his life.  He now serves as the Director of CFDA and is determined to give the Sport of Cowboy Fast Draw a chance to build itself into an organization that can last for future generations to enjoy.

To learn more about him, here are his résumés in greater detail. 

  1. Shooting Accomplishments

  2. Sport Administration & Firearms Instructor

As a fan of talk radio, I know what I like and don’t like on a Saturday afternoon, and likely, you feel the same way.  So I promise that this radio show featuring Quick Cal will be entertaining, and informative—and it will be my intention to make it so exciting that you’ll want to join CFDA after our broadcast.  I am thankful to Quick Cal because in essence what he gave me which I wasn’t sure about when I got started, was a way to shoot my .45 Vaquero at my home in a pretty suburban setting.  The wax bullets and the 209 shotgun primers that are used in Cowboy Fast Draw along with the targeting system utilized make it so I can practice target shooting right in my garage without disturbing my neighbors.  I built a special backdrop to keep the bullets contained in a safe way, but the wax bullets do not shoot through plywood, so there is no danger to anybody outside my home.  And the noise is about as loud as a well charged cap gun.  This makes shooting at home an entirely new reality that everyone can enjoy.  A shooting range could be easily set up in a basement or garage so long as practice distances of 15’ to 21’ can be maintained.  Where shooting radio shows often get boring is that often the talk is about things that most of the audience can’t participate in.  Getting out to a shooting range for a lot of people is difficult.  But shooting at your home is something anybody can do, and it’s a wonderful way to expand the usefulness, and participation in the Second Amendment.  People tend to value something more if they can participate, and Cowboy Fast Draw allows shooters to partake within the comfort of their own homes and that expansion of utilization is largely an invention of Cowboy Fast Draw under the direction of Quick Cal.

http://www.cowboyfastdraw.com/index.php/about-the-cfda

So be sure to tune in on January 9th 2016 at 1 PM on WAAM.  If you want to call in during the show dial (734) 971-1600 and we’ll get you on the air.  It will be a fun show, and educational, but more than anything, it will make working in the garage, or wherever that much more enjoyable.  It’s the kind of show that comes straight out of competition, you won’t get this kind of thing on CNN or Fox, but because of deregulation and the marketplace of the imaginative, you can get it on WAAM and more specifically, the Clarkcast and Matt Clark’s mini, media empire.  It is good to push yourself in a free society, and the first step toward that monumental endeavor is to turn on WAAM and listen to an enlightening interview with Quick Cal of the Cowboy Fast Draw Association and enjoy something you won’t get anywhere else.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Caltech Capitalism: An explaination of ‘Interstellar’s’ “blight”

I was surprised to learn while reading a recent book by a physicist I respect a great deal regarding the science of the movie Interstellar how limited the views of science really are. While attempting to discover a way to insert the concept of a blight into the film as the primary reason for earth’s cataclysmic disaster pushing human kind off the planet, Kip Thorne, the author organized a dinner meeting with Jonathan Nolan the screenwriter, at the Caltech faculty club, the Anthenaeum. Also attending the dinner was film producer Lynda Obst, the biologist Elliot Meyerowitz, Jered Leadbetter—an expert on diverse microbes, Mel Simon, an expert on cells that make up plants, and David Baltamore, an expert about everything regarding biology.

The challenge was to discover how plausible it was for a blight to consume the food supply on earth due to relatively natural occurrences. In the film Jonathan and the Director Christopher Nolan wanted a natural disaster in the story that would force humans to make a decision, so they set the story a bit into the future, yet the population on earth was rapidly declining, and technological advancement was regressing. The scientists attached to the film, and the attendees of that dinner found it hard to believe that scientific endeavor would decline so rapidly in such a society—which I thought was astonishing. After all, it’s happening right now.

My son-in-law and I were discussing this very problem just last night–if it hadn’t been for Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher who wrestled away from socialist England much of its industry back into privatization, most of the great technology we are enjoying today would not have happened. Our society would regress as opposed to the leaps it made in the 80s and 90s to what many neglect these days as common occurrences–such as cell phone technology. It took political vision and commitment to privatizing industry that was using science to usher in the technical leaps that we have been seeing. However, the danger is that much of that work is has-been technology and for the generations coming from the years of the Bush presidents, Clinton and Obama, much of the science has returned to the type of dinner discussions occurring at Caltech for the Interstellar blight meeting.

Most college professors know that most of their funding comes from the tax payers, so their view of the world tends to be left leaning progressive. People tend to attach their politics to what feeds their mouths, not so much what they believe is right or wrong based on personal judgment. So those brilliant scientists at Kip Thorne’s meeting were already missing a major ingredient to the success of science before their meeting on the blight even took place. After reading about the meeting it is no wonder that so many top scientists believe in global warming as a manmade occurrence—as their funding often comes from government, and government wants to propel such myths so to gain more control through organizations like the EPA on regulating industry. In much the same way that the aforementioned scientists found a type of blight for the Interstellar film plot line, they also find evidence of global warming to gain grant money for their research leaving the discovery process of scientific data contaminated with liberal politics.

Yet the point of the meeting was to find a form of biological blight appropriate for the Nolan storyline—so it was under a capitalist endeavor that the scientists even gathered to discuss the topic. Without the potential profit of making the movie Interstellar, the motivation for even having the scientific discussion would not be present, and those same faculty members would talk among themselves not sharing with the world the brilliant science of their efforts. It was just another reminder of how science should be attached more to business rather than government.

The dinner meeting went on for some time and many topics were discussed. Jonathan Nolan is my kind of screenwriter. He is concerned with many of the same types of themes that I am, the danger of collectivism, the regression of human spirit when the profit motive is taken away, and the strength of the individual over the mob of democracy. Those are topics that Kip’s scientists are typically weary of as they come often from the liberal side of the tracks, particularly Lynda Obst who is one of those liberal Hollywood producers that are always talked about attending Obama fundraisers thinking that he is the second coming of Christ or the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses. Yet Lynda was in the business of making money. At the time it was Steven Spielberg who was attached as the director of the film, and there is an expectation that his films must garner a certain healthy box office take—especially in regards to science fiction. But Nolan was staying away from the typical man-made doomsday scenario that most writers guided by Obst would typically be comfortable with. If not for the profit motive, the dinner meeting would not have occurred at Caltech with any purpose but for scientist to talk about what projects they were working on.

The result of the dinner was the type of blight that is known in the science world as a lethal generalist blight that would run rampant over the earth consuming the oxygen humans need to breathe. As the atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen and the lethal blight feeds off of nitrogen it has an endless supply of nutrients for its parasitic destruction of plant life. The byproduct of the Interstellar blight is CO2 which of course is a byproduct of human breathing which would gradually consume the oxygen in our atmosphere slowly killing everyone who depends on oxygen to live. But before arriving at that conclusion many scenarios were discussed, such as an AIDS virus that could quickly evolve into a far more contagious form that was airborne. Another scenario proposed by Leadbetter was that people might panic due to global warming and fertilize the oceans to produce algae that would eat much of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. This could be done by throwing a lot of iron into the oceans to help feed algae growth. However this massive growth might then kill off all the fish and plant life starving humans from the rich food supply there. Another proposal by Meyerowitz contemplated that ultraviolet light streaming through our atmosphere’s ozone hole could mutate an enormous bloom of algae growth creating new pathogens that would again wipe out plant life in the oceans then jump on land to do the same. All those are interesting ideas, but also point to the dangers of not having a screenwriter like Jonathan Nolan who came up with a strong premise that actually made these scientists think. Typically, what would have happened is that a clueless screenwriter enamored by the nice meal and wine at such dinners would do whatever the scientists proposed and hoping to get another writing job, would kiss the ass of Obst. This would have taken Interstellar’s plot and made it into something like The Day after Tomorrow or some other cheap environmentally charged message film that would falter at the box office because it does not speak to the core of the American film audience—rather just the fringe government driven scientists at universities.

If the faculty at Caltech was more attached to capitalism instead of government driven socialism discussions like the one that took place for Interstellar would take place all the time and be aimed at more profitable measures—which would be a great thing. Instead of brilliant scientists like Thorne, and the others sitting around at the Anthenaeum contemplating the universe as they wait for tax payers to funnel money through the government to arrive at their science experiments, the goals of such discussions under capitalist endeavor would be to align profit with science to arrive at a new market—and therefore a new human creation. There needs to be a lot less government involved in those types of meetings and a lot more capitalism. It is only because of Jonathan Nolan and later his brother Christopher that Interstellar took a unique approach that pushed scientific validity to a level that was unusual for a big screen film produced by the studio system. And if such endeavors could do wonders for a simple movie, just think what they could do if private enterprise was more engaged directly with the likes of Thorne, Leadbetter, and Meyerowitz.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

Cliffhanger Ranch and the Wonders of Capitalism: McDonalds in the Appalachian Mountains

The American Hiking Society’s National Trails Day in Coeburn, Virginia is an annual event that takes place in the heart of Wise County. It’s in this location that a good friend of mine is building the Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost on the front door of the Jefferson National Forest heavily used by equestrians all over the eastern United States. The designated weekend set for this celebration of outdoor endeavors was June 1st through the 3rd 2012 and I was invited to come and perform several bullwhip shows for the groups of horse riders, mountain bikers, hikers, kayakers and many others who found their way to the ranch as an oasis of adventure.

It was a pleasure to attend this event. While doing shows in remote places like the Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost there is always a real opportunity to witness life the way America was always intended. The people who participate in events like The American Hiking Society National Trails Day are typically those who appreciate the kind of adventure the outdoors brings, and it’s refreshing to speak with such people. For my wife and I the trip to the Ranch was a wonderful experience as it took us through the heart of America in the land of Appalachia.

From Cincinnati the best way to get to the remote portion of Virginia that houses the Cliffhanger Ranch is the Mountain Parkway through Eastern Kentucky. My wife and I stopped at a McDonalds on the journey through Stanton, the gateway town to the Daniel Boone National Forest. The next area just to the south is the Red River Gorge and Natural Bridge locations. Everything south of that is a no man’s land for many in America. The locals know well about the majestic magic of the town Jackson nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains about 25 miles south of the Red River Gorge area on Rt. 15. Then of course further south near the Kentucky/Virginia border is the historic town of Hazard.

It had been several years since I had been south of Red River Gorge so I warned my wife that she should enjoy this particular McDonalds, since I wasn’t sure if Jackson, or Hazard would have such places to eat.  Those towns are about as remote as anywhere on earth with only towns in Alaska and the upper states of America comparing. In small towns like Stanton the philosophy of America is alive and well. Washington politics seems like a remote concern. Three firefighters ate next to us at McDonalds and I noticed their t-shirts did not have the typical AFL-CIO emblem on them. In towns like Stanton, Jackson, and Hazard the meaning of volunteerism is alive and well. These towns in the south do not like unions and the corrosive, mob like behavior of big city outsiders and their big government ideas connected to labor unions. The inhabitants along the Mountain Parkway are ruggedly independent and damn proud of it. Yet, they are also friendly to one another. When I hear labor unions in the north claim that the world would fall apart if not for their labor union membership, those advocates have not traveled in the south, which is home to most of the country’s right-to-work states.

On the way through Jackson there was a pretty serious accident. A pick-up truck had flipped over on its side in the middle of an intersection, the driver was seriously injured. On the scene were a couple of police cars, and the fire department, only the firefighters were obviously volunteers. Some of the firefighters directing traffic around the accident were dressed in the cloths of their professions, and had shown up because they were on call. The driver was being cut out of the car as we drove by and I noticed that all the emergency personal at the scene seemed to be very competent and were very composed functioning without panic. I saw a similar scene further south where there was another accident on Rt. 15 which is great road, but very dangerous if drivers aren’t paying attention as it winds through the Appalachian Mountains. Again there were many plain clothes emergency personal on the scene, a lack of union identification, and a genuine lack of panic. If the same accident had occurred in the northern states, the police and firefighters would make a much more audacious show of their emergency care. Compared to the same type of personnel in the mountains of Kentucky the public workers in the north are much more neurotic, and panic driven, since they tend to dramatize their heroics to drive home their “social” importance in order to pass tax levies.

As my wife and I pulled into the town of Coeburn, Virginia I was impressed to have passed at least three Wal-Mart’s from Stanton to the Cliffhanger Ranch and at least four McDonalds, which really surprised me. I tried to imagine executives at McDonalds planning to build restaurants in remote towns like Jefferson and Hazard, Kentucky far away from highway access. The miracles of capitalism become apparent in such places. I have often marveled at how many McDonalds restaurants exist along highway I-75 from Detroit to Miami, Florida and that by itself is a magnificent achievement on behalf of capitalism. Only capitalism allows such a convenience. An overabundance of McDonald’s restaurants will not be seen anywhere in China or in Siberia, Russia. Only in America can such things happen, because it is capitalism that made it so.

As my wife and I paused a couple of times to enjoy a sausage and egg McMuffin and enjoy the mountain air at several of these restaurants just for the pleasure of stopping, I suddenly felt a bit silly for being concerned that Stanton would be the last sign of such convenience for over 150 miles. When I was a kid and visited the site near Hazard, Kentucky where my grandma and grandpa grew up deep in the heart of moonshine country, gas and food was hard to get unless you killed it yourself. Now, there was a lot of new construction along Rt. 15 south of Mountain Parkway and there was no shortage of McDonalds restaurants. Since 1961 McDonalds has more than 12,804 locations and they open a new store every four hours. It is because of capitalism that remote places like Jackson and Hazard have the smell of coffee and hash browns waltzing with the misty aroma of mountain air early on a weekend morning as old men sit with their friends and read the paper, and traveling families relish the menu of their home towns with a familiarity that is refreshing and more than satisfying to their minds than the hunger of their stomachs. It is McDonalds that joins everyone under the umbrella of capitalism.

The will of capitalism and of mankind in general can be seen in full glory in that wonderful drive from Stanton to the Cliffhanger Ranch. Where human beings wished to build a Wal-Mart, if a mountain was in the way, they simply blasted through the mountainside. If mankind wished to put a road through a mountain, they simply removed the mountain. In Southern Kentucky, mankind had decided that it was not subservient to the power of earthquakes which made the mountains in the first place along the fault lines of geologic plates. Man had proclaimed itself as powerful as any force on earth by moving and shaping mountains in a more organized fashion than the chaos of Mother Nature and her temperamental neurosis.

And this is the beauty of places like the Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost. My friend is offering a permanent facility that preserves the ruggedness of nature and individual adventurers the ability to enjoy it. That is the responsibility of capitalism, to capture and preserve such places so they will not disappear. But it is also the responsibility of capitalism to build McDonalds in every corner of the globe if possible so the quality of life can be improved for all. Families instead of spending half the morning preparing for a large breakfast can now do more with their time since McDonalds has made it easy to get quick food while on the run, or just providing a wonderful gathering place for locals to stay in touch with each other. And when outdoorsman wish to get away and listen to the locusts singing their summer songs in the heat of an afternoon, it is the Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost that is there for the weary adventurer looking to enjoy the cold water of a river from their kayak, or the mastery over a majestic animal while horseback riding through the Jefferson National Forest. At the end of the day at the Cliffhanger Ranch high atop a hill looking down into the National Forest as a raging bon fire threw its heat to the night sky it was capitalism that made it all possible. Because these days, as opposed to only 30 years ago, such remote places are accessible to be enjoyed without giving up the benefits of productive human life.

Just a few miles from the location of that raging bon fire was a Pizza Hut, a Long John Silver’s, many gas stations, and the Lonesome Pine Raceway hosting races on Saturday night. In town the cars could be seen on their trailers heading to the track and it was capitalism that made it all possible, the cars, the restaurants, and the Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost. Those combinations are wonderful reminders of what America the beautiful really means. It’s not just the mountains, the forests, or the horses carrying their riders on glorious weekend adventures that make America the subject of song and jealous hatred the world over. It is capitalism that makes it all possible, and is why the rest of the world cannot enjoy these combinations, as it is in capitalism that the adventures of mankind’s mind can thrive and preserve the world not as mother nature handed it to the human being in her random, manic depressed state, but that the human being can carve the world into the image of their wildest imaginations.

The Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost is the most recent endeavor in that far-flung part of the world to capture the great outdoors while still embracing the wonders of capitalism so that youth and families all over the Eastern United States will not forget the pioneering spirit that began to carve Virginia into the land of adventure that it is today. It is not intended to hang on to the past by stopping the future as most environmentalists attempt to do, but to serve as a reminder of who we are, and how we got here, as McDonalds and the miracles of capitalism continue to expand the human imagination into uncharted territory of a future that is coming at mankind with treasures not yet discovered.

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Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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