Tag: Economy

Kings Island Goes Cashless: Communist China is leading the world in controlling financial transactions

Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless

I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless.  Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime.  They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy.  Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate.  It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe.  Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased.  Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants.  For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier.  That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system.  Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options.  I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless.  I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute.  But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”

Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards.  No cash allowed.  We were all hungry and tired.  We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park.  We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car.  Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced.  The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me.  Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system.  It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless.  An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons.  But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while.  Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it. 

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The push for a cashless society comes from communist China.  They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it.  Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people.  It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions.  For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie.  Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store.  If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food.  That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society.  Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction.  I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well.  There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations.  What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer.  The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around.  It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America.  Cash is freedom.

I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island.  Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think.  If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer.  The transaction is between the seller and me.  No bank in New York even knows about it.  They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows.  And I like it that way.  So do a lot of other Americans.  Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture.  Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull.  Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction.  While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card.  That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase.  My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment.  Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution.  But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell.  The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire. 

I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept.  I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements.  All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind.  It felt like a betrayal.  My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange.  They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck.  Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much.  So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon.  I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China.  Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid.  And lazy.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Challenge to Big Tech: The result will be 12 total years as president

Trump’s Challenge to Big Tech

As we’ve been talking about since the beginning of the Big Tech censorship against President Trump, legal action of some kind was inevitable.  It’s good to see Trump initiate that activity as he has in July of 2021.  It takes time to build these cases.  It is also great to see so many people joining him in that effort.  Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest have it coming.  They abused their power and what they did was quite purposeful.  They used free speech to control speech, at least the legal premise of free speech.  Because they are also private companies, which is just another subtle attack on how corporations can become big and financially competitive with nations yet hide under the protection of the United States federal government to implement their will.  It would take a big name like Trump to take them on, and they kept poking and poking until he did it.  So now we will have the court battle we’ve needed for a long time to settle the matter, free speech against private companies and what role they can play in the election process, which based on the election fraud that is emerging has been vast.  Especially regarding Facebook.  As global companies now, the Big Tech social media companies have obviously no regard for American sovereignty and illustrate a problem that existed essentially since Andrew Jackson’s laissez-faire capitalism gave Cornelius Vanderbilt the ability to operate large corporations as a competitive rival of our own elected government. 

Up until recently, really where corporations started looking after that dangled carrot of communism in China with their 1.3 billion people, we’ve managed as a nation to walk that fine line between corporate influence and elected government.  Many of the skinny jean progressives of Silicone Valley don’t understand that China is not the lucrative market that has been sold to them.  Not all those people will be allowed to participate in the world’s economy; they are under tight controls there, so selling out America to the Chinese will always end only one way—with grave disappointment.  Film production companies have had to slowly learn that over the last decade, only to nearly be wiped out entirely by the Chinese bioweapon Covid-19 meant to torpedo the economy during an election year for retaliation over Trump’s trade deals.  (Where’s the proof—everywhere if you look at it.  Most don’t want to look at it) I’ve also mentioned in many other articles that the problem with tech companies, what Google collects on people, and how Facebook builds profiles is that people do not reveal their entire essence on social media platforms.  You may get consumer behavior or sexual behavior patterns, but learning the totality of human need has proven elusive to the tech companies.  The geeks who work in those places often don’t know what questions they need to pose under online tracking to understand a human intellect.  So even with all their tampering, they still ended up with a society that elected Donald Trump twice.  The first time the FBI tried to erase the results for them as they had promised government they would do.  The second time they participated in massive voter fraud with the help of Chinese tampering in four specific counties in crucial swing states, and they were caught.  But not before they made a real mess of things and declared victory even as they were recorded cheating.  The court cases for this will take years to sort out, but they have trouble on the horizon for their election tampering that most people haven’t been able to wrap their minds around yet. 

But the Big Tech skinny jean geeks didn’t care.  They were global corporations operating in many ways more significantly than the United States government that people had elected for a republic.  And they made their move that corporations had been toying with for well over a hundred years, steering their companies away from American sovereignty and toward a global government which they would influence from the inside out.  Cornelius Vanderbilt, in his day, for example, or even J.D. Rockefeller, were patriotic toward America, and when they could have, they avoided going total globalist.  But that was a day when trains ruled, and Europe was far behind.  A hundred years later, with a much smaller world brought together by Big Tech, it isn’t surprising that companies like Google and Facebook would abandon the American concept altogether in favor of something they created.  Even though Google told us ten years ago that they were libertarians and would never abuse their power, they have grossly abused their power and now have lots of trouble.  Many think that Google doesn’t care and that Facebook is too big to fail.  But as I say many times, the way to beat these guys is through their branding.  They care about their brand, and after the 2020 election, their brands have taken a massive hit.  The corrosive effects have not yet been measured, but they will show up in 2021 going into 2022, and it will be painful for them.  Many young people do not care about Facebook; it’s an older model and quickly has become the social media platform for older people.  And when you add election fraud to the mix, and that many young people from 18-25 are starting to turn to Trump despite the Marxism taught in public schools, the Big Tech companies have some serious problems with their brand. 

Yes, young people are looking toward the Republican party anyway, no matter what kind of influence Facebook and Google thought they had with censorship.  Their censorship worked in China, but the people there have been conquered for many thousands of years.  China has never recovered fully from the rule over the Mongols. They’ve had some ruling dynasties, such as the Han. Still, as a people, they have never evolved into the kind of independent people that Americans are, which I talk about extensively in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  If only the skinny jeans execs in Silicon Vally had asked me, I could have saved them a lot of headaches.  But they took their shot, they put their chips on the wrong horse, and now they’ve been exposed.

The court case with Trump itself will be a tough one for the Supreme Court as measured today.  But by the time they hear the case, the world will be a much different place. Other factors will come into play, such as public sentiment, for the same reasons that the Supreme Court did not want to hear about election fraud after the 2020 election because they didn’t want the radicals in the Democrat party to burn down their homes.  They will be influenced by an angry public newly aware of Google and Facebook’s role in stealing the election from a person those same people voted for.  Right now, it’s too inconvenient to know.  Too many media executives are currently engaged in the cover-up.  But during this case, as it brews in the legal world, those execs will retire, move to the Bahamas to take their money and run, and the replacements will do what they do in every corporate culture, they’ll be thrown under the bus, and the cover-ups will be ended.  In the end, that’s how it will go down, and we’ll all be better off as a result.  And, we’ll get another four years of Trump anyway.  In this way, Trump will be able to be president effectively for 12 total years thanks to the follies of Big Tech and their powergrab at the expense of American sovereignty. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Power of “Ghosting It”: Attacking Trump supporters isn’t enough

The Nature of Power

Nobody with a sane mind will dispute that what has been going on with Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg is an abuse of power in the extreme. The means of defending ourselves from the incursions is where the primary problem resides.  The frustration for the insurgents on the political left, which is global, is that the Trump Organization is attached to Donald Trump in a way it hasn’t seen a hit against its brand.  People still love and respect the Trump Organization even as there have been hits against its reputation by radicals looking to destroy the brand and destroying the business’s income.  That is how the left has operated for years, and it’s the only gas they have in the tank.  They have no actual means of destroying people or companies but hope to change the way people feel about them.  But, as we have seen through the election results of President Trump, even though on paper it showed that Joe Biden had won the election because the official titled participants certified the election, the truth about the vote comes out in math all across the country.  Despite all the attempts to tear down the Trump brand, well over 70 million people voted for Donald Trump in the election. They continue to support him even now at rallies and personal statements in every state across the country.  That is the actual vote by the people and is why the Trump Organization hasn’t been torn down yet.  The leftist’s attacks depend on people to stay in the lines created by society, manipulated by the legal system, and conform to the social controls of history to work.  But they haven’t been working, so the system itself is getting desperate and attacking anybody close to Trump that they can get a hold of to destroy any potential that Trump might resume his climb into the Executive Office as an elected representative.

This case illustrates perfectly why so many people in the world clammer for power or their perception of it.  One of the reasons my management method of “Ghosting It” is so effective is that it exists by living outside of the definitions for power that are generally instilled in our culture from its inception.  The reason people want power, whether it is political power, power within a community, a family, even within a friendship, is because they count on titles and official capacities to shape the world to their liking.  We all want to believe in our legal system. Still, unfortunately, such as the case with the Trump Organization, the New York prosecutors have gained power by title so that they could, in essence, control the definitions of law and order.  Since we have lost our connection to Natural Law in America, it thus allows for any tyrant to acquire power and use that power to destroy their enemies.  In this case of Trump, the left is terrified Trump will continue to break the rules and run for president yet again, which will destroy all their long-established plans.  Many of which have been in place for over a century.  The progressive effort in society has sought to remove Natural Law, family strength, and an economic grip on capitalism since the 19th century.  They intend to “progress” beyond those American concepts and seek to destroy any reference that might root the country to those ideas, and they are out for blood to continue that path.  That is why they have been working so hard to corrupt our legal system over so many decades.  They want desperately to have the kind of power they are showing in New York, to interpret the law, and to use it as a weapon to achieve their political desires.  We see the same behavior currently working against Rudy Giuliani where they have taken the law license of the former mayor just because he has been representing Donald Trump on legal matters. 

Over the last few weeks, I have been talking about two legal cases that came about before the progressive era took root, the Wild West period. In this case, Laurence Murphy gained control of the law in New Mexico to edge his rival, John Chism, out of the cattle baron business.  And we saw it again when the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, paid a killer to shoot Wild Bill before he could become sheriff and clean the city up from the crimes that were happening there that were making a lot of money for a lot of people.  I point those out because comparing things to western history, relatively simple politics shows the intent of vile evil people wonderfully.  Most people can agree on the facts when presented against the context of history long over the horizon of concern.  It is much harder for people to decide that the same type of thing was going on against Trump with James Comey, for instance, who had weaponized the FBI to control the kind of people who could be elected into representation roles in the American government. The message to us all has been that if we elect someone, the intelligence community from a Deep State perspective doesn’t approve of, those people will be destroyed by the law, which has been happening to Donald Trump since he announced he was running.  None of the enemies thought Trump would survive, and they are perplexed that he continues to survive.  So for them, the next best thing is to go after people close to Trump, hoping to erode him with a lack of support.  The other method they utilize, which they were caught on this past year, was election fraud.  If a candidate isn’t destroyed by some miracle in the media and people vote for them anyway, they will cheat.  This has likely been going on for many years.  It was just this past election where Trump was the one who had over 80 million votes, not Joe Biden, where they had to cheat so bad that they got caught this time. 

But to their minds, getting caught isn’t the worst thing in the world because they still have the power of the law to abuse to hide their crimes, which is why they have spent so much time and energy trying to acquire control over many years.  They always wanted to have James Comey types out there running the FBI for the political insurgency.  And they always wish to have liberal prosecutors to go after their political enemies, which is the whole intent of attacking the Trump Organization.  Thus, the way to beat these villains is to keep our law and order rooted in Natural Law.  And to stay committed to that fight, the public conflict must come from “ghosting it.” Trump has an instinct for it, as do most great leaders; they always have.  I have lately put a definition to it that allows others to utilize the tactic.  The way to beat progressives of radical leftism is to be bigger than them, have more maneuverability than they do, and take away the fear they expect to utilize by controlling the legal process.  Trump is “ghosting it,” so they will never catch him.  No matter who they attack, Trump has made himself untouchable by using his legendary status built over a lifetime and is unleashing it now in a way that no institutional controls can manage.  And that is the sunny side of the gruesome stuff we see now, especially coming out of New York legally.  The old tricks won’t work anymore, because as the Trump Organization proves, people still have all the power.  And maybe for the first time in history, controlling law and order from a government standpoint isn’t working.  Cheating the vote wasn’t enough because there are still many Americans and supporters worldwide who know better, and they aren’t giving up.

Rich Hoffman

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Yes, the National Parks are Full: That’s what happens when government tampers with the economy

One unmistakable thing is that if you get a chance to travel this summer as I have been doing, the National Parks are packed.  They were filled way over capacity, everywhere.  Park Rangers are perplexed with the number of people they are suddenly dealing with and are complaining that there needs to be a reservation system at the National Parks to help them manage the capacity.  Now that is a very “government” thing to do; rather than embrace the surge in National Park interest, they are looking for ways to turn them into a BMV where visitors need to take a number before visiting to see their favorite tree.  In the video above, I talk about the several parks my family visited recently and the news report about Zion in Utah.  The story was from Idaho, which I saw on a television screen while staying there; the capacity problem was a direct byproduct of the government screw-up on Covid, where people were confined in their homes for a year. Now that they are free, they are doing all the things they wanted to do over that period, and the surge is the reaction, which government doesn’t know how to handle. 

I tend to have a soft spot for park rangers and anybody who works in the park systems.  We have an America the Beautiful pass, which I am very proud of.  This year, we have used it a lot, which essentially waives the 35 dollar fee that it takes to get into all the parks.  As this story about National Park capacity was breaking, we visited Yellowstone, one of the biggest ones.  We were in the Tetons.  We even went down into Dinosaur National Monument, and there are fees to get into all those parks covered by America The Beautiful passes.  I am typically in a pretty good mood when I’m visiting a National Park, so I overlook more than often the apparent liberalism of the government employees, including park rangers.  But I heard more bitching from them than I cared to.  Even over at the Yellowstone lodges at Old Faithful, workers complained about the number of people at the park because I was there in a midweek setting, and the employees expected an easy day.  Instead, at 9 AM, they had rushes of people that resembled 2 PM on a Saturday, and they were not happy about it. 

I deal with these kinds of things by getting up at 6 AM and getting everywhere before everyone else does.  The crowds didn’t bother me much until we were leaving.  The crowds can be managed if you think out of the box.  But if you think you’re going to wake up at noon and hit the parks, you can forget it, which is why Zion has already implemented an appointment system.  They had an appointment system at Dinosaur National Monument as well, which irritated me.  We were so early in the morning that it didn’t matter, but in the middle of Utah, they were seeing surges that the park rangers were having a hard time dealing with.  It was both fun to watch and grossly sick because they were essentially upset that they had to work, which they aren’t used to.  Other parks are feeling the pressure.  Thankfully when we were there, Yellowstone hadn’t yet done such a thing as a reservation system.  It defies the purpose of spontaneous adventure when you must check in with a park ranger to see a geyser.  But these are new problems caused by the government that government is not prepared to deal with.

What I find interesting is the human reaction to the problem.  The Covid lockdowns were pretty scary stuff.  The idea that a government that didn’t want to control the virus that came from China could destroy the economy, lock people in their homes and expect some tame result at the end of it is unfathomably ignorant.  There were solutions that were ignored, such as hydroxychloroquine and zinc.  Covid-19 was a self-imposed stupidity because there were ways to solve the problem.  The government ignored them, hoping to control people until this July 4th Holiday under the Biden administration.  But the dam broke this spring as people pushed their governors to ignore the CDC rules and reopen their economies, and thus, out came this rush of interest in the National Parks.  It looked for a time that the new standard would remain and that we would never return to a time in America without masks and social distancing.  But much to our credit, people got sick of being lied to, and they just started to ignore the government, and now there is this massive surge in National Park attendance.  People spent their time in isolation thinking about the things they’d like to do, like going to Yellowstone, and the moment they could, they did. 

We saw the same thing at Jenny Lake in the Tetons.  It was early in the morning when we arrived, and cars had already filled the parking lot and were piled up down the road toward Jackson for miles.  Now Jenny Lake is very nice; they have great accommodations.  Once we finally arrived in the little village, they have there like restrooms, a visitor center, and a gift shop at the foot of the magnificent mountains; it looked like Disney World with people occupying almost every bit of the available sidewalk.  It was packed.  The employees at those places had a kind of blasted look on their faces.  I was glad to see it.  I think it was good for people to get out and see such magnificent places.  I think it’s also good for the employees to be challenged a bit.  Maybe they got jobs with the National Park Service because they were liberal and didn’t want to work very hard, but this was a good reality check.  Whatever the viewpoint, the only reason can come from people leaving their homes and seeing their national parks, even if they were crowded.  I didn’t mind the crowds at all, but there were significant crowds that would have just been worse if there was a reservation system. 

The lesson is that this is what happens when government tampers with the will of the people.  Unforeseen circumstances are bound to arise.  This built-up serge of interest in National Parks was not planned. The reaction by the public has taken the government quite by shock; they were very flat-footed in dealing with the market needs.  And since the government does not make decisions based on market forces but bureaucratic sentiment, they were clueless about the outcome.  But that problem isn’t for us, the visitors. They’re going to have to figure it all out, the government. They’ll have to complain to someone else because we don’t want to hear it.  In the future, when they think of shutting down society and the economy that fuels it, they need to think of these mistakes.  These surges may last for years.  Things may never get back to normal for the National Parks as the lockdowns look to have triggered people’s desire to do something in their life they used to put off.  I suspect that the new normal that everyone has been talking about isn’t accepting lockdowns and more government regulations on personal behavior. Instead, an increase in people not putting off what they could do today might have otherwise been inclined to wait until tomorrow.  Because with government, they may screw up everything tomorrow, leaving today as the only choice to do something.

Rich Hoffman

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Biden’s Theft of the Good Trump Economy: Democrats will steal anything

If you ever had doubts about how Democrats and specifically the Biden administration steals from those around them, then look no further than the jobs report from May 2021.  Biden quickly claimed that there had been 2 million jobs created since he started his term in January.  But the phony counting comes from the fact that most of those jobs were Covid jobs put on hold due to the shutting down of the economy.  They are, as I said in the video, Trump jobs created during his term.  Those jobs were put on the shelf while we fooled around with Covid-19.  Once we pushed the button to reopen the economy, the positions were reactivated.  The Biden administration did not create them.  They are simply the latest example of Democrats taking credit for the work that Republicans do.  But for those who don’t believe it, it just happened right in front of all our faces. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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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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