Tag: Johan Norberg

Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance in West Chester, Ohio: Making Hard Work Great Again

I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.

The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road.  They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked.  But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered.  It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades.  By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard.  That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general.  J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job.  They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy.  I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?”  Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged.  So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China.  It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.

If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy.  This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically.  But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism.  It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them.  And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work.  Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class.  It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat.  Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it.  And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs.  That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement.  People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it.  And they want to improve the situation dramatically. 

I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again.  It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future.  Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between.  And that everything would be great.  And it hasn’t been.  Americans need to get back to working hard and working often.  We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom.  The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio.  Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level.  However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities.  The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core.  Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again.  We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions.  And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.

Rich Hoffman

The Comeback of Adam Smith Capitalism: What the economy will look like beyond 2024

Included here is a picture of Adam Smith from Scotland, where his Wealth of Nations was born, which I consider one of the most outstanding books ever written. It just so happens to be about economics and is the secret sauce to America’s great economy and why it has been at the top of the world. Many countries have many more people in them or even have more mineral resources. But for some reason, America has produced more economic wealth than any other place, anywhere, at any time. Even with all the big government restrictions that come from these socialist intrusions over the last century, significant government types have tried to ride the camel of productivity while at the same time imposing Marxism on them. America still outproduces the rest of the world in fundamental, economic value. So, the Wealth of Nations is an essential book written in 1776. But I also keep talking about Johan Norberg’s recent 2023 book, The Capitalist Manifesto, because it’s a really good book. Not necessarily from a conservative American perspective. But he’s from Sweden and he talks about IKEA a lot, but from a European liberalized mindset, he’s preaching the benefits of capitalism that I thought the left would never dare utter. And he’s doing it in an effort to save the concept of globalism from its massive failure of attaching itself to global communism. He sees, much the way Adam Smith tried to convince everyone, that capitalism is the best means of helping the most people, and in The Capitalist Manifesto, Norberg puts forth in a written and non-boring way, all the benefits capitalism has brought to the world over time and makes his case for everyone to get it for reference to the future of all global economies.

A statue of Adam Smith in Scotland

I was an economics major in college, but I was miserable. They were teaching Marxism, and I was far away from that vantage point, so it was painful, and through most of my adult life, I have worked in the opposite direction of all academics. I also found Adam Smith’s work to be my favorite, and I have rejected all forms of Keynesian economics from centralized authorities, which Smith also argued against. And over the years to feed my sentiments, I have enjoyed the work of Ayn Rand because as a Russian who lost everything to communism in her home country and had to flee to America to have a shot at a decent life, she understood Adam Smith too. But I was always the odd person over in the corner standing against the tide of globalism that we were all told was going to move in a noticeably communist direction, with China being the model that globalism created. So I can’t tell you how happy I am to have lived long enough to see that whole Marxist empire die in front of our faces. You could see the last gasp of it when Xi from China visited Biden in San Francisco late in 2023 for a kind of communist summit. Globalism was trying hard to show that they had reached the finish line. But due to populism yearning for Adam Smith capitalism, the water is flowing through their cupped hands fast, to the point where soon there will be nothing left to drink from. Looming in the background of all this political activity is the return from exile of President Trump, he has a vicious plan to end globalism as it has been proposed, and economic advocates like Johan Norberg see the writing on the wall, that if the world of liberals wish to save their hard work at establishing globalism, that they were going to have to throw the towel in and adapt capitalism, quickly.

I do read many books, about three of them the size of Norberg’s book a week.  But after I got through The Capitalist Manifesto about a third of the way, I considered it the most important book about economics since Adam Smith.  And I say that knowing that Norberg and I would likely see eye to eye on very little, politically.  But this book is a glaring admission that I know a lot of my old college professors would probably commit suicide over.  I would get so angry at their sheer stupidity that I would jump into just about every risky business proposal that came my way to shake off the stink of it all.  But I learned a lot in the process that is what we might say, unique to the present marketplace.  So, it all worked out in the end.  And I can see where Norberg is going even as the people on the political side of Norberg found Ayn Rand to be the incarnation of the Devil in all the details.  This was all a mainstream admission that the only way to save global markets was to adopt capitalism, purely and without much micromanagement, which is a massive statement from any economic circle.  It’s one that I have known about for decades, and it cost me much trouble to be on the side of pure markets while the rest of the world was moving toward various degrees of Marxism, from the stock market to the making of plastic baseballs in China. 

So, boys and girls, this is the question of the century, the answer all wrapped up into one, and the reason that Norberg published his book at this particular time.  What happens in 2024 and 2025 and beyond economically?  Norberg is not a populist, and he is not a fan of President Trump.  Yet, Trump is the leader of the political world, all over the world, despite all these attempts by globalists to keep their dead duck alive by trying to destroy Trump.  And revenge is coming once he is president again, and the last threads of globalism are as good as gone.  The entire plot of the World Economic Forum and their paper tiger of China will disappear.  That’s why Xi met with Biden.  They all know it’s over.  National capitalism will have to make a massive comeback, which will impact all the global markets attached to communism, which will be allowed to die on the vine to separate itself from the market flow of America.  That is where America is heading; for a while, we will close our borders and let the rest of the world rot on the last vestiges of globalism as envisioned by Tragedy and Hope (the book).  And if the world wants to survive, it will have to start thinking like Norberg and, fundamentally, getting to know Adam Smith better.  The Karl Marx experiment driven by all the Masonic lodges was a massive failure, and now people like Johan Norberg must fess up to it, which makes his book, The Capitalist Manifesto, the most important book of our time.  I can’t recommend it enough because it is the roadmap for the rest of this century.  And it all starts with what Trump will do in America once he’s reelected.  And the world struggles to catch up, which will be very hard for them.  But do, they must, if they want to survive the world that is coming. 

Rich Hoffman