Tag: Ray Dalio

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

Intellectual Currency

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

The Looted Wealth of China

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

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

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

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

 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The World Bet Against America: What Edward Abilene and other socialists never figured out

The World Bet Against America, Bad Decision

Another reason I felt I had to write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is because many people consider America a great place, but they don’t understand why.  I thought I had always understood its essence, but how its evolution played out on the world stage leading up to some of the monstrosities we see in our current events, people didn’t have the proper context to grasp what was happening.  To write the book, I needed to visit some places to confirm my thoughts, and one of them was the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.  I was after the essence as to what made America tick, and to get there; I needed to step back to before the progressive era and into the end of the reign of Queen Victoria to put my finger on it.  I would say that I discovered what I needed to, not just at the Buffalo Bill Center. Still, I visited along the way in many places, including the area where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in Deadwood and exploring the reasons for the murder, which is compelling.  For me, these events told the story of today, how we got here and what was wrong with it.  These discoveries certainly made it into my book, a unique collection of thoughts about American business and why they so quickly outwork other industries in the world.  And why there is so much global jealousy toward America.  It’s not something we did, but instead, it’s that we left the world behind, and like a jealous lover, they can’t get over it.  Well, I can say that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West gets it, and I honestly think that all youth in America should go there and study.  It would do them a whole lot more good than in going to their first year of college.  The same holds for all Americans and people worldwide who make the pilgrimage to that Center to touch the essence of Americana as Buffalo Bill showed it to the world at the turn of the last century. 

I always warn my kids about Liberal Springs (Yellow Springs, Ohio) because Antioch College is such a liberal institution that attracts all the dope-smoking hippies and other progressive degenerates.  It’s one of the most liberal areas in all of Ohio, made that way by the college that has been there for so long.  Most Americans have been made to feel guilty for passing judgment on a place of higher education, that is until recently.  But in the case of Yellow Springs, they would have saved themselves a lot of pain if they had been willing to call bad, bad from the beginning.  One of my daughters and her husband wanted to go up to Clifton Gorge to hike, and to get there; they stopped by Yellow Springs to get a Coke.  Because my daughter wasn’t wearing a Covid compliance mask, the server there refused to serve her and wanted her to leave.  After some dispute, my daughter went to McDonald’s next door to get her Coke, and they proceeded to hike at the Gorge.  While there, resting on a rock along the trail, a mall cop type of park ranger wanted to give them a citation for getting off the path by a few feet.  After more debate, they were told to leave.  The area of Yellow Springs had heard the Biden dog whistle and was moving toward full authoritarian, the kind of world liberals want for all of us.  Instead, my kids left the area, returned home, and went to a place much more conducive to their personalities, Premier Shooting in West Chester.  They spent the rest of the day there shooting and enjoying themselves with like-minded people who had not become corrupted by liberalism. 

The reason for that little story and the tie back to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is that Edward Abilene had toured America with the daughter of Karl Marx in the late 1800s to measure the temperature the new nation would have for socialism.  Abilene had a strange attraction to Buffalo Bill in trying to understand Americans, which is why that Center was critical to understanding how Europe saw America.  At that time, Americans weren’t considered a threat, so England appeased the Buffalo Bill show the way a parent might indulge a child putting on a magic show for the first time, with a pat on the head and some upper lip encouragement.  But what they saw was a raw example of masculinity and weapons work that had conquered the wild frontier that had a new kind of art and culture to display, industry, endurance, tenacity, and courage.  The men of English society were more than a little threatened when English women were clamoring for these Buffalo Bill types, just as England as an empire was well on the decline.  They thought that America had no art, no history, no culture, and Europe was far superior.  They convinced many Americans to chase after the European standard and copy their religions, their colleges for higher learning, and other aspects of culture.  That is how the liberal was created in America.  Many other Americans like those in the Buffalo Bill show were new and mysterious in the world. They were not just attractive; they might become the most dominant organization of people on the face of the planet.  That was a threat to Europe and the old powers, and they have been anxious about it ever since. 

Liberals in America started creating colleges in the United States, like the one in Yellow Springs, to bring European culture to the new country.  Not so much to help America but to slow down its growth and ambitions.  During his tour of America and his relationship with Buffalo Bill, Abilene realized that Americans were looking for recognition from the old world the way a child seeks the approval of a parent.  So the plan to bring socialism to America was through such a process of shared art and culture.  Since then, America has had a restrictor plate applied to it, slowing it down to Europe’s liking.  It has also created a kind of subclass of European in the American liberal that is all the cause of conflict to this very day.  Such as the waitress in Yellow Springs who refused to serve my daughter a Coke or the overly zealous park officer at Clifton Gorge.  Americans have been made to feel guilty for all their ambitions and lack of culture, which Europe provided in exchange for a limiting relationship that has hindered America’s growth.  Now that all the cards are on the table and true feelings about each other have been revealed since Trump became president, it’s time to review all these relationships and decide how to move forward.  I would propose to leave the world behind and to force them to catch up if they want by adopting capitalism.  That would solve many of the problems in the world.  No government can provide that solution; it has to come from individuals who set the bar high and force the world to live up to it.  It might be a nightmare for Europe and Asia, but it is the way of the future, and for anybody curious about it, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West tells the story in ways that no place else does.   The world has bet on liberalism.  But what America created is what everyone wants, so that bet toward China will fall short because it’s not the best. 

Investors like Ray Dalio and companies like Walt Disney may have invested everything assuming that the world would turn back to the old and that hierarchical power would resume its work globally.  For them, they picked China and have hedged themselves behind that decision.  But, they should have read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  It would have saved them billions and trillions of dollars in lost revenue, which they will experience over the next decade.  I can understand their anxiety, but it’s their fault for not understanding what America was and thinking they could change it through academic means.  The Buffalo Bill Wild West show led to a yearning for freedom that created the country despite the world’s governments, and those forces are still at play.  Peer pressure isn’t going to return Americans to the grip of the old world. Instead, the entire government of America could be stripped away, including those compliant losers in Yellow Springs, yet Americans would still have an incredibly high GDP.  It was always a mystery to Edward Abilene and other Marxists who wanted to take over America and still do.  But they won’t be successful.  To understand why the Buffalo Bill Center of the West shows it.  Or, you can read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business