Tag: Wealth of Nations

The White House Called Me: What I said

Ahead of Liberation Day, on April 2nd, the White House called me to ask my thoughts on how Trump’s tariffs would be beneficial.  They were compiling a list of names for people to attend Liberation Day, and at that time, they were thinking more in terms of a town hall presentation. However, what they ended up doing was more traditional Trump.  In that process, they called me as they were setting up for the day, and I was more than happy to share my thoughts, as always.  I usually don’t discuss those kinds of things when they happen, but this was an excellent conversation that I think is a fitting follow-up to what they ended up doing at the White House for Liberation Day.  And that is the discussion about supply chains, which is the number one issue hidden behind the noise of personal investments.  It’s one thing to complain as a company that has invested in globalism to be afraid of Trump setting tariffs to defend our values from a world built on socialism.  So many countries have completely sustained themselves off American capitalism, then throw all that money into a dumpster fire of losses caused by Marxist politics.  Many investors, to their shame, have invested a lot of money in bad ideas and hoped that somehow it would all work out.  And they’d make up for it patriotically on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July by cooking an extra hot dog on the grill for the holiday to celebrate American independence.  But many financial firms have been looting our system for years and hiding their treachery behind an American flag, hoping nobody would notice.  But we have, and that is precisely why Trump had to liberate America from the terrorist implementation that has been quite ostentatious in the background. 

The main problem I conveyed to the White House was that, with all the transfer of wealth, the world has become complacent with its supply chains, taking too many vacations, and has lost its sense of providing a service to customers due to the accumulation of unearned merit.  What I said specifically was that the world was now filled with a bunch of slack jawed losers who have gotten used to easy money given to them for wealth redistribution, stolen from the value of capitalism and given to the looting nature of Marxism, and they no longer feel like they have to compete to earn the money, because governments have given it to them for nothing.  When you need something in the world, given all this global trade and the numerous time zones, what you get more than ever now are excuses.  In France, I think they are only working about 20 minutes a week now, and they are always on vacation. Most people have 6 weeks of vacation, it seems, and are rarely in the office.  There is no expectation to even pick up the phone while on vacation; the world is suddenly allergic to all forms of work, and it is a global crisis.  As a result, if you need something from Malaysia, what used to take four or five days to arrive is now six months or more.  And in many cases, if you think you need something for manufacturing, you have to order it more than a year in advance. Even then, the supplier is likely to push out their schedule multiple times, without even having any expectation of fulfilling their timeline targets.  As I told the White House, this is the biggest crisis in the world that nobody is talking about: subsidized laziness and the perpetuation of lazy people to profit off the demise of the world.  Trump’s tariffs would immediately help that condition, and it couldn’t happen sooner. 

Now I understand, and we discussed it on the phone, that this kind of thing takes longer to explain than a typical media snippet on tariff talk.  Our media is why the White House has shifted its focus away from the traditional establishment and toward alternative media to convey its message.  We have a lot of people in the same category as the global slack-jawed losers who are lazy and have an expectation of not working nearly enough.  Many of these types now work in traditional media.  So they can’t delve deeply into the tangible benefits of the Trump tariff necessity for a Liberation Day.  A liberation from lazy, slack-jawed losers who order their lunch for the business day at 9 AM and by noon are already checking out and getting ready to pick up their kid at day care and thinking about how they can call off for the rest of the week and still get paid.  If you’ve ever dealt with government, and this is the case with all of Washington D.C., they are very eager in the morning to get to work and park in their parking garages between the hours of 8 and 9 AM.  But by 1 PM, the parking garages are mostly cleared out.  Government workers, if they go to work at all and aren’t working from home, are only putting in 4 or 5 hours of work per day and expecting to get paid a king’s ransom in wages.  This is the hidden cost of globalism, and it is a real problem.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ve certainly discussed it with the White House, but supply chains before COVID and after are entirely different.  If you needed a fuse or a new alternator for your car, it was always readily available on the shelf before COVID-19.  However, it has taken months to obtain it afterwards.  If you wanted to have a special Corvette built from a dealer, it was usually on the lot, or you’d get it in a few weeks.  Now, it might take a year, and everyone seems to be okay with that, as if that’s the new normal.  No, that is not acceptable, and it has been detrimental to all economies worldwide.  And it all starts with globalism, rather than competitive nationalism, and these tariffs had to happen to reset the world order established after World War II.  People all over the world need to work harder, longer, and much, much faster.  And when you call them, they need to pick up the phone because they need the money.  Not to have an arrogant attitude, as they know their socialist government will compensate them anyway with the proceeds from the trade imbalances.  That’s certainly a more profound discussion than just talking about the price of eggs.  It’s more of a psychological problem of wealth redistribution, which, to Trump’s point, we have been getting ripped off.  And it has to stop; Liberation Day is the moment in history when it did.  And the world will thank us later for forcing them not to be a bunch of slack-jawed, entitled losers short on ambition and full of excuses as to why our supply chains are too slow and inefficient.  And for the Trump people at the White House, it was nice speaking to everyone.  I’m happy to do it anytime.  Trump is doing great, and if he needs anything, don’t hesitate to call.  Liberation Day was great, and very much needed!

Rich Hoffman

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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

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