Tag: Wyoming

The Fed’s 2% Inflation to Lower Wage Rates: Micromanaging employers and causing quite a mess

There is a dirty little secret that the Federal Reserve has about its role in mass society that needs to be discussed in relation to interest rates and what it considers managed inflation.  The Fed recently met at its annual Jackson Hole meeting, and it reminded me of many things, particularly the time when my grandkids wanted chicken nuggets from McDonald’s and their dining room was closed.  We were in my RV, so the only way to place an order and collect the food was to use the drive-thru window, which I barely fit through.  The McDonald’s in Jackson Hole is very close to where the Fed meets against the backdrop of the Teton mountains.  For a tourist town with one of the largest concentrations of wealth in the world, it’s a small McDonald’s with a pretty small parking lot.  Certainly not RV friendly.  However, I managed to make it work with less than an inch on all sides of my vehicle, and it’s a story that has gained a lot of popularity in my family.  “Remember that time grandpa did this?”  And everyone says, “Which one?” because there are a lot of things to talk about.  The town itself is one of my favorites, and I can understand why all the bank presidents who are members of the Fed want to meet there to discuss monetary policy.  It’s a really good place to go and is America’s version of Geneva, Switzerland.  I think the Tetons are better, though.  So after the Fed meeting there, Jerome Powell indicated he was going to do what I said he was going to have to do, and what J.P. Morgan had been pressing for, along with President Trump, and that was the Fed was going to lower interest rates.  Not happily, but because they have to.  The economy is too good to hide phony interest rate profits for the banks behind artificial inflation numbers meant to frighten the world away from Trump’s presidency. 

However, there is another issue at play that we need to address regarding employment.  The Fed believes that in managing money, it must bake in 2% inflation per year because that is the only way to offset the erosion of wages that employers provide to employees, which dilutes the actual value of labor.  Because the Fed believes, which is one of the reasons for its existence, that employers will not incur the hard cost of paying employees less for their labor as they age and become less valuable.  Therefore, the Fed believes that it must step in and manage the economy because employers won’t do so on their own.  Often, when a company gets out of step with its cost structure, it has an obligation to reduce its costs, either through a reduction in force or wage cuts.  However, most employers are hesitant to lose their legacy talent and invest a significant amount of money in retaining them, when in reality, they should consider letting them go on the open market and replace them with cheaper and younger workers.  The NFL has to do this all the time with salary caps, which are imposed on teams to keep them fresh and relevant.  If a player wants to leave a team for more money, then that team can turn to free agency to replace that player.  If the market wants to pay a lot for that experienced player, they certainly can, but there is a salary cap, so that team won’t be able to pay a lot to other workers as well. 

That’s why we should operate in America with some gold standard, because value has to be protected. Instead of the Fed having the temptation to print more money, it would micromanage the economy with continuous infusions of cash, ultimately diminishing its buying power and hiding the inflation it creates in the process.  And try to hide it behind other economic conditions as a justification, which had worked until Trump came along and called the Fed’s bluff.  And because the Fed believes that free market pressures won’t manage the economy effectively, they have baked into all their assumptions about economic flow that they must micromanage employers who won’t trim their fat with inflated wage rates at their companies, as they fear losing talent to their competition.  So, the Fed bakes 2% inflation into everything.  That’s why, when reviews are conducted with employees, a standard minimum of 2% is required to maintain your wage value at the same level as the previous year.  The trick is that as you get older, you actually lose buying power in most cases because inflation eats up whatever increases you manage to get for yourself.  The goal is for Americans to earn less over their working years, not more, because the actual value of labor must be managed by the Fed, which introduces all kinds of problems, as it’s not really employers who are the problem.  That is just the excuse that the Fed applies to cover a lot of liberal politics, for which they are prone.  Labor unions, for instance, are very guilty of propping up wage rates that are artificially too high, which then feeds the Fed’s argument for mass micromanagement of the economy with incremental inflation to let people believe they are being paid a certain amount on paper, but in truth, the money is worth a lot less.  People don’t notice because it happens over time.  However, every three years, at a minimum, workers lose 6% of their buying power if they do not receive raises in their pay that are well above 2%.  To receive an actual 2% raise, employees would need to obtain a 4% raise with each yearly evaluation.  Which certainly isn’t the case for most people. 

Consider the problem at the McDonald’s in Jackson Hole that I mentioned, which had its drive-thru window closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  And the government was pushing for a minimum wage increase that inflated the real value for entry-level jobs, such as McDonald’s workers making $15 per hour, when the real value for their jobs is likely under $10.  When politicians interfere in the process of manipulating market values, the Fed must attempt to cover up the mess with interest rate hikes to conceal the inflation it creates, which often exceeds 2%.  Our goal with inflation should be zero, and if we held it to the gold standard, it would have to be.  These are the problems you get when you let pin-headed bureaucrats micromanage an economy with Marxist ideas instead of free market capitalism, and it’s a real problem.  So Jerome Powell knows all this and is reluctant to lower interest rates, even though all the parts of the economy that they usually hide behind at those Jackson Hole meetings are too good, forcing his hand.  So he’s not happy about it.  But a lot is coming that he won’t be pleased about.  There has been a significant amount of tampering that has impacted wage rates, and employers have not been the primary source of the issue.  It’s too much administrative mess that comes from the Fed, and short-term politicians who have caused all the problems.  McDonald’s workers, like the one in Jackson Hole, should not have employees making over $20 per hour.  Wal-Mart should not have employees making $20 to $25 per hour because all other labor has had to increase their wage rates to obtain workers.  But the money is all on paper.  People are not actually making those actual wage rates because the Fed has had to hide the impact through inflation.  And now they are being forced to lower interest rates, which will expose the whole mess.  Although the meeting in Jackson Hole might have been very scenic, it wasn’t enjoyable.  There will be a lot more to happen with monetary policy in the coming months.  And the Fed is going to lose a lot more control, as they very well should. 

Rich Hoffman

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Liz Cheney Loses Big in Wyoming: The Masons, Never-Trumpers, and established order of politics are very confused and want desperately to lash out at voters who aren’t picking them in elections

It was a bizarre proposition from Liz Cheney, after losing in the primary 28.9% to 66%, a massive blowout in Wyoming by any measures, that she compared herself to Lincoln and hinted at running for president. As if she learned nothing from her dramatic fall in coming out against President Trump and being the face of the January 6th Unselect Committee. Just as bizarre was the campaign ad that her dad did for her, wearing a cowboy hat and looking stern into the camera, warning about the destruction of the republic by Donald Trump. Didn’t he watch Mitt Romney do the same thing back in 2016, which did nothing to harm Trump’s brand? The Cheneys are politically savvy; they’ve been around for a long time and served in top offices. Why couldn’t they read the tea leaves? Or was it that they could read the tea leaves but be in denial about what they were saying? Perhaps they are suffering from the same problem that is causing the entire Never-Trumper movement so much consternation, the knowledge that the plan they had for so long in America, to serve the Liberal World Order as they themselves have been calling it, was falling apart and people had rejected it wholesale. Their anger at Trump was really anger at themselves displaced because they couldn’t look in the mirror and apply blame where it belonged. 

Every political age has its own unique circumstances. In her concession speech, Liz tried to brand herself as the Lincoln of our time, even though she was just smoked in a very conservative state in an embarrassing election. Like some unthinking drone, she is hell-bent on a course she learned from her father over the years to put her political head to the grindstone and just barrel through it because institutionalism would come to her somewhere out there defense, and her fortunes would change. That is the belief she has been functioning from. When she turned against Trump and put on the massive show trial that benefited only Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden with the name of a Republican denying that election fraud occurred in the 2020 election, it proved to be a terrible strategy. People saw for themselves what happened, there is plenty of evidence of election fraud during that election, and people saw that it gave them Joe Biden, a loser of a president that has raised taxes, destroyed our economy, destroyed our advantage in the world with fossil fuels, and brought a lot of corruption and scandal to our White House. It’s been embarrassing, and Liz Cheney made herself the apologist for all that bad behavior by trying to put all the focus on Trump. And people grew angry with her over it. 

People can see the evidence for themselves on election fraud and what was going on over January 6th, 2021. It’s not like President Trump owns the opinions of so many millions of people. But people have chosen to favor his opinions over all others, and that option is what has Liz Cheney and many other anti-Trump forces like her upset. Trump is changing the political landscape away from what they thought were the rules of conduct. Republicans would play a role in Washington politics as the flop, while Democrats would be the people’s party of equal rights. So long as everyone stayed in their lane, everything would work out just fine, which is how it was for her father during the Bush administration. Behind the scenes, there were many forces at work, but there was a code that was established by the Masons who founded Washington D.C. of how politics would run in the new country of America, and the establishment understood what those ground rules were. Republicans played bad cop and represented business. Democrats played good cop and represented minority groups and equal rights. But in the Mason lodges around Washington D.C. and in every community around the country were the understandings of the Three Crafts, regarding equality, dependence on others, fidelity to promises, contemplation of death, and duty to others which was the underlying foundation to everything in politics. Republicans and Democrats who were all Masons or involved with Masons through fundraising activities knew the rules. So long as everything stayed on those value systems, everyone could agree to disagree. The Masons were bringing to the New World starting in 1776 a long contemplated utopia, and people would love them for it. 

The crisis came several hundred years later when it all blew up in their face. The more freedom people had, whether in transportation, communication, or education, the less inclined they were to follow the Mason vision for how America would evolve. That rocked the political world, which needed more and more scandals and wars to distract Americans from their information hunger in a free society. When the Masons contemplated how a free society would function, they obviously had not been drawing from successful examples around the world because there was no society previously that had figured it out. But the American Constitution created a truly an unruly maniac that defied the rules of conduct that a polite, “masonic” society would give them. Free will turned out to be problematic, and for political insiders like the Cheney family, it was well beyond their grasp to deal with. That is why they had that lost puppy look in their campaign ads and were tone deaf in the aftermath of the election results. America had rejected them when given a choice by Trump. Never-Trumpers directed their anger at Trump for providing that “non-Masonic” option that everyone in political theater through their mason halls agreed never to breach. But Americans didn’t want to be controlled by the Masons either. And the Masons never planned to control them initially. But Plato never addressed how free people should act; the role in politics was always to have that philosopher-king presence in politics who would rule over people with wisdom and compassion.

Liz Cheney and her father thought that’s what they were, and now people rejected them. They were perplexed, beyond recognition. In the aftermath of her concession speech, it was clear that Liz Cheney wasn’t even close to understanding the MAGA movement, what role Trump played in it, or what would happen next. So, of course, from her perspective and the Mason-driven establishment of America and European political discourse, the world is coming to an end. Thousands of years of planning and manipulating political power behind the curtain were falling apart, and all they knew to do was to be angry at Donald Trump. But all Trump did was offer himself as an option and refused to kiss any political rings. And from there, they hated him. But people loved Trump for it. Trump gave people a choice they hadn’t had before, hadn’t had for thousands of years. And now, all those long-established political forces were unprepared for the blatant rejection. You could see it on Liz Cheney’s face; this was not the political order of the world she had learned from her father. You could see it on Dick’s face, too, during that ridiculous ad he did for his daughter, thinking that the cowboy hat would sell his pitch. We are living in a world where it takes a lot more than that. Political candidates must be much more substantial and freedom-loving, not in token considerations but to their souls. And the establishment is lost as to what to do with this new knowledge. In the Mason’s ideal society of Egypt, there wasn’t a version of Donald Trump, so they didn’t know what to do with populism. And now they are learning the hard lessons history never taught them.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Corruption: Uncovering history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

The Nature of Corruption

I can’t say it enough, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, turned out to be a treasure trove of philosophy that was just what America needed at just the right moment, at least for me, so that I could explain it to other people.  It was interesting; my family was mad at me for the breakneck pace of a big trip we were all on together.  We had just spent the day before seeing all the big sites in Yellowstone.  Every day, we had been getting up early and doing more in a day than most people do in a week of vacation.  Not only were my two daughters with me and their spouses but all my grandchildren as well.  I was on a mission; I was uncovering rocks putting together the essence of what was happening to our country.  The election year of 2020 had presented us all with lots of unusual problems, and I was looking for answers in 2021.  In June of that year, my family was deep in the rugged buttes of Wyoming several miles from the East entrance to the park outside Cody, Wyoming, which convinced me they needed a break from all the adventuring.  So, we agreed on a compromise; we’d take a day off our adventure and go to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in town and take it easy to let everyone catch their breath.  It was their idea, actually, but I didn’t tell them that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was one of the places I had on my list that was always at the top, and I wanted to go there badly.  So quite unexpectedly, I found myself there with my entire immediate family, and it turned out to be one of the great highlights of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those wonderful days with my family that intersected with questions I had been asking all my life, and suddenly there were answers. 

My concern was in asking the nature of corruption; we had just seen the removal of President Trump by a rigged election and hostile Democrats hell-bent on socialism and communism.  They had seen how well Bernie Sanders, the socialist, polled among young people during the presidential election the year prior, so now they were pulling off the masks and showing themselves to be the socialist they always were.  They were behaving the way I always said were their true intentions, and for many Americans, they were shocked by it.  At that time, I was also working on my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I had finished on the road that year and was in the editing process.  At the center of that book was an understanding of the nature of corruption.  My point was that some of the best years of American life that was least corrupt were the one where the modern socialists were declaring to be one of the most, the Victorian age, the end of the Gilded era, and the start of the Progressive.  For me, it was the other way around, so I was very interested in why the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was so popular among Americans for the closing decades of the 1800s and how Trump was an interesting call-back to that Make America Great Again sentiment that also was there with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

I have an interesting relationship with Buffalo Bill, each year in Ohio; I participate in the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County during the last weekend of July. I have done that for most of my adult life.  It’s always been a throwback to the Buffalo Bill show which Annie Oakley was the trick shooting act.  When I was a kid, the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy touched me deeply, and I wanted to be a part of that life, so the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio, gave me that chance, which I have always seen as the essence of American life.  I used those experiences to paint my book’s unique point of view to what America was, especially from business life.  So a lot was culminating there at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that the average visitor wouldn’t have experienced.  But the museum didn’t disappoint.  It was top class, one of the best of its kind in the world, and I brought back from there a real treasure of books and art that I would spend the rest of the year studying, which is the usual way I do things.  I visit places; then I learn all I can about those places long after I’ve gone.  In that way, my visits last a long time, but I get to know a place months and years after the initial visit.  And it was in this exploration that I ran across the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward and discovered precisely what I had been looking for, the link to many of our modern problems.  That book had been trendy during the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it held the answer to the long question of why that show had been so popular with people, even in this modern day.  It even explained why Trump was such a good president and why so many people on the socialist left wanted to see him utterly destroyed. 

Bellemy’s biggest mistake in his book Looking Backward was that he assumed that an administrative state of the central government could regulate corruption out of existence.  This idea of a socialist utopia was very attractive to some people, and they became progressives that would shape the Democrat party we see today early in the 1900s. Ironically, many Americans, without realizing it, understood that the life of Buffalo Bill and his show had touched on the essence of America, and they wanted to see more of it before it vanished as progressives had been promising.  There was honor and invention in the Wild West that Buffalo Bill showed in his displays.  America was remarkably uncorrupted for a few years of western expansion until corruption took over on the heels of Progressives and the work of Karl Marx sought to sabotage it right out of the gate, which is a battle that is still being waged to this day.  As it turned out, and it’s evident at the Buffalo Bill gun museum on the Center of the West campus, gun ownership in America had punched a window into the long history of corruption in the world. Buffalo Bill represented the best to have come from that philosophic period.  This bit of history was so remarkable that Plato and Aristotle would have never conceived of such a thing. Still, there it was in the American west, the defeat of corruption before the world’s governments could taint it with their looting presence.  And the left never figured it out. It’s an easy answer “Looking Backward” at how childlike Bellamy was in his assumptions within his book.  The socialist utopia that Karl Marx wanted and the Bellamyites who followed him for years after that book instead made corruption worse through the administrative state.  We were all a lot better off when the world was, as Buffalo Bill showed it.  And people understood that when they went to see his show. 

The nature of corruption comes from any organization of people who are put in power over other people. The other people have no means to check the power inflicted upon them.  The magic of America that no other society in the world had figured out is that with Americans having gun ownership, they could control the influence of corruption as it grows within any centralized authority. That centralized authority might be our corporations or our local, state, and federal governments.  Corruption was always going to happen, but the ownership of guns kept it checked in healthy ways that worked best before the works of Karl Marx infected American academic circles with a completely foreign concept from Europe that fed corruption rather than controlling it.  And that was something new for me to think about.  I think it’s normal to have thoughts about something where you know it’s right or wrong, but we often don’t understand why.  Well, at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, they had recorded “why,” and it was just the right thing I had been looking for.  It’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work for emotional reasons.  But in the context of history, we have preserved facts that we can study and apply to our modern-day.  And within that study, we have our answer on the nature of corruption and what we can do to control it.  It’s in the minds of all societies to have corruption.  For the liberal, they think they can educate it out of people.  But in the process, they make much more of it.  Yet, in the proven history of western expansion, we did control corruption for a healthy period, and the world was much better for it.  History proves it so.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business