What We are Seeing in the Streets and on Campuses is not Fringe...

Like most Americans, I was of course shocked by the vicious inhumanity that the coward terrorist group Hamas carried out in Israel three weeks ago. Unfortunately, organized evil is neither unique nor surprising. The Nazis were equally evil across Europe, as were the Japanese at Nanking and Stalin with Ukraine and Mao with his own people. Sadly, evil happens, devils exist and thankfully they are rarely celebrated.

But rarely doesn’t mean never, and the most shocking thing was not the evil perpetrated, but rather the extraordinary support it has received. Not only is Hamas’s evil finding exuberant support in places like Iran and Qatar where you might expect it, but there were tens of thousands of Muslims – and their liberal comrades – in places like New York, Detroit, and Washington out en masse vocally demonstrating their support for these monsters.  And it wasn’t just on the streets, in places like Harvard and Yale and NYU you had students and professors and organizations blaming Israel for Hamas’s inhumanity.  Even as the full extent of the carnage emerged, days after the world was able to see the barbarity of what the savages carried out, the rallies in support not only didn’t diminish, they seemed to grow.  I couldn’t help wonder what that portends for our future. 

As an American I shook my head, stunned as I watched the scenes play out. I wondered how so many people, with smiles on their non hidden faces, could cheer such evil.  How supposedly intelligent people could put their names in support of such barbarism.  My reaction to a few posts on Twitter was “Send them to Gaza”. Not that it was going to happen, but it’s one thing to cheer the beheading of babies and raping of women from five thousand miles away, it’s another thing to do so when there’s a realistic possibility of the IDF ending you.

Of course that’s not going to happen, but then I wondered to myself, what is wrong with these people and why are they allowed to do this? Before the words even formed in my head I answered my own question:  Free speech… that extraordinary thing we have which most Muslim countries don’t.

All of that led my brain to a quote that is often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:  “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.” The British Bulldog may not have said that, but a look at a map of nations with Sharia law suggests the reality of it.

“But we don’t live in one of those countries” you might say, “these people are just fringe wackos.” Not so much. A 2015 poll of Muslims in America showed the following: “More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.” It also found “nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, ‘It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.’” and “Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.” Anyone watching the thousands of protesters in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tampa could easily see that it’s likely the numbers listed above have only grown worse – from a free republic’s perspective.

Now, support for Sharia doesn’t necessarily equate to support for the actions Hamas took last week, but a Venn Diagram would likely demonstrate a great deal of overlap. 

But then you say, “Muslims are barely 1% of the population, this can’t be a threat.” Maybe, but think about this: trans people are far fewer yet today we find ourselves in the midst of national fights about bathrooms, sports and the “medical” butchering of children. Interestingly, most of the people who support the LBGTQXYZ123 agenda also support “Palestine”, where many would likely be thrown off the top of buildings were they to actually go there.

So the question becomes, how does a pluralistic, secular state that puts value on individual liberty deal with vile ideas that are repugnant to the basic elements of the culture and those who espouse them? Is the Constitution a suicide pact that allows those who object to its foundational principles to use the document’s freedoms to take power in order to eliminate it?

In his autobiography Malcom X talks about being invited to speak at Harvard and other prestigious universities, this at the time he was spewing much of his pre enlightened anti-white racist venom. He marvels that while he was invited to speak and said things that most of the audience disagreed with, they were always courteous and usually engaged in a healthy, respectful dialogue. Contrast that with today’s conservative speakers such as Heather MacDonald, Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro who have had events cancelled or found themselves drowned out and threatened by leftists who equate speech they don’t like with violence. Not surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 66% of college students find this acceptable while another showed that 65% of Democrats supported censoring “misinformation”.

Now, maybe this vile and public championing of hate will be a tipping point where the Democrat coalition fractures as the various victim classes it has nurtured twist themselves into pretzels trying to be good team players. I doubt it, because Democrats in toto hate America, hate freedom and most of all hate Donald Trump & MAGA and put power above everything else.

Nonetheless, what we saw over the last week causes one to stand up and take notice about those who would use our freedoms to end them for everyone else. The adage of “One man, one vote, one time.” refers to the idea of someone or some group using the democratic norms of a nation to win an election then use that victory to eviscerate freedom. Think Hitler in Germany, Chavez in Venezuela, or Erdogan in Turkey. If we’ve learned anything since the reign of Barack Obama it’s that America is not immune to the danger of political parties weaponizing government for their own purposes. Given that the people cheering on the butchers of Hamas are a core part of the Democrat coalition, we should not be too quick to dismiss them as fringe… we could all live to regret it.  

Having Survived Barack Obama, Back to Where the Tire Hits the Road...

I started writing this blog in 2009 after having written various random pieces over the years following 9/11. I started some months after Barack Obama was sworn in as President. I thought he was a clearly a socialist, perhaps a Communist, but most certainly un-American. One of the first signs there was a problem came prior to the election when an interview he had done years prior surfaced when he bemoaned that the Constitution was a “Charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf." Building on that he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”. Finally, the promise of a black president didn’t quite play itself out the way some had expected. Some Americans felt that if we finally elected a black man to the presidency it would fundamentally demonstrate the United States was not the racist country so many had accused it of being. Not so much.

On the contrary. Many people started looking at that document Barack Obama saw as defective and started suggesting the entire country was built on a racist foundation. They began using 21st century mores to disparage the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they gave us over two centuries before. For them, an America that is not perfect is therefore evil and racist. Hence the name of this blog “Imperfect America”… drawing on the quote from Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. My first post was titled: “Racism: America’s Original Sin” essentially pointing out that the 3/5 Compromise did not at all mean what activists suggested it meant, and that in fact, had it not been for that compromise the Constitution might never have been ratified, blacks in the South might have been stuck in a country where slavery was fully accepted and a war the war that ended slavery might never have occurred. No, slaves would have been stuck in a nation that was not balanced by vociferous anti-slave voices as there were in the eventual United States. That was the start of this blog, but the areas of concern were many…

Over this past eight years I’ve pilloried Barack Obama, teacher’s unions, the BLM snake oil salesmen, Social Security Disability, Democrats, the media, big government, regulation, spineless Republicans and even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The list of enemies of freedom are legion, and most of them – but not all – live in the DC metro area and control the country like an unchecked borg "assimilating" everything in its path. Government rarely passes on an opportunity to get involved and make matters worse, regardless of the area or the Constitutionality of its actions. The lust for power from bureaucrats and politicians seems to know no bounds… and that won’t necessarily change with Donald Trump in office.

But what I think will change is the danger that the country is in. For eight years I’ve lamented the fact that Barack Obama and the progressive left were seeking to turn the nation into a third world socialist paradise such as Venezuela or Greece or Cuba. In some respects they’ve succeed, but thankfully in some they have been stymied. They will no doubt continue to mobilize their comrades in the media and academia to advocate for their march for progressive fascism, but given that there are fewer elected Democrats today than there have been in almost a century, they may have a somewhat difficult road ahead. Indeed Barack Obama’s legacy just may end up being the decimation of the Democrat party… which would be a fitting "fundamental transformation".

Donald Trump may be many things, but one thing he is not is Barack Obama. He may be something of a big government liberal, but he’s not anti-American. He may be too tied to big business to appreciate the challenges of small businesses, but he’s not an absolute enemy of free markets. Put another way, after eight years of worrying that the United States is about to careen off the path of freedom and die on the march to a socialist / fascist progressive nirvana, today I look forward to a future where freedom, liberty and limited government have an opportunity to retake their place in the pantheon of ideas on which the country thrives. That doesn’t mean that there are no threats left or that Donald Trump will be the savior we need. Trump will, no doubt do many things that cause conservatives such as myself to bang our heads against a wall, but at the end of the day, for the first time in eight years we at least know that our president’s starting point is not that America is always wrong, that America is racist, that government is good and the private sector is evil. America may not be perfect, but with someone other than a progressive Democrat in the White House we at least have an opportunity to address real issues of consequence and perhaps set the stage for a revival of prosperity.

As such, while I will continue to write pieces for this blog from time to time, it is now time for me to focus on a few other things a bit closer to home where I might be able to have a more direct impact.

Thank you for reading…

Freedom & Fortune... The Spoiled American Voters of 2016 Squander Their Inheritance

In the segment of the financial planning industry that caters to the uber wealthy, the rule of thumb is that by the 2nd generation 70% of family fortunes are lost and by the 3rd 90% is gone. Why? “Most of them have no clue as to the value of money or how to handle it.” Financial wealth is not so different than freedom and Thomas Jefferson knew it: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

The United States has thankfully lasted much longer than 3 generations, but the writing is on the wall and the election of 2016 is proof.

On one side of the debate we have Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. We have two people who have zero experience in doing anything even remotely productive in the private sector in their lives. Bernie Sanders has virtually zero experience in the private sector as most of his many short lived jobs being for public or government institutions of one sort or another. His first steady paycheck not coming until he was 39 when he was elected Mayor of Burlington, VT. He’s never started a for profit company, he’s never ran a business that had to actually make a profit and meet a payroll… He’s never had to compete to attract consumers who are willing to freely exchange their hard earned money for a free market good or service he is providing. And, if it’s possible, Hillary Clinton has even less private sector experience.

Both of the people running for the presidency on the Democrat side have spent essentially their entire lives working in the public sector. As mayor. As congressional aide. As Congressman. As First Lady. As Senator. As Secretary of State. All of these jobs are funded by the taxpayers and in both cases their passions have been fueled by the desire to use the police power of government to bend the public to their will… in the service of good of course.

Donald Trump on the other hand has never had a job in the public sector. He’s been a builder and developer his whole life. He’s also been an operator of casinos, a reality TV show star, the leader of an eponymous university and he’s lent his name and likeness to countless products. While he parlayed his father’s $1 million loan and influence with bureaucrats into becoming a very successful real estate developer and reality TV star, the rest of his repertoire has been… shall we say, less than successful. But at the end of the day he’s a billionaire and that’s largely due to his real estate success. Not surprisingly, in that – real estate – Donald Trump has been in bed with government just as much as Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. From using government tax handouts to finance buildings to using government sanctioned bankruptcy laws to threaten and blackmail erstwhile partners, Trump’s real estate success has been built on a foundation of government intervention… and everything else is built off of that. But at least he knows about meeting payroll and attracting customers who have a choice as to where to spend their money.

The fact that America has selected these three big government candidates as the only viable options for the White House tells you everything you need to know about America in 2016. Like the 2nd and 3rd generations of wealthy families, an overwhelming majority of Americans are more interested in what someone else – the government in this case – can do for them than what they can do for themselves. An overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea of what made America great in the first place. An overwhelming majority of Americans don’t understand exactly how close the nation is to killing the goose that laid our golden egg.

Half the population is prepared to vote for a socialist wannabe Hillary Clinton or the actual socialist Bernie Sanders. Their basic premise for governing is simply more regulation on businesses and individuals, more illegal immigration, higher taxes on the rich and more redistribution programs for the poor. Absolutely nothing in their positions suggests anything about helping businesses be successful. Nothing suggests freeing up capital or entrepreneurs to start the next big revolution. Nothing suggests driving down the cost of business so that companies can innovate, hire more employees and offer yet to be invented goods or services to the public. No, for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders everything is about what the government can do for you or will do to someone else.

A significant portion of the remainder of the population are prepared to vote for Donald Trump, a crony capitalist of the highest order. The problem with crony capitalism is that it’s not really capitalism at all… it’s coercion of others by the state for the benefit of friends of bureaucrats and politicians. Whether it’s Vegas’s tax breaks for the billion dollar NFL or Georgia’s tax incentives for Hollywood movie production or the Agriculture Department’s subsidies of corn or sugar or peanuts, it’s all crony capitalism. So too is it when banking or broadcasting or healthcare regulation becomes so onerous that they stifle competition and innovation because only the ultra rich friends of government can afford to pay the compliance costs.

One way or another it’s always taxpayers, small businesses and average citizens who are left holding the bag for government decisions where bureaucrats and politicians put their personal or political agendas ahead of individual freedom and free markets. Fundamentally this is because so many Americans simply don’t understand that a government can’t produce prosperity, it can only stand in its way. That a government that can take something from someone else to give to you today can just as easily take from you to give to someone else tomorrow. That a government that can write rules that favor you today can turn around and write rules that handicap you tomorrow. One need look no farther than Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, France or Greece to see what such government strangulation of free markets and free citizens does. Economies that stagger from one crisis to the next. Widespread unemployment. Flatline economic growth or outright decline. Unrest in the streets. Such things are the hallmarks of big government.

And the truth is, supporters of the three contenders for the presidential crown have no clue how prosperity ever came to the United States in the first place. American prosperity dominated the world in the 20th century like perhaps no other nation has in all of human history. While China and India may have had a larger share of world GDP two millennia before, the 20th century saw world GDP grow more, and more broadly ever before, and growth was driven by the United States. More than anything else, that American Century was characterized by freedom where government – mostly – left free markets to solve problems and innovate a wider array of new products and services than the world had had ever seen.

Those times and that leadership are long gone and they may never return. Beginning with the trickle of the New Deal and picking up steam with the Great Society programs, government regulation and redistribution policies began to strangle the American economy by the end of the 1970s. It was on life support when Ronald Reagan was able to revive it with spectacular success. Since then however it’s largely been downhill. From George H.W. Bush to George Bush government regulation continued to grow year after year. Bill Clinton took advantage of the “Peace Dividend” to grow it more in between. Under Barack Obama government regulation and strangulation of the economy has advanced at an unprecedented rate. And the economy has shown it. During Ronald Reagan’s first 7 years the GDP grew at an average of 3.4%, during Clinton’s it was 3.84%, Bush’s 2.46% and under seven years of Barack Obama the American GDP has grown at a stultifying 1.4% a year… and this is during a period when $10 trillion was added to the National Debt and the Fed pumped in an additional $2 trillion! (BEA data in Excel)

And so it goes… like the wastrel children and grandchildren who blossom under fortunes built by someone else and proceed to lose those very fortunes, Americans have lost their way with prosperity and may not find it back. National prosperity demands freedom. Prosperity for the many demands free markets. Widespread prosperity demands limited governments. But rather than look for a president who will roll back the suffocating leviathan of government and unleash free markets and entrepreneurship, Americans are instead choosing to support candidates who offer to use the power of government to tilt the scales towards them and their friends at the expense of everyone else.

The sad thing is, it’s not like that choice doesn’t have a clear outcome. It’s been tried over and over again around the world and it always fails, every time. And it will fail here too. The question is, is a fiery collapse that resembles the likes of Venezuela in our future or is it the slow calcification of France or Greece where the government slowly strangles the citizenry to the point where practically nothing works and eventually the nation begins to simply implode? In either case as the consequences of the disastrous 2016 election begin to play themselves out over the next couple of years Americans should be prepared to find themselves involved in more wars, experiencing more economic failure, buckling under more government regulation and enjoying less freedom of all types, particularly speech. Add to that more racial division, riots, crime and ultimately, much more despair and distrust of the system. Such are the conditions of revolutions, the hot ones, not the ballot box types…

Kim Kardashian, Robert F. Kennedy and why Donald Trump Scares the Hell out of the GOP

If you ask any American who Kim Kardashian is – other than perhaps one of her 34 million Twitter followers – they’ll likely tell you she is a vapid, self(ie) obsessed brunette with a propensity for public displays of nudity who leads a reality show band of dysfunctional misfits. They’d be right of course, but that wouldn’t be whole story.

That characterization would miss the fact that she is a brilliant marketer and businesswoman who has successfully harnessed rapidly evolving social media for a decade, and in turn attracted the attention of millions of young fans at a time when young people are notorious for having short attention spans. She has in turn turned those millions of fans into hundreds of millions of dollars not only for herself and her family, but for E! and a wide swath of the American publishing industry.

Good or bad, Kim Kardashian is an American cultural icon. So too is Donald Trump. When it comes to self promotion, Kim’s a piker as Trump has been at it for almost four decades – although she has ten times as many Twitter followers.

And now, in perhaps the greatest example of self promotion in human history, Donald Trump is running for President. And he just might win. In the world of political media, where seasoned politicians have spent years cultivating messages and controlling coverage, Trump is running the table. Although there are currently 17 candidates for the GOP nomination, from a media perspective there is really only one. He is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room… and as a result many seasoned and successful politicians will not survive for long.

And he’s doing it on someone else’s dime, despite the fact that he could afford to spend 10 times what everyone else in the field could, combined. Just as Kim Kardashian has leveraged the media to benefit herself, Donald trump has leveraged the media to put himself at the front of the pack. While Rick Perry, the extraordinarily successful governor of Texas is eliminating the paychecks of his staff, Trump has spent nary a dime advertising his campaign. Just as you may not like the way Kardashian gets coverage, she’s very good at it… and so is Trump. It’s neither the fault of Kardashian or Trump that America is celebrity obsessed. They simply take advantage of it.

But to write Trump off as a mere celebrity would be a mistake. He’s that, but much more. He is a consummate operator. Although he was born with a quarter billion dollar silver spoon in his mouth, to his credit he has improved on what he was born with twenty fold. Certainly there have been very public stumbles along the way, but each time he has recovered, spectacularly.

For those gnashing their teeth as to how it’s possible that a celebrity, with what might charitably called shaky conservative principals, could be leading the GOP field, they’re missing the forest for the trees. Donald Trump is not leading the field just because he’s a celebrity. He’s not leading the field because he said Mexico is operating a modern day Mariel boatlift and he’s going to build a wall to stop it. He’s not leading because he said something rude about Megyn Kelly. While those all have contributed, he’s leading because Americans think he can and will get something done… particularly building the wall.

In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House Arthur M. Schlesinger recounts a story about the president’s brother Robert F. Kennedy… if I remember it correctly! As Attorney General RFK noticed a sign on the GW Parkway indicating the exit for CIA headquarters. He called someone in charge to get the sign removed. Months later the sign was still there. He called again. Months later the wheels of bureaucracy had still not turned and the sign was still there. Finally Kennedy called the Parkway gardener and told him to take it down personally… and it was gone.

Americans see that nothing works in Washington. America has become that sign. Cameras catch thousands of illegals crossing into the country every single day for decades and yet Washington can do nothing. Regardless of how much money is spent on welfare it keeps growing. The tax code is so complex that the people who wrote it don’t even understand it. Government has become V’Ger from the first Star Trek movie; it’s taken on a life of its own, with no master.

Rightly or wrongly, Americans think that Trump can be government’s master. He may not say the right things, he may be a crony capitalist of the highest order, he may have an ego the size of the Empire State Building… but he gets things done. America sees itself as the Wolman Rink of the world, and the Washington establishment is the Koch administration.

Sadly, the GOP establishment and the media don’t get that. In what is perhaps the most inane interview in political history, Bradley Blakeman, a former Bush administration official complained that Trump doesn’t have the infrastructure, the boots on the ground that campaigns usually have. He decries the fact that Trump has not announced who his advisors are, hasn’t spent any money on a campaign and doesn’t have what’s necessary to get voters out to the primaries. Americans don’t care if Trump spends a dollar on his campaign. They don’t care that he doesn’t have an army of advisors telling him the right thing to say, the name of the president of Burundi or what the new EPA regulations stipulate about CO2 emissions. Americans don’t want someone who can ace a civics test. They want someone who can get things done. Trump does that.

Blakeman, like the GOP establishment, misses the fundamental point. The point of campaigns is to get voters excited and get them to vote, not to build infrastructure or hire campaign strategists. The establishment fears Trump because he can win without them. He doesn’t need them or their cabal to succeed. Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump can and does take his case directly to the American people. And if a president doesn't need the establishment... their power is gone… and with it their privilege. Then they will have to figure out how to compete in the real world, where effort and results drive success, something they are not particularly accustomed to doing.

Of course, Reagan had a long track record of success in government experience before he entered the White House. Trump does not. For six years we’ve lived with the consequences of a president who has no executive experience in government. It’s been a disaster. But it’s been a disaster not because Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing, but rather because Barack Obama is an anti-American anti-free market narcissist with dictatorial proclivities. Donald Trump too is a narcissist and may have dictatorial proclivities and isn't exactly Adam Smith... but he’s nothing if not rabidly pro-American.

Actual voting is still months away and by January Trump may have faded from view like most of the males who enter the Kardashian universe. But until then, Donald Trump is giving Americans something they crave, someone who promises to go to Washington and change the rules, break the bureaucracy and get something done. In the process he’s doing the nation a great service that hopefully will outlive his campaign… reminding Americans that that the business of Washington isn’t to perpetuate its own power, but rather to serve at the behest of the people.

Barack Obama will go down in history as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln...

The eight year reign of Barack Obama will go down as the most important in American history since Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln led the United States at the single most important decision point in its history. At stake was no less than the question of whether the country would continue as a single nation or would it split in two as Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. Would there be a largely agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States of America bordering on a largely industrial and free United States of America or would a single, free and economically mixed United States emerge? At no point in the subsequent century and a half did the United States ever face a more foundational question.

Six years into Barack Obama’s presidency - and looking with much trepidation at the “last” two - one can’t help but wonder what kind of a nation will emerge on the other side. “History” said Winston Churchill, “is written by the victors” and like it or not, Barack Obama is the victor. Not sure about that? Take a look at the latest capitulation by his supposed opposition, Boehner and McConnell, the GOP leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively. In what is only the most recent example of obsequiousness they have vociferously attacked their own base in order to allow Obama to continue with his patently unconstitutional amnesty.

And what is it that Barack Obama has done to merit such distinction? He has opened the Pandora’s Box of unprecedented, omnipresent, government intervention. And like the evils escaping from Pandora’s Box, once government intervention is put in place you can’t get rid of it. With Obamacare he decreed that the government can tell Americans what they must buy, for their own good. With his NLRB appointees and the nationalization of General Motors he has eviscerated private property rights. With his using the IRS to muzzle opposition and his FCC taking over the Internet, he has taken a sledgehammer to concept of free speech and free markets.

In addition, his regulatory bonanza and welfare policies have cut the legs out from the basic premise of hard work being the key to success in America. By making entrepreneurship and job creation more difficult and by providing a seemingly endless array of benefits, he has driven the labor participation rate down to levels not seen in four decades.

And of course it’s not just the laws. He has set black against white as he constantly invokes racism in places where it simply doesn’t apply. What’s more, he has essentially told black Americans, those who are at most risk of being victims of crime, that the police are their enemies. He has set the poor and middle class against the rich as he assails the successful as robber barons who earned their success on the backs of others.

The country was far from perfect when Barack Obama took office and you can make the argument that it was already heading in a troubling direction when he came along. But the difference is, unlike Abraham Lincoln, who sought to save the Union, Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform it. And that he has… from a place where individual initiative was the key to overcoming challenges, achieving success and finding happiness to a place where the first instinct of many is to look for someone to blame for their lack of success or happiness, or to try and figure out which arm of government to look to provide them.

Combine that entitlement / victim mentality with a legion of regulatory diktats and unconstitutional decrees – that no one in power seems willing to fight – and you have a recipe for a banana republic where power is held by whoever bribes the largest number of people and creates scapegoats to fuel populist furor. And so it goes as a nation of giants transforms into a nation of beggars and a government limited by the Constitution becomes a one limited only by a president’s appetite.

No president in 150 years has changed America more. Not Roosevelt, not Kennedy, not FDR not Reagan. Such is the transformation Barack Obama promised and delivered. Most Americans won’t view it as success, but the left does. Therefore, if history is indeed written by the victor – or in this case by his lefty sycophants in the media – Barack Obama will go down as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln. And at this point it might be useful to think of something Churchill’s enemy, Adolph Hitler, said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

From Silicon Valley with Love... and Hope for Free Markets

I’ve just returned home to Atlanta from spending a week in Silicon Valley at a program called Founder Institute. Basically FI is a bootcamp for founders of mostly tech startups. We were a pretty diverse group of companies. One wants to put servers in space, one wants to help golfers establish handicaps and another seeks to help equipment rental companies join the mobile revolution. Some had raised $3 million in funding, others were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue while the majority were like me and running on past savings or paychecks. We were also a pretty diverse group of people with participants coming from around the world. In addition from the US, attendees came from Croatia, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Columbia, Vietnam and Puerto Rico. Finally, we were of a variety of ages as well, ranging from early 20’s to mid 50’s... weighing more heavily to the latter.

My goal in going out was to get a better insight into what makes for a successful startup. I’ve been working on one startup or another for 15 years, but I’ve yet to achieve what I consider a really successful exit. In addition, I was looking for angel investors to fund my latest startup, BrandScanned, a mobile rewards app for consumers, based on brands. (Think about how much of a pain in the butt it is to collect soup labels or boxtops for the various programs that provide resources to schools. Wouldn’t it be easier if they just put a unique code on the inside of each package that you could scan with your phone and the school automatically gets the points? Or how about those contests Kelloggs runs for movie tickets or Frito Lay runs for an Xbox where you have to register on their websites and type in some ungodly long number that’s hidden inside the package. Same deal… wouldn’t it be easier to just scan the codes with your phone? I think so, which is why I founded BrandScanned.)
While I didn’t come away with an investment, I came away with some great insights. The first is something I’d been told before but never really got. Success in Silicon Valley – at least as it relates to raising angel and venture capital – is very much driven by relationships. It’s your network… investors want to get to know you… want to trust you… know that you’re resilient, creative and of course, smart. And it’s more than just a cup of coffee… although that’s where it often starts. Investors usually want to know that they are not alone and that you’ve got other investors in your network. And the key to your network is, unsurprisingly… you! As such, investors are often open to making introductions, but you’ve got to sell yourself because if you’re going to create a spectacular startup, if you’re going to make them lots of money, you’re likely going to need a lot of help in the form of employees, partners and other investors… and it’s up to you to engage and inspire them.

Another of the insights I came away with was that if you fail in Silicon Valley, that doesn’t mean you’re sunk. On the contrary. It appears to be the case that if you’ve failed, that’s almost a badge to be worn as you storm into your next endeavor having learned some lessons from your previous bruising. For every Facebook that pretty much gets it right from the beginning are dozens more like Twitter that took a circuitous route to success through failure. Failure is the fertilizer that nourishes and spurs creativity, which in can and often does blossom into success.

Finally, in Silicon Valley they love to think big. Big success followed by big exits are what investors live for. If you’re interested in starting a restaurant or building a business that will do a couple million dollars a year in revenue, good luck, but Silicon Valley investors are not likely going to help you do so… although they might become customers. They want businesses that have the potential to do $50 or $500 million a year in revenue so they can have exits that number in the eight or nine or ten figures. Since investors lose money on 9 out of 10 investments they make, they need to be able to earn enough back from one big exit to cover the cost of investing in the other nine and still make a profit. So don’t expect venture capitalists to give you the money to open pool installation business…

At the end of the day, my trip to Silicon Valley and participation in the Founder Institute program made for a great experience. But this wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t tie that experience into the larger picture.

At a time when the government seems to be doing everything it can to undermine free markets, private property and capitalism in general, it’s good to know that the spark of enterprise still exists. That people feel like they can build something. That investors and entrepreneurs are foolhardy enough to think they can change the world. And willing to take a leap of faith to do so. And not only in the United States, which used to be a bastion of freedom, but in places where you might not expect it, like Vietnam, Croatia and Columbia. The question is however, once the long national nightmare of Barack Obama and his Democrat cleptocracy are finally on the ash-bin of history, can the spark of possibilities that still exists in Silicon Valley find its way back to places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and the rest of California, where much of the spirit of opportunity and the American Dream seem to have been replaced by a populist economic fascism seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States”? Sadly, that the cancer of progressivism seems to have infected much of the country despite the fact that the American convergence of free markets and limited government have driven a greater advance in prosperity around the world any system in history. Nonetheless, perhaps the Silicon Valley mindset of unabashed opportunity is the canary in the coal mine that suggests the American Dream may still be alive, despite even the tech crowd’s distinctly liberal, big government leanings. Only time will tell.

Clarity of Government Purpose - Potentially the Silver Lining Behind of the Ebola Cloud

When the Ebola scare is done the damage it will have done is likely to be far more reaching than just the individual victims themselves. Of all of the things the government is supposed to do, protecting its citizens is likely very close to the top in most people’s minds.

Indeed, government is supposed to do for citizens that which they cannot or choose not to do for themselves – limited of course to those things it has been constitutionally empowered to do. National defense being the prime example. Others include the court system, international treaties, tax policies, etc. Americans have not traditionally – at least for the country’s first 150 years – looked to government to become the provider of all things or the solver of all problems.

Today, for a large part of the population that is no longer true. Whenever something bad happens, they look for government to fix it. A sluggish economy, high unemployment, a failed automobile manufacturer, you’ve lost your job, you can’t get insurance, you can’t support your kids or you want to build a new stadium, look to government for a solution. Or, competitors are eating away at your natural monopoly, your kid can’t read, you think the CEO makes too much money, you haven’t paid your water bill in months and the water company has turned off your service… look to the government for a solution. Usually these solutions come about in the form or a check or government using its police power to force other people to do your bidding.

The result of government spread so wide, doing so many things, having its tentacles in virtually every aspect of American life is that not only does it do a bad job at practically everything, it often fails spectacularly at those limited things it’s supposed to be doing in the first place.

The Ebola situation is the perfect example, writ large. Ebola is a disease in that until recently was largely confined to Africa. While Ebola is not the continent’s largest killer, what makes it somewhat unique in that it kills 70% or more of the people who catch it, usually within a few weeks. And, we don’t really know how it’s transmitted, but we know that coming into contact with a carrier – even after they are dead – or their body fluids can transmit it. Can it be transmitted by mosquitoes? We’re told no, but viruses mutate. Can it be become airborne – thorough say, sneezing? The goalposts seem to be moving. Can it be transmitted by touching objects a carrier has touched? Don’t know for sure.

Ebola has, by everyone’s measure, the potential to become a true epidemic. As such, Ebola might be one of those things that most Americans agree is rightly a government interest, something the government should be focusing on and doing what it can to inform and protect citizens.

Unfortunately, thus far the government’s action has been an abysmal failure, beginning with Barack Obama’s inexplicable decision against imposing a travel ban from the nations where Ebola is raging, and his September 16th assurance that the chances of Ebola reaching American shores were “extremely low”. Four days later US patient zero, Thomas Eric Duncan, landed in Dallas from Liberia.

A week later Duncan was in a Dallas Hospital with Ebola. Since then, two nurses who treated Duncan have come down with the disease. When the first nurse, Nina Pham, came down with Ebola, CDC director Tom Frieden suggested it was her failure to follow protocol that caused her contraction. Later it turned out that Ms. Pham had followed all protocols from the CDC, the same agency that in August said: U.S. hospitals can safely manage patients with Ebola disease.

A month in, confusion reigns. The CDC goes from reassuring the public that Ebola requires contact with a victim and is not a respiratory ailment spread like the flu, to later warning that just standing within three feet of an infected person poses a risk. At the same time news emerges that Amber Vinson, the second nurse to treat Duncan, was told she was OK to fly by the CDC after calling to report her possible symptoms. Later CDC Director Tom Frieden stated that she should not have flown.

While all of this chaos is going on, politics rears its head when the administration and Democrats suggest the GOP is to blame for having called for budget cuts. Then it emerges that not only did the GOP give both the CDC and NIH more money than requested by the president, but that the agencies had wasted tens or hundreds of millions of dollars studying things like the propensity of lesbians to be fat, the impact of TVs and gas generators on a village in Vietnam, and what bus riders thought of HIV videos. Indeed, over the course of 5 years the CDC spent more than $2.6 billion on HIV and AIDS grants that the agency itself admitted: “have no objectives” or were otherwise useless.

What the Ebola crisis is putting on full display for the American people is the malfeasance and ineptness of a government that takes $3 trillion of their money each year yet can’t seem to get the basic things right. One doesn’t need a PhD in biology to understand that making it more difficult to travel to the US from a country infected with this virus is a good thing. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist that recognize that millions allocated for health research shouldn’t be wasted replacing perfectly good furniture or buildings. It doesn’t take a 140 IQ to understand that a person recently exposed to a deadly virus shouldn’t be given the OK to fly on a commercial jet. But in modern day America, that’s how government operates – or as in the case of a travel ban… doesn’t.

If the government is making horrendously bad decisions, providing conflicting and inaccurate information and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in an area that literally involves life and death, and one that is playing out on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, just imagine how badly their mismanaging everything else they are doing from the mundane to the obscure, most of which is played out behind closed doors with the help of cronies and lobbyists and political financiers. Maybe the silver lining of the Ebola cloud will be the long overdue recognition by a majority of Americans that not only is government not the solution for everything that might go wrong, but maybe it’s meddling failures are behind many of things that go wrong in the first place.

Random Observations on Government

Ronald Reagan was the most conservative president in the last 75 years. Despite interest rates of 20% when he took office, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 17.7%. Barack Obama is the most progressive president in American history. Despite interest rates close to zero throughout his terms, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 5.8%... and it's getting worse, shrinking at an annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014!

At the very moment in time when crime in the United States is at record lows, local police departments are morphing into paramilitary armies. How many times have you heard of someone buying a brand new toy and letting it sit in the closet? Probably not that often…

Barack Obama’s never been a big fan of American Exceptionalism or hegemony, despite the fact that American leadership has ushered two generations of relative peace after two world wars in the first 40 years of the 20th century. He is however a big fan of international consensus and cooperation. The UN is a good example of just such cooperation. They are the ones who brought us a UN Human Rights Council featuring such freedom loving states as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba. Barack Obama likes that non-US centric model so much that he has decided the United States will relinquish its management of the Internet traffic cop organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). So now such liberty stalwarts as China, Venezuela and Iran will have just as much to say about the freedom of the Internet as the United States does. That should work out well.

Despite mounting proof that NOAA and other organizations manipulated data to further the myth of global warming… despite record cold temperatures and ice packs in the Great Lakes, Barack Obama believes “Climate Change” (AKA “Global Warming”) is as great a threat to national security as is terrorism.

Why is it that over the last 5 years GDP has grown by 6% yet the stock market is up by over 120%. Could it have anything to do with Big Government?

There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. Why are 7 of the 10 richest located adjacent to Washington, DC? No, that couldn’t have anything to do with Big Government.

The bad news: In 2014 there are 127,000 fewer native born Americans working than there were in 2000, despite that group growing by 17 million people. The good news: Since 2000 there have been approximately 5.7 million jobs created in the United States. The worse news: According to the Center for Immigration Studies, all of that 5.7 million net job growth has gone to immigrants – legal and illegal – leaving a total of 58 million working age native born Americans without work.

After years of practically non existent border enforcement, and his administration signaling to millions of poor that if they can just get to the United States they just might be able to stay, Barack Obama blames Republicans for the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who are flooding across America’s southern border. Constitution be damned, he’s going to use executive action to solve America’s immigration problem. Regardless of the rhetoric, the outcome of Obama’s unilateral action will likely be amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who will soon thereafter be converted into Democrat voters.

Despite crystal clear evidence that ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline… Despite the fact that prices for everything from beef to plastic and everything in between are rising because so much farmland is dedicated to ethanol corn production… Despite the fact that ethanol significantly raises the price of gasoline… Congress just passed another Farm Bill that will provide tens of billions of dollars to maintain the ethanol cabal.

Congress’s approval ratings are at historic lows, in the single digits, yet somehow American voters regularly return over of 90% of their Congressmen and Senators to Washington.

Despite the fantasy that progressive policies are good for the poor, in the end they are bad for everyone, except those in government and the friends of those in government. If you’re riding the Wall Street gravy train then you love big government. If you’re a big business who uses government to limit competition and pad your bottom line, you love big government. If you’re a government employee with practically lifetime employment, 50% higher salaries than your private sector counterparts and the power of life or death over businesses, you love big government.

If however you are an entrepreneur seeking to start a business and create jobs, you are oppressed by big government. If however you are an unskilled youth seeking to get your first job, your opportunities are limited by big government. If however you a simple wage earner who wonders where the rest of your check went, big government exploits you.

None of this is rocket science, nor is there anything here particularly surprising. Nonetheless, Americans continue to vote for big government progressives in both parties and wonder why things never seem to get any better. The question is not whether this unsustainable and suffocating government system will end, but when. The more important question is, will the entity we know as the United States survive intact or will it devolve into anarchy and chaos and become just another ghost of a failed state on history’s chronicle of mankind’s evolution? If people with no sense of liberty, no appreciation for small government and no allegiance to the the Constitution keep getting elected, the outlook doesn't look good.

War and Liberty - The Enemy Within

Today, when people talk about winning World War II, they often talk about freedom defeating tyranny. That is mostly true as the United States, the UK, Canada and Australia were indeed democracies. But it was not tyranny we went to war against. Indeed one of the powers that helped defeat Hitler was itself a dictatorship that only declared war on Hitler after having been invaded.

Adolph Hitler didn’t suddenly become a dictator in 1939 or even 1941. He had been a dictator for years before war broke out. While he didn’t start out as such, soon after getting power legitimately in January of 1933, he became one. Mussolini similarly became dictator three years after coming to power legally in 1922. At the same time, in Japan Emperors had ruled without opposition for more than two generations. Dictatorship, as unseemly as it might be, is rarely a reason to go to war – however it can be a great motivator once war is declared.

We also hear people talk about WW II as a fight against evil. Again, while true, we did not go to war against evil. The Nazi’s came to power on a platform imbued with anti-Semitism and for most of the 30’s they were engaged in marginalizing, quarantining and murdering Jews and others who didn’t fit the profile of their superior Aryan “race”. In Asia the Japanese had been massacring Chinese for years, and in one of the most horrific events in modern history, they raped, mutilated and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children in Nanking in 1937.

At the end of the day it was not tyranny that America went to war against, although our enemies certainly were tyrants. It was not evil America went to war against, although our enemies were certainly evil. No, it was aggression that America went to war against. Specifically, it was aggression directed towards us and secondarily against our allies. The United States did not engage in WW II until the Japanese attacked our forces at Pearl Harbor in 1941 – although the United States had been providing aid to the British and the Chinese for some time. And while Congress declared war on Japan the next day, it did not do so against Germany until after they had declared it on us.

Why does any of this matter? Because freedom matters. Because understanding that freedom’s not just preserved simply by defeating an enemy on the battlefield matters. While the Axis was indeed a threat to American liberty, German and Japanese atrocities made it easy to rally support against them. Rallying support for freedom against an enemy is much easier if that enemy is a viscous, ruthless killing machine. It’s far more difficult if the enemy of freedom is someone who’s ostensibly trying to help.

And that’s what makes 2014 different from 1941, or 1944 when D Day was launched 70 years ago this past Friday. During WW II the enemies of freedom were tyrants doing despicable, abhorrent things, and doing them largely over there. Eventually they targeted the United States and we engaged. Today, while there are enemies of freedom who do despicable, horrific things largely over there, the biggest enemies of freedom are over here and appear far less menacing. Indeed they couch their tyranny in the paternal pleas for “fairness” or equity or protecting the children. It’s hard to raise an army people who claim to be trying to help. But make no mistake, they are just as dangerous in the long run. This battle will not be fought with guns and bombs and the enemies of freedom aren't nearly as easy to identify as those flying the swastika or Rising Sun flags.

For Barack Obama and the rest of the big government cabal – which includes many Republicans – nothing less than American freedom is the enemy:

• Economic freedom is hard to maintain when they have regulated the American economy into virtual stagnation. Insufficient jobs and more government largesse leads to more people falling out of the workforce and becoming wards of the state. Today the Labor Force Participation Rate is at its lowest in almost 40 Years and fully half of Americans live in a home that receives government benefits.

• Intellectual freedom is difficult to maintain when government is snooping on your every move and listening to virtually every word you say. 

• Political freedom is hard to maintain when the government uses its police power to harass its enemies and allows unfettered entrance to those who do not share our values.

• Liberty itself becomes somewhat unrecognizable when virtually every element of your daily life is regulated by nameless faceless bureaucrats in Washington and beyond. They may not yet tell you when to get up, when to go to the bathroom and when to go to bed, but it’s only a matter of time as virtually every single thing you interact with every day is regulated. Who must live in your neighborhood. The type of plastic your alarm clock is made of. The amount of sugar in your cereal. The amount of water your toilet flushes. What kind of gas your car must use. The kind of car seat you must have for your kid. What you can give that kid for lunch. What they must learn in school. What your boss must pay you. What constitutes overtime. How many minorities your bank must lend to. Who can contribute how much to political campaigns. What people can say on the radio or TV. What the cable companies can charge you.  What information Google can collect. What a company can say on the label of a can of corn. The kind of refrigerant used in your refrigerator. The kind of light bulbs in your night stand. Not to mention the confiscatory tax rates and a tax code that even its enforcers can’t understand. There’s virtually nothing you do in any given day that does not require Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval at some point along the way.

In substituting for Rush Limbaugh last week Mark Belling wondered if the United States today could rally a force to defeat… well, anything. That’s a good question because it appears to be the case that the nation that rallied itself to defeat the greatest menace in human history is unable to recognize the threat to liberty right in its midst. Seventy five years ago the German and the Japanese conduct made them an easy target against whom to focus American attention and energy. Today, after a half century of the cancer of big government liberalism crippling American prosperity and eviscerating American freedom, perhaps it will be its flowering in the person of Barack Obama that will finally bring about its downfall. The soft tyranny of liberalism may not be as easy to recognize as the tyranny practiced by our enemies in WW II, but it is no less important to defeat. I hope Mark Belling will soon find himself pleasantly surprised.

1776 & 2014 - Complacency and Revolution

How long has it been since you thought about the American Revolution? In 2014 not that many of us spend our time thinking about the catalysts that caused that revolution over 200 years ago. Who has the time? Between jobs, families, bills, a bit of TV and some recreation and socializing, there are only so many hours in the day. That’s the beauty of things being settled… you can get on with other things. If we had to spend our days thinking about what kind of government we wanted, how would we get anything else done? It would be impossible. Think about election season every 4 years. From July through November we can’t escape it: campaign advertisements on TV and radio, signs on the side of the street, wall to wall press coverage and endless water cooler chatter. All that and we have a government that’ been largely settled for 150 years.

Sometimes however it makes sense to go back and look at why things happen. In the case of American independence and the Revolutionary War, it was not any single event that caused the war to begin, rather it was a series of things that took place over years.

Among these things were well known events such as the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts and the conflict at Lexington & Concord. Then there were other lesser know but equally important events such as The Quartering Acts of 1765 and The Declaratory Act. In all the Declaration of Independence lists 27 grievances against the King. Among them are:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

Importantly, the most significant lines in the Declaration of Independence are not among those 27, but rather in the 2nd paragraph.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
… all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Americans today are acting as Jefferson suggested most people do… they are suffering evils rather than throwing off the yoke of a despotic government. Jefferson suggests however that when the abuses become too much, the people will indeed revolt. So the questions in 2014 are two: Are close to that point of abuse that sparks a revolt, and is it too late to turn the tables on the usurpers?

On the first question, the answer is a resounding yes. While 2014 may not quite yet be George Orwell’s 1984 with an all knowing all seeing – and listening – all powerful government… We’re close. We have a government that uses the police power of the taxing authority to silence its critics. We have a government that has decided that children can be punished for their parent’s mistakes, even if it was the government who made it. We have a government that spies on its citizens with impunity. We have heavily militarized local police forces across the country and every federal agency seems to come with its own SWAT team, regardless of its mission. We have an executive branch that brazenly ignores the clear language of the Constitution. And then of course we have the shrinking pool of citizens who are forced to pay stifling taxes in order to support a growing horde of those suckling at the government teat.

On the second question, is it too late, the answer is less clear. Human nature suggests that at some point those who shoulder the burden of financing the government’s largesse will revolt. Today we don’t see taxpayers manning the barricades and storming America’s Bastilles so we clearly have some time to reverse course and strip the usurpers of their power.

Settled can be good, but as Jefferson notes, it can turn to complacency. And complacency can lead to rot. Whether it’s the five year reign of Usurper in Chief Barack Obama or the last 40 years of creeping comforts and expanding government, Americans have assumed that we’ll get through everything just because politicians tell us we will. That’s not how things work. Freedom and prosperity demand vigilance. Neither can survive where a government decides that they are its to withhold or grant. In 1776 fifty six men risked their lives and decided that they could no longer abide the complacency of accepting tyranny. And they started a revolution. How many Americans will come to the same conclusion in 2014 and risk far less when they turn off the television and enlist as foot soldiers in an electoral revolution in 2016? Only time will tell.

A Lack of Identity politics...Exactly why the GOP can't seem to attract minorities and immigrants...

The GOP establishment has spent a great deal of effort over the last decade pushing for amnesty under the guise of “comprehensive immigration reform”. This is of course because they are scared of the fact that minorities are going to become a majority in the US over the next 40 years and they don’t want to be left out in the cold. They have what I call a “Fear of a Black Planet… or at least of a minority majority country…”. And according to some numbers cited recently by Phyllis Schlafly, they have good reason to fear.

Of course the establishments’ solution to the problem is to acquiesce to the demands of the left and essentially give amnesty to the 20 million people who came here illegally. Honestly though… who can blame Boehner, McConnell and their friends? It’s hard to compete with “No human is illegal” signs and heartbreaking stories of kids brought to America at the age of 5 and at 25 they have no legal status. They don’t want to be seen as “heartless” or get tagged as racists as the press is wont to label them, so they simply give in and make the same mistake Ronald Reagan did in 1986.

Frankly, the immigration debate is the GOP’s problem in a nutshell… The GOP has a communication problem - and an identity problem too. They have a hard time distilling their messages down to a bumper sticker. Every day they face a plethora of bumper sticker issues which they typically fail to properly address. Calls for an increase in the minimum wage are heralded by stickers proclaiming “A living wage is a moral value”. Each new school year is inaugurated with teachers striking in one city or another carrying signs broadcasting the false equivalency of opposition to education spending increases with a hatred of children. Then there are the Facebook shares of posters with quips like “Keep your laws off my body” or “Stop the War on Women”.

It’s often difficult to respond to these issues (and many more) because the rebuttals to these debates are typically too complex to fit on a bumper sticker or in a network sound bite. The GOP’s feckless attempts at responding to these issues often result in them being involved in a political version of a school yard skirmish where the response is “No I’m not!” rather than explaining a nuanced opposition to the particular issue at hand.

As an example, the argument against increasing the minimum wage is based on an understanding that doing so hurts far more people than it helps. This is particularly true in the case of teens and younger workers and those with little experience or skills. In order to hire an employee at a minimum wage of $10, an employee must provide an employer with work that brings at least $10 in value to the company. If they can’t the owner is not running a business but a charity. This is exactly why virtually every time the minimum wage is increased, unemployment among the young and unskilled (particularly minorities) increases. At the same time doing so always increases the potential for outsourcing and mechanization and we’re beginning to see that everywhere, even in the burger industry.

That kind of a rebuttal simply can’t be distilled down into a pithy sentence or sound bite. The result is that in the face of such a challenge, the GOP establishment more often than not simply chooses to go along to get along. The GOP is so worried about being painted as racists or as the party that hates the poor that they forget to talk about what they actually supposed to stand for. They get caught up in defending themselves against being women haters or immigrant haters that they forget to stand up for individual freedom or the rule of law.

The GOP’s problem isn’t immigrants don’t like what they are saying… which is true, the GOP’s problem is that they are saying the wrong things.  And this is where the identity problem comes in.  With “Compassionate Conservatism” and “comprehensive immigration reform” the GOP is simply remaking itself into the Democrat Lite party. It’s no wonder that immigrants and minorities choose not to support them. Who wants generic crackers or cola when they can have Ritz or Coke instead?

As Schlafly points out, immigrants and minorities don’t support the GOP on a range of issues from small government to gun rights and others in between. But it’s not because there’s something wrong in their DNA. It’s because there’s something wrong with the GOP. On a wide range of issues from immigration to education to government spending, the GOP has simply lost their identity and have become a party that stands for nothing extraordinary and has no message. In the last two presidential elections Americans actually chose a socialist over the milquetoast offerings of the GOP. On the biggest stage in the world in a bitter fight for the most powerful position on the planet the GOP was unable to convince 50% of Americans not to vote for the socialist! It’s not because the minorities and immigrants voted for the socialist… which they did. It’s because the GOP failed to give Americans of all stripes a reason to vote for them. When your bumper sticker could essentially say “Not quite as socialist as the other guy” it should come as no surprise that people don’t rally to your cause.

The lesson for the GOP is not how to play a better game of bumper sticker politics, but rather to begin articulating fundamental ideas that will inspire people to join their crusade. Ronald Reagan promised to eliminate the Departments of Energy and Education. Unfortunately he failed to do so, but everyone knew where he stood on big government. Contrast that with the GOP of 2014, which has just signed off on a $1 trillion farm bill that sends 80% of the dollars to food stamps, subsidizes Big Agriculture and taxes such things as home heating oil and Christmas trees. Does that make you think of a party wedded to the idea of limited government, market economics and low taxes? Probably not. And the GOP is confused why they can’t attract minorities and immigrants? Maybe they need to stop worrying about the demographic makeup of the voters and start looking in the mirror for their identity.

The Vindication of Ted Cruz

Pundits and journalists across the country have suggested that Ted Cruz and friends accomplished nothing with the government shutdown. I’d beg to differ. Indeed, I’d suggest just the opposite. The best parallel I can draw is with Ronald Reagan in 1976 when he angered the GOP establishment by challenging Gerald Ford for the party’s nomination before he went down to defeat at the hands of a peanut farmer from Georgia. Reagan however had made his mark. He was for smaller government and everyone knew it. As a consequence, four years later he won a resounding victory on the strength of the army of supporters he inspired in 1976.

In the same way, Ted Cruz hates Obamacare. He recognizes that Obamacare is an anvil around the neck of American freedom and prosperity. What is most important about his “filibuster” and the shutdown is that he has left no doubt in the minds of Americans exactly where he stands. Not only about where he stands, but also about his willingness to suffer the slings and arrows from both the opposition and those within his own party in order to make a clear statement. And that statement is that big government in general and Obamacare in particular are bad for America.

Many GOP establishment types pilloried Cruz for the shutdown, saying that had it not been for the shutdown he championed, the news from October 1st would have been the failure of Obamacare itself. They are simply wrong. Had the shutdown gone on longer two things would have occurred.

The first is the most telling: Given enough time it would have become clear to more and more Americans that the “shutdown” of the federal government would not bring about the end of the world, despite the warnings from the big government types in both parties. This was the real reason that the media and the Washington establishment focused on the shutdown. By the shutdown demonstrating the irrelevancy of Washington to the lives of so many Americans, they feared that the voting public might just decide that they didn’t really need to be taxed to the hilt and mortgaged beyond their lifetimes to pay for things that didn’t really matter. As such, the war on Ted Cruz and the Tea Party via the shutdown had to be job number one, which it was. The reality of this fact can be seen in the results of a Washington Post / ABC poll. Despite weeks of shrill coverage and apocalyptic predictions, once the shutdown was over a full 78% of Americans reported that they weren’t inconvenienced by the shutdown at all and another 11% felt only minor inconveniences. When 89% of the population barely notices that you’re not showing up for work it’s time to be concerned about your job. The establishment was… and it should be.

The second thing that would have occurred had the shutdown continued is the thing that is happening right now. Americans would have become well aware of the train wreck that is Obamacare because it’s so catastrophic a failure that it would have been impossible to miss. The failures of the website are legion, as are the basic elements of Obamacare itself. As more and more people were feeling the punch – i.e. losing their current health insurance, seeing premiums skyrocket and watching their choices disappear – the reality of the actual damage caused by Obamacare would have become more than the sycophant media cold hide. It’s one thing to read about our Spoiled Child in Chief keeping veterans from visiting monuments to their fallen brethren, but it’s another thing altogether to get a notice from your insurance company telling you you’ve lost your coverage or that your premiums have doubled and your deductible has tripled. Those are the kinds of things people notice regardless of what is going on in Washington.

Which brings us back to Ted Cruz and his alleged tilting at windmills. It turns out that the thing he was warning us about was even worse than even he knew. That said however, in reality Obamacare is just the most obvious example of the thing that Ted Cruz stands against, which is dysfunctional, failed and crippling big government. Listen to his sequester speech, or most speeches that he gives. The enemy is not government per se, but rather a government that undermines on the freedom and rights of American citizens. The enemy is a government that destroys jobs and impedes prosperity. The enemy is a government that listens to Washington lobbyists and bureaucrats while ignoring the voices of the people. The enemy is an unaccountable government that sees no limits to its power, its reach or its checkbook, whether there is money to cover the checks or not.

Ted Cruz may have lost in the Senate and on the shutdown, but those are merely the first battles in the war that will be waged for the heart and soul of America over the next four years. What kind of America will emerge from that war of ideas we will have to wait to see, but Ted Cruz has already signaled a clarity of vision, a willingness to lead, and a capacity to inspire that suggests conservatives may finally have a champion who is prepared to take a stand and give the country a real choice for the first time in a generation. That is a victory not only for conservatives, but for Americans in general because as Ronald Reagan demonstrated, one man with a clear vision and message of freedom can move save a nation on the brink of failure and put it back on the path to prosperity.