From the late 1990s on, I have been writing this blog. Sometime soon after 2001, when Typepad first started, I signed up for this blog (that is why the URL has my name in it) and began using the phrase Pro Commerce. From the first the title had the same subhead it has today. This material about commerce was derived from my earlier 1997 book Gods of Commerce and expanded in my 2004 book Commerce.
At the time I started using ‘Pro Commerce’ I notified Google that I wanted to be alerted to all uses of the term ‘pro commerce’ which I recognized as a new human concept, not hitherto in use. In the early 2000’s I got several Google alert messages but they were always for a French use of ‘pro-commerce’ which has a different meaning than the meaning in English. Those notifications stopped coming to me. Then surprise, a few weeks ago I got one.
A gentleman named J.G. Collins used the term in an article he wrote in the American Thinker. We're talking roughly 14 years since I first used the term. Collins uses ' pro commerce' in contradistinction to 'pro business' as it is currently used by the Republican party. He argues that ‘pro business’ as a political theme is too plutocratic while ‘pro commerce’ is inclusive of the middle-class and blue-collar workers.
Collins is the first person who genuinely introduce my idea into our society and I'm grateful.
I had no idea how long it would take for this concept to make its way into the American mind.
Of course this is only the beginning. Pro commerce, when fully developed, is a state of mind. As I explain in future blogs it is situated at the highest level of the mind the level of: comprehensive thought.
I have been patient in the past with my ideas. I first enunciated the idea of random legislature in a car trip to San Francisco from a weekend spa, late in 1974. By 1977 it was an article and by 1984 it was a book. By 1996 it was taught in a course in political science at several universities and by today it is taught as a major theory in nearly every course in political science around the world. The idea of a random legislature was used in the early 90’s as a model for focus groups on politics and for convening a new charter for the government in British Columbia. Today it is the standard model used for selecting the designers of legislative districts; this use was first started in California in 2010.
I am patient. I know I will not live to see Pro commerce as an idea used in a widespread realm and certainly not with the other elements that you see as part of it in my blog.