Pro Commerce

When religion abandoned religious people

It is really astounding to think about it but the mainstream religions of America abandoned most religious parishioners.  

This occurred beginning in 1964.  Within two decades the mainstream churches had lost more than one third of their members at a time when the U.S. population increased by one third.

I identify two movements in the church that brought about this collapse.  First nearly every mainstream Protestant church joined Leftwing political activism, including anti-Vietnam War and general Lefty issues such as pro-union and strongly pro civil rights.  Most church goers were not politically active.  They went to church for religious reasons and were offended by turning religion into Lefty politics.  Those who remained in the churches included mostly people who didn’t care about politics, like most of the general American public (half of Americans don’t vote).

The other movement that brought about this collapse was the churches distance from young people who were becoming hippies.  Smoking dope and aligning with hippie spirituality.  Churches never understood nor opened their doors to the new values of young people.

How do we know these were the movements that hurt the mainstream churches?  First, the evangelical churches began growing rapidly at the same time.  They stayed out of Lefty politics.  They emphasized a simple spirituality with most efforts directed at community building with clubs for singles, motorcycle riders and family training.

Second, churches like Glide United Methodist in San Francisco that had rock music, contemporary singing and vague spirituality attracted young people.  Glide was copied by many mainstream churches that attracted young parishioners.

Mixing religion and Lefty politics is a bad idea.  The same bad outcome occurred in Reform Jewish temples when rabbis confused Lefty politics with Jewish teaching.  Membership disappeared.

All white outfit

For nearly 20 years I wore all white clothes.  That period overlaps the period when I began to live with only 200 objects.  It was convenient because I could put all my clothes in the washing machine at the same time.  I wore Japanese motorcycle jumpsuits that were easy to put on and were comfortable.

What is the relevance in today’s world?  

I see the elites of the East Coast wearing their summer whites, and remember how nice it looks.  There is something about a uniform that makes individuals more important.  Having distinguishing clothes every day is much like tattoos.  They can’t communicate much (narrow bandwidth) and they can’t say much about an interesting person compared to a few minutes of conversation.

The other day I had to explain to new friends my ‘white period’.  It started when I was building a park for street people who were nearly all black.  These men always hit me up for a loan.  As I came to understand what that was about, I was forced to opt out.  The loans among black people, was to form a community of mutual sharing and commitment.

I liked that idea but I was too busy to get involved.  My polite solution was to start wearing all white clothes.  I had learned from one or two blacks who were part of the community that in the Bondye religion among blacks it included a year of wearing all white and leading a spiritual life.  So my white clothes were seen as spiritual and made me a part of the community more than the mutual money lending and borrowing.

To my great surprise the all white clothes had an additional effect.  I had spent my life being elected leader and president of every group I was ever a member of.  That stopped happening as soon as I was wearing all white.  Maybe I was perceived as crazy.  But it was a blessing for me.

I went back to conventional clothes, actually to suits and sportcoats, toward the end of the 1990’s when I came back from a Japanese trip determined to work on four unfinished projects.  

The projects required that I be seen as serious.

Sympathy fatigue

I’ve noticed, and commented on my blog, that over the years I have seen a definite mean turn in the attitudes of my fellow San Franciscans.  Before 1990, San Franciscans were consistently kind to each other in public.  The hippie spirit fit into San Francisco perfectly.  By 1990 that spirit was on the decline and has gotten much worse since then.

I’m not talking about the city government which is a hate machine.  Pure communist ideology: ‘I know what is good for you and I am passing laws to make sure you behave the way I want you to’ 'We hate commerce to boot'.

While the deep anger that creates most Democrats plays a role in the mean-spiritedness of current San Franciscans, that part only comes out in conversation.  There is a mean-spiritedness on the street that seems to have another source.

I think it may be ‘sympathy fatigue’.  I wouldn’t use the term ‘compassion fatigue’ because compassion is rare in our society.  Compassion is a feeling one has towards beings that are different than us; such as mosquitoes, ants, worms, cockroaches and UN delegates.  Sympathy is a feeling towards people ‘who could be us’.  Sympathy applies to the feeling some of us have for street people.  ‘There but for the grace of god….’

I started working with street people in the late 1970’s when I built a park for them.  There were less than 500 in the whole city then.  I could see that the issue was not going to go away because these were mostly men who wanted to live outside our society, often to do drugs.  Our Puritan society could not tolerate that idle stance.  They had to be sober and get jobs.

I wondered how society would cope with this issue in 20 years.   It is now more than 35 years later and I see how society copes.  San Franciscans are angry.  They want to help street people to get jobs and be sober and be out of sight.  Now there are 7,000 still on the street and many more in government programs costing over $100,000 a year per person.   

Puritanism is in conflict with sympathy, misdiagnosis (they are not homeless), and persistent filth and intrusion on public walkways.

I diagnosis this as ‘sympathy fatigue’.  A difficult emotion to live with, a political problem that can not be resolved (by government which San Franciscans believe can fix anything) and a city filled with angry people.

Two hundred objects

I saw a Facebook video about a young Japanese man who kept his possessions to 100 objects.

For 20 years I kept my possessions to 200 objects.  The idea came from Lyall Watson a whale biologist who traveled the world and lived out of his suitcase.

There are several details about living on a limited number of possessions that arise.  First, what is a single possession? One sock does not function as a single item.  So the minimum is a pair of socks.  The same goes for dining.  One place setting is a knife, fork and spoon.  

Second, tools of your trade can’t be included in the 200 possessions.  There is no way to limit the number of tools one may need in most livelihoods, whether a dentist, lawyer, carpenter or history professor.

Lastly, when you have children and a spouse, their possessions belong to them.  My kids stayed at my house when my wife and I were not living together.  I couldn’t control the number of possessions they had, I could not impose my simple living values on them.  For many years I tried to have my kids and I live with only three nesting bowls to eat out of.  After it was fun, they lost interest.

A spouse is a different matter.  I’ve lived with several women.  Two had large collections of objects (records, books, California pottery) which I had no interest in interfering with.

I had no trouble living within the 200 number.  I got rid of old things when I got something new.  I always, in my life, bought high quality objects, since I treated them with honor and importance.

One of the humorous experiences was during the beginning of my getting rid of everything.  I invited my friends to my house to take anything they wanted.  To my utter surprise there were many objects that my friends wanted and had wanted for a long time.  I couldn’t believe that friends had possession envy.

For seven years I lived as a house sitter (I rented out the house I owned). I had a van and could easily fit all my possessions in the van. It really worked.

Romeo and Juliet

Everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet.  The Montague and Capulet families were feuding and their offspring fell in love.  

When my granddaughters were studying this play I had to point out to them how stupid and irrelevant it is to today’s audiences.  We don’t have any two prominent families feuding.  The Whitney’s don’t hate the Roosevelts so much that children in either family would be forbidden to marry each other.

That sort of thing might still happen in rural France, Southern Italy, Spain, parts of Latin America, most of Arabia, India or Bulgaria.

What has changed in the 430 years since the Shakespearean play was first performed ?

Modern commerce has intervened.  The Montague and Capulet offspring have to work together at  Fiat headquarters.  Modern commerce has eliminated family feuds because commerce is what delivers food, clothing and shelter to individuals, not families.

Most of the world still doesn’t understand that deep positive value of modern commerce.  It is rarely understood among the Luddites on the Left in most modern economies who value victimology.  Modern commerce values meritocracy, individual uniqueness and diversity; not family supremacy.

Modern Lefties are trying to replace family feuding with gender and race warfare. That is what a modern play should be about, if anyone could take it seriously.

One eye

I have been blind in one eyed for three weeks.  Iatrogenic.  It was caused by a staph infection in my eyeball from a doctor’s injection.  I may be able to see in that eye again by Thanksgiving.  I look like a sophisticated pirate in the meantime.

I just wanted you to know one of my biggest surprises.  I didn’t think I could drive because I assumed that I needed two eyes to measure distance.  A doctor I trust assured me that I could drive.  I did and it was OK.  One eye and decades of driving have given me enough visual knowledge to navigate the street scene.

The subsequent surprise was that I have no stereo vision within my first five feet.  I can not do any close precise work, such a carpentry, machine tool work or even putting a key in a lock.  Cooking and washing dishes are OK because much of that has a large range of tolerance.

The overall surprise was that stereo vision is offset by knowledge at large distances and possibly by movement of the head, but close up, we really are stereoscopic.  

Sometimes I give up

In thinking about the past dozen years that I have been doing this blog, I think of all the individuals I have talked to on a daily basis: face to face.  That would be thousands of people.  I can only think of a trivial number whose minds I have changed.  Those few were largely changed by showing them data about the failure of Global Warming.

That is terribly discouraging.  It re-enforces my idea that nearly everyone gets their brains hardboiled by age 23.  In my few downer moments I refer to the Lefty-brain-sphincter-muscle as a problem.  I saw it just last week.  A fanatic Muslim murders 49 gay people, as Islam commands.  He yells out to Allah in Arabic and demands to be recognized as a Jhadi.  In a few days the gay community I talk to daily has fallen in line with the Democrat absurdity that this was an act of gun violence and maybe the killer was conflicted in his own homosexuality.  (Could issues with homosexuality be part of Islam?)

On the positive side, I enjoy talking with people who have a pro commerce orientation.  I always learn from these people.  I am forced to think in new ways because this blog is daily and you readers are demanding.

You’re a racist

Not surprisingly, this attack has become more common in the 45 years since I was first called a racist.

I was called a racist by the black Rev. Cecil Williams at the time I was the business manager of the Methodist church where he was the lead minister.  

The incident occurred after I reported the difficult negotiations with a potential tenant for a hotel the church owned.  It happened in New York where one of the relatives of the famous Helmsleys and I were negotiating a lease that I demanded include a pro-black hiring policy.  The other side threatened to pull out of the deal.  The office was on the 49th floor of the Chrysler building.  I took a small statue of Lincoln off the nearby desk and was about to throw it out the window.  The other side changed their mind and signed the lease.

When I told the story, Cecil, said ‘you will still be called a racist because you’re white.’

I did much more in the Civil Rights movement including winning the most successful affirmative action class action case in America.  

Yet, as Cecil said, I will always be called a ‘racist’.  I understand that.

I also know that on another occasion where my help had been crucial to some success the church needed, Cecil and I went into his office with his coterie of black hangers-on.  He closed the door for a solemn ceremony where he pronounced me an ‘official nigger’.   We had a bottle of wine and all drank from it.

So, I’m a racist.

The longest day

Yesterday was the longest day.  In number of hours it was.  Because I am at a Northern latitude, 38, that means the earliest sunrise and the latest sunset were not yesterday.  

I learned that long ago as a runner who ran at 6am with a small group of people.  I was very aware of sunrise, because we could see where we were running.  Sunrise often came weeks after the Winter solstice.  And it changed with each year because of the .25 change in the length of the non-leap year day.  Daylight saving and daylight wasting were very noticeable.

I once visited my father when he was living on the South China Sea at the equator.  That was really different.  The sun rose and set every day at the same time and in the same location on the horizon.

Back in San Francisco, I used to see all the morning constellations, except in the foggy months.

Today, I don’t notice anything but the amount of light when I get up.  I only see the constellation Orion a few days a month a few months of the years.

I am not alone.  Most Americans are in the same category as I;  out of touch with the sky.  However most of them try to use loony substitutes to suggest they are in touch with the sky and the planet.  Natural foods, anti-GMO, human caused global Armageddon, locavorism, Paleo diet and every other Luddite scam to come along.

Sorry folks.  Even going camping, most of us are out of touch with the environment around us.

Racism is the explanation

I saw a Youtube discussion between two academics; Jonathan Haidt and Gad Saad. It is long.

Towards the end they talk about PC on campus.

They concur that the root cause is racism.  Or more accurately ‘racist guilt’.  In many courses, but especially the ‘victim classes’ of women’s studies, gender studies, black studies and LGBT studies, students are told they are racist.  

So they act out to overcome their racism, demanding all sorts of amelioration on the campus; including creating safe spaces, trigger warnings, all black dormitories and all black classes.

This pseudo-racist guilt is called ‘white privilege’ and is exercised against a hierarchy of victim classes: Blacks first, followed by women, gays and recently added to the mix, Muslims.

This appeal to racist guilt makes some sense to me.  I am still struggling to understand how Americans could ever have elected the most arrogant, mean spirited, incompetent Anti-American, black man to the presidency for a second time.

Pro commerce issues

There are an increasing number of people writing about the wonders of pro commerce.  All of them recognize the profound importance to society and the awesome power of commerce for good.  Some recognize the individual benefits that I have singled out.

Because my pro commerce stance does not come from intellectual meandering, it looks different.  My pro commerce stance comes from experience; it comes from actual operating businesses; several thousand of them.

I have found two elements of commerce than others have not found.  First is the tripartite nature of commerce and second is the good-values direction of commerce.

There are three categories of commerce.  

• The most ancient is ‘trade’.  A stand alone business is usually involved in trade.  A flower shop.  Each transaction is the end goal; it must have enough margin of surplus revenue to keep the seller in business and renew the inventory.
• Another ancient one is ‘clientry’.  A doctor or engineer are practicing clientry. Their goal is to provide the best service appropriate to the client for the lifetime of the client.
• The newest and most potent is ‘industry’. This form of commerce is based on reducing costs.  Cost reduction is achieved by increased scale; large scale of production, large scale of marketing, technological improvements and managerial competence.  It is found in every chain store operation and factory.

Commerce actually thrives when it incorporates four values: meritocracy, diversity, openness and preference for markets.

• Meritocracy means employing the most qualified person for the job or function.  This is not the case where tribalism prevails or nepotism dominates.
• Diversity of human resources results in the greatest productive output of any business.  Diversity refers to different skills and viewpoints and has nothing to do with gender or skin color.  Diversity is what cities have to offer and why commerce has always thrived in urban areas.
• Openness is vital to any commercial operation.  People who work together must be open with each other.  Secrecy between workers and hostility are counterproductive.  The same is true for all relations with suppliers, advisers and consultants.  Openness is vital for learning, shared competence and innovation.
• Lastly modern commerce thrives on markets.  Markets allow for survival of the superior and are an excellent form of communication and education.

The greatest sum total benefit of modern commerce is that it allows each individual human to grow and develop to their greatest potential.  In pre-commercial societies there are less than 100 occupations and labor practices.  In modern commerce there are an infinite number of livelihoods and ways of life. Room for every talent and genius.

Unfriending

Unfriending is a term that comes from Facebook an Internet site that became national in 2006.  A decade ago.  It means the person who is unfriended remains a friend as listed on an individual’s list of friends and is allowed to continue reading the posts.  But the unfriend one no longer reads the other person’s posts.

An interesting and novel human relationship.  A one-way connection that would not be called a friendship in traditional terms.  Only one person knows the relationship is in the ‘unfriended’ category.

My son (a major source of my ideas these days) has suggested that unfriending is a new social mode that is having a significant effect on society.  It means ‘I know you and recognize you in some way but I’m not listening or paying attention to you.  Don’t bother asking me to listen; what you say or do doesn’t interest me’.

That is one interesting statement.  Does it characterize an increasing number of contemporary relationships.  It is entirely new.  A by-product of technology.

What does the new world of unfriended people mean?

In my case, some of my friends who have been unfriended I talk to regularly but I have little interest nor knowledge of their Facebook life.  In other cases, my unfriendees have just been dropped out of my life like ordinary ‘former’ friends.  

Then there is that strange category of people who I don’t pay attention to who make comments on my Facebook entries.  A relationship that doesn’t exist outside the Internet.

So what does our new friendship network look like with the new category of ‘unfriended’? What is it doing to society?

Seriously

Since yesterday’s blog I’ve been asked to take Lefty ideology seriously and consider the reason the Left is a dead end.

The Left argues that a commercial society is better off if government restraints are put on modern commerce to make it conform to traditional moral norms.   

• Poor people must be helped and brought into the workplace.
• Inequality of income must be reduced.
• The power of big corporations to influence government must be limited.
• Singapore is an example where strong government and modern commerce co-exist.

- The poor people argument is a straw man based on wildly inaccurate media stories.  Since 1970 Americans have seen people living on the streets and begging.  This has nothing to do with modern commerce.  America’s wealth has been generously used to help the mentally ill who are given extensive housing and care facilities in every part of the nation.  If you have a developmentally disabled family member you know this is true.

If you know a physically disabled person you know that America has led the world in disability access to work, community life, education and transportation since 1978.  The disability community is well organized by itself and is effective because pro commerce Americans are generous and sympathetic.

The issue of ‘street people’ has nothing to do with modern commerce. It is a government failure.  A regulatory failure.  No government anywhere in any city has changed these circumstances.  This is a strong argument that government is ineffective in improving lives.

- Inequality of income is the natural by-product of a productive workforce and social norms.  In every major developed country the number of billionaires is a multiple of the number of workers.

There are two exceptions because of social norms.  One is found in most of Africa where tribal norms require everyone who makes an income, shares it with relatives.  This makes it hard for any person to save money and find capital for a business. The only option is to leave family and friends.

The other is Japan which has far fewer billionaires per worker than any other society.  Japanese find that all Japanese are part of one tribe and no one should be or live far outside the norm.  Individuals and families do not have private Jets.

So how can a Lefty idealog turn any other society into Japan?  It can’t be done.

- The simple solution to keeping money out of politics is to choose legislators by lot. This was done in early Greece.  It is done on juries in America.  It works in the dozens of contemporary experiments.  A global movement is emerging on this issue.  A much better solution than more incompetent and ineffective government regulation which hasn’t worked in any city or state in America.

- I’ve spent time in Singapore.  It is a thriving commercial society but a really boring place with no significant innovation.  That is the byproduct of modern commerce combined with a powerful central government.

- America is the engine of global innovation.  Shackling it with more government regulation will make it like every other country with little innovation.  

- The only other country on the planet that equals America in innovation is Israel.  Also a pro commerce society.  All the communist and socialist failures are examples of failure.  Israel is the magnificent example of success.

Lefty dead end

While the Left was totally decimated among intelligent observers in the last century, the power and influence of the Left is described by me as a ‘tsunami’ today.

This is a bizarre state of affairs for a social direction that I consider a dead-end.

How do I reconcile this obvious contradiction?

To me the key is that most people’s brains become hard boiled by age 23.  Thus the current media world, academia and East Coast elite were diehard Lefties in the late 1970’s and 1980’s and they are in dominant positions today with their 23 year-old views of the world.  They never saw or understood the failure of the USSR, Mao’s China, India and the Scandinavian socialist experiments.  

Moreover, these people moved to the locales that suited their politics: cities.  There they have formed an echo chamber of their cohorts and a political base that has disproportionate power

They also missed the rise of the whole new intellectual world of modern commerce advocates including Charles Krauthammer, Jonathan Israel, Thomas Sowell, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Yoram Hazony, David Hazony, Matt Ridley, Deirdre McCloskey, Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and many others.

Since these troglodytes are teaching a new generation, it is hard to know when this intellectual dead-end becomes a political dead-end.

Social fabric

In the Torah a number of people, Jacob, King David and Job, are described as tearing their garments when a loved one dies.  This symbol of anguish is still found among Orthodox Jews.

There is such a thing as the social fabric. It is a good metaphor and related to the Biblical garment rending.  The social fabric is the informal and unspoken connection among people of a common cohort.  The boundaries of the social fabric are variable.  When Peoples Temple members committed suicide with Jim Jones in Guinea the social fabric that was rent included the population of San Francisco and the Bay Area black community.  When Islamic Arabs brought down the two World Trade Center towers, the fabric was all of America.

Today all the social fabric of America is rent.  The reasons are many, but it mostly has to do with the perpetual lies of the Democrat Party leaders, especially concerning the Islamist threat to the world.

What happens when the social fabric is rent?  People with a weak connection to the society around them become more than usually deranged.

In periods like this we get a dramatic increase in homicide, terrorism, out of control maniacs and social pathology.  Think the Manson family and the assassination of leaders in the 1960's.

It’s here now.  It’s happening.

Editing books

I’ve experienced most kinds of editing and had my writing supervised by many editors.

I didn’t appreciate editing until about 1977.  I wish I’d known about it in 1963.  

I couldn’t get my PhD in economics from UC Berkeley because of Lefty rejection of everything I wrote.  So I spent six months writing a paper on my major thesis; that capital is knowledge, usually embedded in institutions.  The paper ran to 68 magazine pages.  I sent it to the leading economic journal, American Economic Review.  The editor said he would print my article if I cut it down to 40 pages.

I had no idea of how to do that.  While I would have been a famous economist, and professor at Harvard because of the article, I’m glad I never became an economist.

My first book, The Seven Laws of Money, which ultimately sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies shows no editor on the first editions but shows Salli Rasberry as co-author on later. abridged editions.  What is the truth?

I dictated a 14 page article to Rasberry for her Free School newspaper.  That became the paper that generated an offer from Penguin to write a book.  The 14 pages became notes at the beginning of each chapter when Salli and I wrote the book.  

Salli asked questions and I wrote the answers as paragraphs. Random House, the final publisher, had my future close friend Charlotte Mayerson as the official editor.  She would never allow her name to be mentioned.  

Several professional editors were used by Shambhala Press to create the abridged versions.  Their names don’t appear anywhere.

Salli and I used the same approach to writing Honest Business and Marketing Without Advertising that we used in The Seven Laws.  In effect she was much more than an editor because she got all the material out of me with good questioning.  And being a close friend she made it work.  She is shown as co-author.

Some ghost writers do this with people who can’t write their own books (Like Hillary Clinton on It Takes a Village).  That kind of ghost writer get paid.  Salli was always a co-author and got half the royalties.

On all my other books I didn’t have an editor.  Citizens Legislature was a true co-author job.  We each wrote a successive chapter.  Chick (Ernest Callenbach, the co-author) was actually a book editor at the U.of California Press. The other exception was Simple Living Investments.  Catherine Campbell loved the book.  When we were living together, four years after it was first self published she wanted to add material.  Which entailed a few good stories.  So she is shown as co-author on a second edition.

Humor.  Marketing Without Advertising was the standard relationship between me and Salli.  The publisher, Nolo Press, did a noteworthy job on the layout by their staff.  On one of the six editions over 25 years, one woman who did the layout, one year, was listed as an author on Amazon

That would seem to be my many experiences with editors.  The funniest one was with Marketing Without Advertising.  My experiences on three major books of 'extraction' by Salli was a high level of editing seen publicly as a co-authoring.  The publishers at Nolo Press and Random House involved editors too, who changed little or nothing.

Join the club

In the tidal wave of hate for commerce that is the Left around the world and the vast new wellsprings of socialism-light, there are three pro commerce tiny surfers on the top of this wave, besides me.

First you should know the greats of this pro commerce surfers club.  Both have appeared in the Wall Street Journal Saturday Review section in the past year:  Matt Ridley and Deirdre McCloskey.  A tape of McClosky can be found at my social thought website.

Matt Ridley has two books that do a brilliant job of making the case for commerce: The Rational Optimist, and The Evolution of Everything.

Deirdre McCloskey has one great book: Bourgeois Dignity.

Now my friend David B. has introduced me to another late entrant to this club.  Late meaning he has a simple explanation for the benefits of commerce and presents a good case for beginners.

Here is Jonathan Haidt:

Public discussion

Would we know what public discussion looked like if it occurred right in front of our faces?

I don’t have the answer.  But we have a great example in front of our eyes right now.

We all concur that something unusual is occurring in America right now with the rise of  Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Many theories have been advanced and new ones continually emerge.  This is public discussion.

Some theories see these as two separate developments.  Others see it having the same source in public antagonism toward established politics.  I tend to side with the two sided phenomenon, but I would willingly accede to a single source.

We have seen many theories advanced.  A rejection of the mass media bias.  A rejection of the blocked Congressional - Executive process.  A static economy.  A malaise associated with the state of jobs and middle income stasis.  A building discontent with the whole political process.  A widespread sense that the government lies to the public.

This is a small sample of the theories now in the public domain.  Nothing exactly like this has happened before.  So public discussion should be expected.

I see some coalescing around a few of these theories and I see some being discarded.  To me, a genuine deep dissatisfaction with the Congress -Executive would lead to a discussion of replacing Congress with a random legislature.  I haven’t seen that yet.

I haven’t seen a connection made between the powerful Tea Party movement and Donald Trump, nor the feeble Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign.  But there must be one.

Lastly, I am pressed by the lack of original ideas by public intellectuals on this startling period and I still expect that to happen.

We have a real ‘public discussion’ going on now.  It is time to learn how it works and how it leads to the emergence of new perspectives.

The worst blight in American history

America is a masterpiece of human creation.  It brought human society the greatest flowering of human capacity since our emergence as homo sapiens.  First the Constitution and the government that it created, then the distance from the old world class warfare, and finally the vast open West where meritocracy was given free rein.

This all made modern commerce possible two hundred years ago.

Over that time we have had to struggle with many social stigmas.  Slavery was a blight, our treatment of many Native Indian tribes was aggressive and intolerant, we have often behaved badly to immigrant groups and minorities.   The Democrat Party played an especially despicable role in America with its support for lynching, for Woodrow Wilson’s firing of all black federal employees, interning Japanese Americans and our long standing immigration bias in favor of European immigrants.

None of those black stripes is equal to the most horrific moral blight in American history which has been brought to us today by the Democrat Party and its 44th president, Barack Obama.

Obama initiated a vicious and perpetual hate campaign against the top rung of society.  He attacked the top rung with a focus on ‘Wall Street’, a traditional source of American hostility, but then he added  ‘Hedge Fund managers’, ‘private jet patrons’ and ‘the top 1%’.  He smeared opprobrium on this class by saying ‘they don’t pay their fair share of taxes’.  He has been joined by the rest of the Democrat Party and its wholly owned mainstream media.  The viciousness has become a major campaign theme in this year’s 2016 presidential campaign with both Democrats claiming that the top 1% has thwarted the opportunities for all other Americans.

This whole line of malicious attack strikes at the soul of America.  Americans have always championed the opportunity of people with merit to rise as high as possible in our society.

That is the soul of America and modern commerce.  Obama and the Democrat Party have attacked our soul.  Their behavior ranks as the  most outrageous blight in American history.

And America has no voice yet to scream at these monsters for the damage that they are doing to our history and our future.

Misdiagnosis of black issues

You don’t need to hear it from me.  Everything to do with black issues is well known, but the media, the political world and the popular culture deny it.

Our criminal system is not biased against blacks.  It is the reverse, blacks commit 5 to 6 times more crime than anyone else, but they are incarcerated at lower rates.

The judicial system bends over backwards to avoid punishing blacks to the extent that they warrant it.  It brings shame and contempt on the judicial system for its pro-black bias.

The same is true for employment.  Blacks hold jobs and get academic preferences in excess of their skills and competence.  To the detriment of everyone else, blacks under-perform in the workplace and are over-represented there.

The overall consequence is the general population holds many of our important institutions in contempt, because of poor research reporting and pro-black biases at every level of our society. 

Houses, pharma and education

My son has pointed out to me that we can see the future in several areas but we are seeing no progress in adopting the obvious reality.

Residential houses today are still made the same way they always have been.  Factory houses are readily available and have been for a long time.  They have every feature of size, cost and function that we dream of.  

I am told by people in the pharmacology industry that major improvements in the healthcare industry are already on the market or in the pipeline and could be available now or shortly if they were not stuck in the bureaucracy.

It is clear that all educational information and material is now abundantly available online.  The barriers to using them in academia are deeply embedded in the society and can not change quickly.

It is strange to be living next door to the future and seeing it over the fence but not having access to it.

The flat bottom income

The Swiss just last weekend rejected a nationwide flat bottom income proposal.  Bless the Swiss.

A flat bottom income is an idea that has been around for several centuries.  In a proposal by Charles Murray, he suggests a $10,000 paycheck for everyone over 21 with provisions for paying income tax after $30,000 in earnings.  There are three arguments usually made for this kind of proposal.

• It will save money if all other welfare and social security programs are eliminated.
• It is necessary to cope with the decline in jobs caused by robots and automation.  
• And we will get more civil society when more people have the time for it.

These arguments are terrible when lined up against the one main problem with a bottom income subsidy.

It won’t save money because the politics of eliminating other welfare programs is not a possibility.

Robots and automation are not real problems.  We have been using machines to replace workers from the first card loom and spinning jenny to the current ATM and Japanese low maintenance autos.  Nothing from technology in the future will do any more damage to the amount of work available.  In fact, the opposite seems true to those with their eyes open.   We work more now than ever before.

Only stupid things like a minimum wage will eliminate jobs. Science fiction is really a branch of fiction and fantasy.

Lastly, the level of civil society found among the gigantic population out of the labor market is not impressive.

The fatal flaw with the basic bottom income proposal is humans.  A large part of the human population is happy just watching TV, doing drugs and having sex with a neighbor all their life.  The rest of the human population just doesn’t accept the burden of the lazy part.  Communism has proven that to be true.  Too true.

Bad idea two hundred years ago, bad idea now.

Getting small business started

A writer I generally respect (George Gilder) wrote a Wall Street Journal article on getting the economy started again.  He got the fundamentals right.  You need an abundance of new business start-ups.  New businesses become big businesses.  A simple observation that many can not make.

The writer goes wrong when he makes policy recommendation for getting new business started.  He is a writer after all.  I have helped more start-ups in every field get started, than any person living or dead.  

Gilder focuses on the lack of loan funds in banking.  Absurd.  Banks don’t lend to small businesses and never have.  They only lend on 180% collateral.

I’ve never seen a business person starting who lacked funds.  Friends and family know who can start a business and they are 100% the source of start-up funds plus starvation and other forms of simple living deprivation.

If funding isn’t important, what is?

People only start a business in an environment with two qualities: (1) a network of friends who are optimistic about life.  The hippies were wildly optimistic about the world they were creating and they created more new businesses than any group in history.  (2) there must also be a milieu of cooperation.  Business survival depends on friends, community and support from everyone around.

So how do we create an optimistic environment with people who have a desire to help each other?

The answer to that question is the answer to business and economic growth.

The gig economy

A word from the future.  

I have lived in the ‘gig economy’ for the past forty years.  I often had a supplementary salary.  Nearly all my real income came from clients, speeches and royalties.  For me, it has been a gig economy.  It has given me vast freedom to do what I want with my time and my passions.

Of course that is what the troglodytes in the Democrat Party don’t want people to have.   I listen to Robert Reich and Hillary Clinton rail against the gig economy.  People who are so scared of life and still think we are in the 18th Century with precarious daily sustenance.... that only a salary can protect us from the monsters of daily life.

The reality of the gig economy is the extraordinary freedom ordinary people can have if they choose.  We can work when we want, doing what we want, and working for and with people we want to work with.  What a refreshing change from office politics and working with all the boring schmucks who people the world of salary life.  

We giggers improve our skills, develop new talents and understand self management.  Things not possible in the world of salaries and offices.  We don’t have bosses running our lives and determining our destiny.  We work for ourselves and our lives are in our hands.  

We vacation when we want.  We act like the richest of the rich with a deep sense of security that is never found in retirees on a fixed income.

If you can’t handle freedom, and most people can’t, don’t be in the gig economy.  But for god’s sake don’t try to close off that option for the rest of us.  Please don't use the political tyranny that is the basis for the Leftist view of the world to lock us into the archaic world of salaries and retirement pensions.

Scientists drive me nuts

I have two friends who are scientists by the traditional definition.  One is a physicist who works at a prestigious nuclear weapons lab, the other is a biologist and head of a well funded lab at the University of California. Both are MIT graduates.

What drives me nuts is that neither of these so called ‘scientists’ will look at any data about global warming.  It’s settled science for them.  They have never looked at any data.  They won’t look even though I offer it to them.

How anyone can call themselves a scientist, work everyday in a place that claims to produce science and still not be willing to question a major science issue of the day that affects their lives in significant ways.

I can't understand it.  I have contempt for all 'scientists' as a result.

Sorry.  Just a rant.

Gays and marriage

In my regular morning visits to Peet’s coffee I occasionally see the man most single-handedly responsible for gay marriage legality in America: Vaughn Walker.

Walker as the judge on the Northern Calif. U.S. District Court wrote the most important opinion finding that no legal distinction could be made between a civil union gay marriage and a traditional man-woman marriage based on his reading of the U.S. Constitution.  That ruling was in 2010 and was based on overruling a California State proposition that won a majority of votes saying the opposite.

It was a series of court rulings, up to the U.S. Supreme Court that made gay marriage legal in America.  No one else had the impact that Judge Walker had.

Thinking about that case and its current ramifications I came to two unusual conclusions.

• This has led to a dead end in the gay community.  Marriage is a conservative, largely monogamous relationship.  
• This may be the last gay issue.  The community won very quickly.  There doesn’t seem to any new cohesive issue left on the agenda.     

My gay friends who are married or living in a married situation are being fairly monogamous.  A conservative way of life and very different from the first 30 years of gay male freedom and abandon.  It is hard for me to see the gay community maintaining its vitality if it is just a reflection of straight life with marriage as the pinnacle achievement.  

It also suggests such complete acceptance of an outcast minority that cohesion and group solidarity may be lost rapidly.  

While gays are persecuted in much of the world, that just isn’t a modern organizing tool.  I’ve never heard a gay person who gave a hoot about the problems of gay men in the Muslim world.  

Even fewer care about transgenders wanting to use a bathroom with the wrong designation.

Asians are all the same

This issue comes up for two reasons.  One is a local TV ad for a casino not far from San Francisco.

The ad emphasizes that the Chief Financial Officer is Randy Takamoto.  Most local gamblers are Chinese.  His name is Japanese. In fact Japanese are not much into gambling.  Their gamble of choice is pachinko; a relative of pinball.

It looks to me like some advertising creative type is confused about Asians. He thinks promoting a Japanese named Financial Officer to Chinese gamblers will look positive to them.

It is also possible that Chinese think that Japanese are scrupulously honest.   Something I know is true but I’ve never encountered among my Chinese or Chinese-American friends.

This just looks like pan-Asian prejudice to me.

The second instance was when Peet’s Coffee opened several coffee shops in Tokyo.  I went to the first one and found many marketing errors. Many such as wooden stirrers.  Japanese use wooden, often bamboo, chopsticks to eat with; never to stir their hot drinks.  Since I love Peet’s coffee, I sought out the manager to offer help.

The manager for the multiple coffee shops turned out to be Chinese.  Which is why Peet’s got so many details wrong.  Someone in management must have thought one Asian could handle the new shops in Japan, Korea and China.  A potential big savings in personal.  A gigantic mistake in cultural misunderstanding. Peet's in Tokyo closed a few months later.

Asians are not alike anymore than Europeans.

Mileage rewards

I make heavy use of United frequent flier miles.  I charge everything on the United credit card and have almost enough miles to fly to Tokyo every year.  I buy the rest of the miles I need to get business class when United offers miles for sale periodically at yearend.

I remember when this mileage program started back in 1981. Wikipedia doesn’t give United the full credit it deserves, but Wikipedia often screws up history by finding someone in a backwoods Australian town who did the historically important thing a month before the real inventor did it.

United’s original idea was to use the mileage rewards for business customers to use at the hotels United was buying.  Get its business flying customers to use the United hotels.

It didn’t work.  Most business fliers used an in-house travel agent who wanted the mileage rewards used for future travel.

And that is the model that won out.  Now there are so many trillions of reward miles outstanding that all airlines are trying to rein in the numbers.  For filling up airplanes they have been a great success.  But airplanes may be too full for comfort at this point.

More medical miracles

Two more medical miracles to report on.  Both evolutionary.  

The first is a machine to help people with sleep apnea.  Sleep apnea is the disorder that leaves many people skipping the next breath while sleeping. Or several breaths.  It makes sleeping difficult and keeps the patient from sleeping well.  

The early machines that provided treatment forced air into the sleeping patient with a face mask and strong forced air pressure.  It often was too uncomfortable to use.

The machines have now evolved to be acceptable for almost everyone who needs one.  The air pressure is variable, starting out slowly.  The air mask is tiny and almost unnoticeable and the air is humidified so the air passage remains comfortable.  Great, from what I hear.

The other is a treatment for eyes where a vein behind the retina has leaked.  It deforms the retina making vision poorer and often degrades it rapidly.  Someone somewhere figured out that a cancer drug that shrinks new vein growth might work.  The cancer drug is Avastin and it works.

One friend lost his vision due to this vein-retinal problem a few years ago.  Now there is a treatment.  It is called an ’off label use’ of the drug since the FDA has not tested it for this purpose.  But many doctors are now using it because it works so well.

I experienced the downside of this procedure. The injection is done in an ordinary office (non-sterile).  The needle used on me was infected and my eye became infected after two days.  I'm totally blind in that eye now.  The ophthalmologists hope some of the vision will return.

Statue of liberty

The word ‘iconic’ has been too popular lately.  So popular that it no longer has any meaning,  These days it means ‘very popular’.  The earlier and more powerful meaning was ‘a unique powerful symbol’ coming from the meaning of an icon, as representing a god.

The statue of liberty is deservedly an icon of freedom.  Both in its graphic form and because of its history.

I have long wondered how such a beautiful symbol evolved.  A woman draped with a torch in her uplifted hand and a crown on her head  It strikes me as too powerful to come from the head of an artist.

Well it didn’t.  It came from an ancient and rich culture.  Israeli archaeologists have found a miniature of the statue of liberty on a ship that sunk near the coast of Israel  1600 years ago.  Near a roman town.  The image is on the right.  This is where our statue of liberty came from, thousands of years later.