Where does the hatred of modern commerce come from? This is a continuation of yesterday’s blog. Modern commerce nearly came to the end a few months ago. Barely 65 million Americans from the Old West, saved it from a world of 7 billion who would destroy it.
I blame myself for the extent of this hatred of modern commerce. This hatred comes right up to my front door and I find it in several of my children. I should have written The Greatest Book in Human History. There actually is no book with that title. But I didn’t write it.
That book is what I have been writing about in this blog for several decades and can now be boiled down to its essence.
Modern commerce began in the first democracy, Holland where most of the commercial instruments were invented: bonds, equities, financial markets, salaried tax collectors, modern technology, the intellectual world of enlightenment. Holland with its democracy and vast empire was the land of meritocracy. Holland conquered England and transferred the roots of modern commerce to a larger country where the first great book on commerce was written by Adam Smith. England helped provide the modern world with a larger market. England allowed for meritocracy to grow as the hereditary failures (second and third sons) moved out into the Empire and diversity found a stirrup to help in the empire of truly diverse people.
When the English model moved to the American colonies and the colonies expanded West, meritocracy and diversity got the added value of human-to-human openness. Modern commerce exploded over the landscape.
So where did this hatred of America and modern commerce come from? It didn’t come from anywhere. It is everywhere. It is the base view of the entire world and the intellectual world. Except for Adam Smith and the tiny group of America’s founding father’s, Hamilton and a few friends, no one else has ever argued for and understood modern commerce. There are no books about the genius of modern commerce and how we got it. The entire world of books is either neutral on the subject or overwhelmingly anti-modernity and anti-modern commerce.
The genius’s who populated the governance of the British Empire and the wildly individualistic Americans who settled the West and created modern commerce were not intellectuals. None of them ever figured out what modern commerce was about and how it came to be. No one since then has succeeded in writing about it either.
There has not been the necessary intellectual powerhouse available to every curious individual to help them understand the core issue of their life. The nature of modern commerce the greatest creation of the human species has not found its spokesperson. It is the absence of a powerful intellectual world supporting pro commerce that has allowed the weeds of anti-commerce to become the entire ivy-kudzu world that is trying to destroy commerce. And nearly did.
Thank goodness for the American Old Westerners and British colonizers who didn’t need books or intellectual support. These are the people who build our world without a blueprint, without academic guidance and with no theories of what to do. The technology of modern commerce was created with trial and error, pure pragmatism.
To win the future world at this critical juncture we need ‘The Greatest Book in Human History’. The true book on modern commerce, Much like the intellectual world needed Darwin's Origin of the Species.