Pro Commerce

Confirmation of My Work

I wrote a book five years ago called The Most Important Book in Human History.  The title was not facetious.  I call attention to the unique series of accidents that made America the powerhouse that created the modern commercial world.  The congruence of the weak national government, the even weaker hereditary elite, the vast and abundant Great West with the egalitarian values of an immigrant populace brought about this unique historic miracle.

I wrote the book out of the fear that the centrality of our history to modern life is not understood by most Americans and can be lost in the wave of Luddite wokieism that has reared its ugly head in our wonderful country.

I am slowly finding good history books that fill in some of the details.  The best so far is The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris.

Morris understands the geometric growth of modern commerce in America in the pre-Civil War era and the decline of Britain in the half- century afterwards. He does a superb job of finding visitors to America who comment on the egalitarian drive of middle- class Americans and their natural commercial orientation.  He does an especially good job of showing the role of the Ohio Valley in generating nationally oriented businesses.  He identifies many specific industries and businesses that played important roles in innovation and in creating national and global markets.

At this point I would add what neither he nor I have mentioned, that the Masonic Order provided a national society that brought innovators and financing together on the vast continent.  The details of that remain to be written.

Rot in Hell

What am I referring to? The New York Times and the entire American establishment media.

There is already a place in Hell called the NYTimes Gallery based on the Jew-phobic owners, the Sulzbergers’, complete unwillingness to publish voluminous and accurate data about the Holocaust while it was happening.

Now the NYTimes and the entire American Democrat establishment media failed to report an August 23 vote of contempt for President Joe Biden by the British Parliament.

If you are an historian writing about American history this was an act of great importance in the 400 years of British-American relations.  You could not find it mentioned in the farcical ‘newspaper of record’ (the NYTimes) nor any other major American Democrat media.

This was not a light matter. President Joe Biden told the Brits that he would protect allied personnel during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.  It was a lie and warranted a vote of contempt.

The strain on American and all allied relations will not be forgotten for decades but the event that caused it was never reported to the American public in a way that the incompetence of the American elected leader could be understood or addressed.

I am old and have lived a long, enjoyable and wonderful life.  In my declining years I have lived to see much of America become a third-world shit hole governed and ruled by an incompetent malicious swarm of anti-American fools.

Thomas J. Hargadon

One of my close friends died a year ago and his entire 50 years of life in San Francisco is not in the brief obit in the Boston press.

I met Tom in 1976 when he came from Boston to San Francisco.  The first thing Tom did when he got here was become a partner in a bar in Noe Valley, Finnegans Wake.  His two partners were Don Neuwirth and Tom Frankel. Tom Hargadon had owned a bar near Harvard Square where he had gone to college and where he had graduated with a law degree.  Tom passed the California bar, but never practiced law to my knowledge.  Tom Frankel went on to own a bar on Potrero Hill where Tom H. rented the upstairs apartment.  I shared the apartment occasionally over several years in the 1980s.  Tom owned a home in Monte Rio near the Russian River.  It flooded twice (2 one-hundred year floods). The home was above a garage and only the floor of the house was flooded.  I helped Tom clear it out after the floods by dumping everything out the front window into a dumpster.

When Finnegan’s Wake was closed in 1986, Tom Frankel moved it to Cole Valley where he took over a former lesbian bar, Mauds. 

The original Noe Valley bar was the headquarters for San Francisco politics during the Dianne Feinstein years, largely due to Don Neuwirth’s contacts.  I never saw Tom H. drink, but I assume he had beer on occasion.

The entire time I knew Tom he was built like a long cube, very Irish.  He was able to run occasionally with my Portola Institute gang and with my friends at Crissy field.  But otherwise I never knew him to indulge in athletics. 

Soon after I met Tom I made him Publisher of the Briarpatch Review, which never entailed anything but showing up at parties and being a springboard for discussions. From the late 1970s he was a regular at our coffee group mornings in North Beach. First at Roma’s for a dozen years and for the next three decades at Malvina’s and then to the new Roma’s. The final story on that comes later.

Tom was among my very closest life friends.  He was the most intelligent man around. With an encyclopedic mind and a comprehensive knowledge of Irish literature. All my close friends were like Tom. Interested in the world, current events and deeply self educated.

Tom was also wise.  He talked when talked to, but he was quiet otherwise. Surprisingly, his bar talents meant he was gregarious among strangers. Calm, sweet, gentle, genetically honest and infinitely curious. Always reading when alone.  Tom had the unique ability to carry on three simultaneous conversations.

Tom grew up in Boston, probably Waltham.  His education was at private Catholic schools. Because Tom was so bright and probably slightly autistic, the nuns, bless their hearts, didn’t waste his time in class, they sent him to the library where he read every book in the collection over his dozen years in pre-college. 

From Tom’s own report, after law school he worked at Boston City Hall with mayor Kevin White. Tom understood politics. He had done some organizational work in Mayor White’s office which later led him to some similar work in Washington D.C.  It had to do with computers of that era. Tom always had friends in the computer world.

The only anecdotal story I have about Tom is that he lived, for a time, in a communal arts group in a warehouse in Emeryville. There, he met and married a woman, Ambika, who lived in the building and was a fine potter.  A few years later when Ambika went to Japan, I strongly advised Tom to join her there. I said that Japan would be heaven for a potter and unless he joined her she would meet up with a Japanese potter and stay there.  He didn’t understand what I was saying. I had been going to Kyoto, at that point, for many years.  I was right.  

A decade later Tom joined me and my girlfriend in Tokyo.  He had a marvelous time.  Japan was so new and interesting to him.  He spent his days just travelling around the city in total amazement, learning everything he could.

At one point Tom became a partner in the Blue Heron, a restaurant in Duncan Mills near the mouth of the Russian River.  He made it a lively musical center for the area, but since all the business was weekends, it never succeeded financially. During all my years as a close friend, I never knew where Tom’s money came from.  One year a friend of his in D.C. had government funds left over at the end of the fiscal year to build public housing near Santa Rosa. Tom helped him spend it.

Tom always dressed a little more formally than the hippie style of the era.  Usually a white shirt and suspenders.

Tom and I ended our friendship twenty-four hours after the Arab terrorists piloted airliners into the New York Twin Towers.  We had our usual coffee at Malvina’s in North Beach the next day. An Egyptian, an occasional visitor to coffee, had sent an email overnight saying the attack was justified because of America's role in oppressing nations around the world. Before he entered Malvina’s I told him he was not welcome at the coffee group. Tom tried to stop me from chasing him away; I told Tom to ‘fuck himself.’  He told the rest of the coffee group, who agreed that I didn’t have the authority to kick anyone out of the group.  That ended the group at Malvina’s and my friendship with Tom. Over the next 20 years we ran into each other twice, but we never talked.

Tom was a wonderful man and a great friend.  He died September 8th, 2020 at a hospice in Larkspur, California.

Ending Censorship

America will be saved by ending censorship.  For one reason. 

The anti-wokie arguments are powerful and convincing. Wokieness is ignorance and blindness at its core.  Censorship of knowledge and intelligence is the only reason wokieness survives in more than 10% of the population.

Xi Jinping gave a speech last year announcing his determination to return China to the values of Mao.  Our incompetent media did not cover it at the time. This year has seen his plan being implemented.

This will have several effects. 

• First, it will bring China’s economic growth to a near standstill, like Europe and every other country that tries to mix Marxism with modern commerce.
• Second, it will show, over five years, that the wokie ideas of equity and anti-corporate malice are neither feasible nor productive.
• Third, and most importantly it will enable America’s core commercial and Constitutional values to re-emerge.

During the forty years of the Cold War against the Marxist USSR, America rekindled the core values of the Constitution, open debate and support for modern commerce.  The dialectic of having a Marxist opponent generated American resistance to tyranny in the form of deeper Americanism.

The renewed Marxism of China will have the same effect.  During the Cold War, for example, the ACLU actually defended the 1st Amendment.  Americans defended and supported modern commerce (using the Marxist term ‘capitalism.’)  That was pure Hegelian dialectic.

The same will happen again.  Additionally because China is threatening free trade on the open seas, the core underlying value of ‘public accommodation’ will re-emerge as a global value. 

As I have argued many times, the core historic value of ‘public accommodation’  is the reason the digital media giants have no right to apply censorship on their websites.  Goodbye censorship over the coming five years. Public accommodation applies to all businesses that serve the public whether public or privately owned.

From my July 12, 2021 blog:

The whole debate on the mechanisms necessary to enforce the 1st Amendment to the Constitution and eliminate political censorship on public media seems to be based on a lack of understanding of the history of commerce.

The basic law that is being violated is the law of public accommodation, a law that is more than 2,300 years old.  The law was created by the Roman legislature two centuries before the CE common era to deal with the problem of ferries across rivers in Roman territory.  Ferry boat operators seem to have been applying their own discretion to what people and goods they would transport across rivers.  This stifled trade and created rewards and punishments that were entirely arbitrary, in the hands of a vital service.  

The Roman public accommodations law required ferry boat operators to carry everyone who wished to travel.

Now that law is obvious and our generation seems able to ignore an obvious reality.

Public Accommodation is the core legal idea that creates freedom of the seas laws that China doesn’t understand.  Wokies will find that Chinese antagonism on this issue will spread to many realms of legality, especially censorship.