Western Civilization did better than the rest of the world over the last 300 years (1650 to 1950) when it understood the difference between the wealth creators and the bean counters.
It wasn’t the Italian government that created the Renaissance. It was the Medicis.
An interesting fact in the progression of the Medicis is this, the later Medici line renounced the older generation’s republican sympathies and established more authoritarian rule. That change that produced stability in Florence and Tuscany but led to the region’s decline as a cultural hub.
Democrats today are trying to instill more authoritarian policy and rule in the United States, usurping wealth creation and innovation.
Since 1950, the United States has done better than the rest of Western Civilization when it comes to wealth creation and innovation. Those two concepts, wealth creation, and innovation go hand in hand.
The United States was the shining city on the hill. It wasn’t just a beacon of freedom. It was a beacon of innovation and wealth creation that was enabled by the way our society organized freedom.
The entirety of Western Civilization has largely lost its focus. Today, there are those in the United States that would like to fundamentally reform this focus. This is similar to Islam losing their focus after the Mongols decimated them.
Only those societies which understand the difference between true wealth creation and bean-counting will survive. The world is at a juncture that will decide the future of various continents for the next epoch.
If you decide to live with envy and bean count, you will drive yourself crazy. There is never enough and someone always has more. The more you objectivize the ultra ultra wealthy, the crazier you will become.
Joe Biden and the Democrats like to count. They count and segregate. They try and decide what’s fair and what is not fair. Just like a stuck bull in a bullring, they lather at the mouth when they see wealthy people that want to oppose them.
They will use percentages to make themselves sound smart and logical. Of course, they will ignore all the underlying data and circumstance that goes into those percentages. If they can, they will conveniently repackage it to prove their point.
It should not be incredible to anyone that Hunter Biden’s treatment for a gun violation is different than you might receive for the same violation. It should not be incredible to anyone that President Joe Biden or Illinois governor JB Pritzker are allowed to dodge taxes with no penalty yet scream for higher taxes.
Democrats love to look at your wealth and claim it for the government to redistribute in the ways that they see fit. It’s always to fix something that is broken. If the problem is super large and unsolvable, like poverty, they will claim even more of your wealth, spend it, and the problem will get worse.
We have spent trillions of dollars using government programs and safety nets to stamp out poverty in the United States. It hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s made it worse and more desperate.
Do you know what today’s crop of Democrats doesn’t like to do? Create broad-based societal wealth. They like to create it for themselves, and their cronies to be clear. They do that to consolidate and grab power. That’s why they never will solve the problems confronting us today.
They have now weaponized the bureaucracy to target you. People like Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Biden say it out loud. The SEC, the Dept of Justice, and all the alphabet soup of agencies are pointing their turrets at the wealth creators and innovators. Elon Musk is but one example. There are plenty of others.
If you are wealthy and go with their program, you are safe for now. Wealthy and oppose them? You are a target of opportunity.
I was reading a piece from Bob Woodson, the founder of the 1776 Unites project. He highlighted a woman named Bridget “Biddy” Mason. She must have been an amazing person. She was an innovator and wealth creator.
Bridget Mason (aka “Biddy”) was a black female slave who later gained her freedom thanks to the help of her white son-in-law, Charles Owens. Bridget birthed three daughters, each of whom was fathered by her slave master, Robert Smith.
After converting to Mormonism, Smith and his wife moved to Utah in a wagon, forcing Bridget to follow on foot. A church leader tried to convince Smith to free his slaves, but Smith was unwilling. The church leader did, however, persuade Smith to move to California, which Smith was likely unaware had entered the Union as a free state.
Bridget Mason obtained her freedom in 1856 and worked as a nurse in Los Angeles. She eventually saved enough money to purchase two estates, making her one of the first black women to own property in Los Angeles.
Over several years, she bought and managed more property. She leased out this property commercially and sold portions of it. As Los Angeles grew, so did the value of her real estate.
In 1872, she financed the city’s first black church. By the late 1800s, Mason had acquired a fortune of $300,000, making her the wealthiest black woman in the city.
I don’t think Ms. Mason worried too much about “who got what” or “what’s fair”. Even in the horrible conditions in which she was forced to live, she found a way to see the world, not as a fixed pie where she struggled to get a piece, but as an expanding pie where innovators made more pie for everyone and were rewarded for doing it.
Mr. Woodsen asks, “Should we focus on her hardship? It must have been a terrible journey for her walking behind a wagon and having to take care of everybody all along the way every single day.”
Or, should we focus on how she took advantage of what little opportunity she was given and what she did with it?
As a society, we need to focus on creating the opportunity for innovation and wealth creation. That same focus needs to be enabled via policy, and private dollars, not government dollars and another useless government program.
We have way too many bean counters today and not enough wealth creators. The more the bean counters weaponize and use the government to go after the wealth creators, the more they lean toward going into hibernation.
The rest of the world thinks we're free because we're rich, instead we are rich because we're free.
Since the "War on Poverty" started in the mid 1960s we have spent an astounding $ 25 trillion PLUS on poverty alleviation. In that time the poverty rate went from 15% to.....15% currently. How nice that all the money was basically just spent for nothing.
Why is it that with this level of spending there is no accountability, no after action analysis, no cost benefit analysis? The fact that there is not, but all these program merrily run along tells you everything about what happens in Washington, DC.
https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/~/media/infographics/2014/09/bg2955/bg-war-on-poverty-50-years-chart-1-825.jpg