Niall Ferguson Is Right. (So Is Mike Solana)

During Covid, They Kept the Pot Dispensaries and Liquor Stores Open

Niall Ferguson wrote a column at The Free Press that you should read. Niall Ferguson is correct. He compares today’s America to the late-stage Soviet Union. Instead of America’s rival being the Soviet Union, Ferguson makes a strong case for the Chinese who filled the void left behind by the Soviets in 1991.

Stupidly, the first Bush Administration and then the Clinton Administration enabled the communists to think that if only they traded with the United States and saw how great capitalism was they’d change their tune.

They were wrong, and we are paying a huge price for their inept decision-making.

The question is, can America reverse course and can it win the next century like it did the last?

Mike Solana kind of answers that question here.

I think the answer is affirmative. We can discuss the physical aspects of why. Natural resources, oceans, and an abundance of ports blah blah blah.

However, I think it’s deeper than that. I think it’s deeper than where Mike Solana goes as well. Solana looks at tech, tech advances, and the advent of artificial intelligence. He compares insurgents to gatekeepers.

I agree very strongly with him. I have identified with insurgents my entire life. The crazy ones Steve Jobs called them. Leo Melamed was an insurgent. If you talk to him today at 92, he is still an insurgent. Leo just knows how to placate the gatekeepers.

There are lots of gatekeepers in America. Today, most are in the Democratic Party but there are a fair amount of gatekeepers on the Republican side too. In Solana’s article, he talks about “checklists” in his interview with the inventor of Gmail.

Checklists could also be characterized as meetings, hearings, or listening tours. In general, the checklist is unnecessary bureaucracy designed to empower the people who don’t want change.

Paul reflected back on his experience at the company, right around the time he launched Gmail.

“You had to run through this checklist before every product launch,” he said. “Naturally, the checklist only grew, because it was an opportunity for some ambitious person, within the bureaucracy, to insert themselves into the launch process. Now you need to get a sign off from marketing, or comms, or some other group.

Many technologists contend that artificial intelligence is as powerful for us today as fire was to the cavepeople. Gatekeepers want to regulate it and control it. Insurgents want to unleash it to see what it can do.

There is some danger with AI. It could centralize everything and my friend Craig Pirrong noticed the same thing about blockchain. But, the benefits of AI and crypto far outweigh the consequences and I am betting that gold old-fashioned competition will allow for the benefits to shine through.

Step back and think about everything in America. How many checklists are there? Meetings? It’s all about gatekeeping, or in other words, keeping control and power. The Chinese are all about maintaining control, power, and centralization. That’s why they have a higher probability of losing.

People are not hardwired to be centralized and herded.

The culture of the American people is why things will change here. Even that despondent person smoking cigarettes on government welfare sitting at the bar nursing their beer has potential. They can turn it around if they are enabled.

Getting rid of all the gatekeepers enables them.

The problem isn’t Americans or America, it’s the elites that are running America. They think they are putting up ramps of opportunity with their ideas but instead, those ideas turn into roadblocks. As they put up more roadblocks, the chasm gets larger, not smaller. They are the gatekeepers.

The move to Trump in 2016 was a manifestation of that. Trump is an insurgent. People didn’t vote for Obama to cure the kinds of ills we have today. Obama is a strict gatekeeper. As Shelby Steele perceptively points out in his book, “White Guilt”, they did it to cleanse themselves.

Trump offers some antidote to what ails us but it is not the cure. The cure cannot be summarized into a soundbite or one political slogan. It’s much more complex than that. But, Trump can blow things up and that would be a huge step in the right direction.

Political slogans can be gatekeeping all by themselves.

I am seeing signs that there is a waking up of America. We have a good solid chance at the cure. People like Bill Ackman are starting to read and understand what people like me have seen for over a decade. Another positive development, school choice is sweeping the country. If you can topple the poor-performing public school system, you can topple anything. The Wall Street Journal reports the rapper Jay-Z has endorsed school choice in Pennsylvania.

Change cannot happen inside today’s Democratic Party. It’s full of gatekeepers and Republican gatekeepers are flocking there. Bill Kristol, Paul Ryan, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, and plenty of others are examples of grifting Republican gatekeepers who want to fight insurgents. It’s not just Trump by the way. It is any insurgent.

There is little difference between a free market capitalistic classical economics-believing insurgent that fights for decentralization and a tattooed nose-ringed communist ANTIFA person when looked upon by political gatekeepers.

Does this sound familiar?

“According to the 2023 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), roughly 75 percent of eighth-grade students in the Pennsylvania public school system aren’t proficient in math while 47 percent aren’t proficient in language arts. Furthermore, in the bottom 15 percent of the state’s public schools, the data reveals that less than 10 percent of students are proficient in math, and only 25 percent are proficient in English. In 40 schools across the state, there were no students—absolutely none—that met the grade-level proficiency criteria in math.”

Is it any different in New York? Illinois? Texas? Vermont? California? Washington? Can anyone name a US public school system that graduates competent people in overwhelmingly large volumes?

At America’s core is the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. The courts or politicians haven’t bastardized some principles in them. One is private property rights. Property rights lead down the path to free market capitalism.

Free market capitalism is at its best when it is decentralized.

People are waking up. Even if you are poor and uneducated, you want freedom and a better future for your children and you will make choices accordingly. It’s just hard to fight through the propaganda of the mainstream noise.

But, it’s getting through.

If there is any silver lining in the whole Covid crisis it is that Covid exposed the total ineptness and lack of quality in government officials while at the same time exposing how crony capitalism works. Moderna made millions….on a vaccine that didn’t work where they had to reclassify the definition of the word vaccine.

They paid off government officials to get what they wanted and the public knows it.

There is no compromise on these issues. There is no “middle road”. There is no soft landing. We can’t “Paul Ryan it” by allocating a little money here and a little money there. No, the system needs to be shocked, and the synapses that exist, fried.

New hard wiring has to grow and the way it grows is to cut off the host. Hence, it’s not about weaning farmers and the entire food industry off crop subsidies. Better to kill crop subsidies and let capitalistic free markets work. No weaning universities from government research money. Better to kill it, and let the free market sort it out.

The middle road keeps the crap alive. Before you know it, we are talking about reparations again.

I have faith in the original culture established long ago by the American people. That’s why the Marxists in charge today work so hard to kill it. But, it is awfully hard to stamp out. Capitalism is hard-wired into our DNA. Even the Chinese recognized it. They will shoot themselves in the foot in their quest to control it. The iron laws of economics will eventually catch up to them. They are communists and communism never works.

Of course, America could do it to itself first. That’s what the Chinese are banking on. They could gain control without firing a shot.