The Antidote

It Is Time to Tell The Communists and Socialists to Stuff A Sock In It

This speech was fantastic. Here is an artificial intelligence translated into English link from Twitter. Good thing Big Chief Elizabeth Warren hasn’t regulated AI yet. You are experiencing a huge benefit right now that you might not have thought about. Milei in his own words without subtitles is significantly better. By the way, if you have a job as a translator, I might suggest you learn to code.

People think other people are dumb. The other day I saw a tech writer from Axios gleefully tweet that “in 2020 the Trump economy wasn’t very good.” Of course, we shut down the worldwide economy for a disease concocted in a Chinese Lab and funded by health organizations in the United States which needed the shutdown and panic to help them cover it all up. Statistically, it turns out the whole thing wasn’t nearly as serious as advertised by the hyperventilating crowd. I guess when you forcibly shut down the worldwide economy, you don’t get much of an economy.

The thing is, every human is hard-wired to desire freedom, and property rights, and exploit gains from trade. Even if they are in a mud hut and don’t know how to spell the word “cat” if you spot them the C and the A (tip of the hat to Hollywood Henderson).

I hope Milei’s speech becomes the shot heard around the world like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense. Paine put the wheels in motion that led to the Revolutionary War. Without the American Revolution, who knows where humanity might have been? It was the US, with individual rights and free market capitalism that changed the world for the better, not some government or monarchial-directed effort. Polite applause followed his speech. He eviscerated all of the World Economic Forum.

We need some common sense today! When the mainstream media chats about boys needing tampons in their bathrooms at school, you know that common sense has been abandoned.

There is so much in this speech to talk about. So much.

Milei flew there on a commercial plane. He is the President of Argentina, not some schmuck. The self-important Anthony Blinken complained that he had problems with his plane and was stuck in Davos. I don’t understand why Blinken would not take high-speed rail from Davos to the coast, then hop on one of those fancy ocean-going sailing ships the global warming elite are touting to “fix the planet”. Was John Kerry’s private coach not available?

We need Milei in the United States.

I absolutely love what he had to say about entrepreneurs and the money that they make. I have been saying it myself for years and get a lot of pushback.

Entrepreneurship programs in the US at colleges have become corrupted by social justice. What started innocently as “we need to use entrepreneurship to solve the social problems that confront our society” quickly deformed into an overt indoctrination of “social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion(DEI), along with a solid helping of environmental, social, and governance (ESG).

I subscribe to a lot of different startup email things. Some are published by mainstream media and some are published by university entrepreneur departments.

They all are woke. Business, Law, and Medical schools have gone relatively woke.

I fully suspect the next mainstream media tech emails I open will decry the fact that Elon Musk discriminated against porn stars and porn in general on Twitter Thursday. Every time there is some slight misstep on Twitter, those same publications can barely hide their glee. Of course, Twitter usage is off the charts and growing quickly, just as I predicted. I would never go short Elon Musk and I think he will 3x his Twitter investment.

I bet Facebook sees drops in usage this year since they are overtly censoring and not a friend of free speech. Of course, so is Google, YouTube, and Reddit.

As Milei eloquently pointed out, when you use free market and individual liberty principles in your policy, you win. Try to bend them to your will, eventually, you lose because it is against basic highly ingrained human nature.

When I was growing up, one of my middle school teachers wrote the word “entrepreneurship” on the chalkboard. I had never heard it before and it looked weird to me. I can still see it to this day in my memory. Hence, it piqued my interest. I didn’t totally understand what an entrepreneur was.

I became an entrepreneur and then I started funding different kinds of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are fun to be around if you haven’t been around a bunch. Why? It’s not because of their optimism. It’s because they don’t see limits.

The DEI/ESG infection of entrepreneurship at universities, in accelerators like TechStars, and the general gossipy conversation around entrepreneurship have all put artificial limits on entrepreneurship. I have seen some startups and some VC funds embrace the whole “B corporation” bullcrap. It’s failure theatre all around.

Not only that, the problems they seek to solve are:

• unsolvable, otherwise someone would have done it by now.

• too large, a startup isn’t going to cure global warming for example-assuming it exists at all (hint: it doesn’t in the way John Kerry thinks about it)

• too small a market size, otherwise there would already be a business there

• the market already has found substitutes instead of a dedicated solution

They say, “You can’t build (fill in the blank). It’s not solving this (fill in the blank made-up crisis).”

“You must hire these kinds of people.” Never mind that they are unqualified, see Claudine Gay. Or, they speak those words, but they don’t do it in practice. Instead, they hire the absolute best people they can find. I am looking at you, Mark Cuban.

“I need to allocate capital to only these kinds of people. They are underserved.” Never mind that they might not have had a blowout idea or the talent to execute on it.

“We need reasonable regulation”. Did you see SCOTUS Judge Kagan’s line of reasoning and questioning regarding AI as it pertains to the current Chevron case?

The court’s three liberal justices expressed support for keeping the doctrine in place. Justice Elena Kagan repeatedly suggested that federal agencies, with their scientific and technical expertise, are better suited than courts to resolve ambiguities in a federal statute.

Kagan cited as one example a hypothetical bill to regulate artificial intelligence. Congress, she said, “knows there are going to be gaps because Congress can hardly see a week in the future.” So it would want people “who actually know about AI and are accountable to the political process to make decisions” about artificial intelligence. Courts, she emphasized, “don’t even know what the questions are about AI,” much less the answers.

What’s wrong with letting the free market decide? Someone send Elena Kagan a copy of R.A. Radford’s Economics of a POW Camp.

If you invest in people who advocate for this stuff and execute on the woke stuff they say it is a guaranteed loser. I see a lot of VCs pay lip service to the ESG/DEI mantra, but when they invest or have to put it in their funds, they work on the idea of merit. A big leading fund just hired a new partner. He is not any more diverse than the other partners despite all of those same partners speaking from the “woke” playbook.

Many of the successful VCs or entrepreneurs I see touting this bullcrap have already climbed the mountain. They aren’t threatened by it. Yet, when they were young and starting, they didn’t climb the rungs of the ladder by internalizing and acting out the ethos of DEI/ESG, or wokeness.

It’s easy for entrepreneurship professors to pontificate and indoctrinate students about ESG/DEI as it pertains to entrepreneurship from their Ivory Towers. They have no skin in the game and they aren’t going to lose tenure if someone fails. It’s not the real world.

I have seen how “woke” employees screw up a start-up company. I have seen woke board members try to interject their agenda on a start-up. It can and often does kill a company.

Companies should build stuff to satisfy customer needs that customers are willing to pay for in some way. That causes growth, more employment, wealthier employees, and happy investors.

We all win with abundance, not constraints.

I hope that someone close to the presumptive Republican nominee for President will show the Milei video to him. Hopefully, he will internalize, and start talking about those things on the stump. You know the other party doesn’t understand this.