I read this article today by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post. And I wanted to throw up. This kind of ignorant drivel makes it very difficult for me to pursue my mission of helping people create more wealth for society.
Don’t devote more than a minute skimming Pearlstien’s article. His supposed analysis of capitalism is a swamp of shallow, anti-historical, politically-driven propaganda. The essence of his argument is that freedom is bad and the implementors of government-led coercion have a duty to control people to keep them from managing resources to create wealth for society. Except that Pearlstein wraps his twisted logic in a diatribe against “robber-baron capitalism.”
I have no idea if any rationally thinking person believes this kind of crap, but it is placed very prominently on the Post’s website, and after all, Pearlstein is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist (without a single day of real-world business experience–but I digress). So let’s suppose Perlstein’s thesis is true: That government coercion in all aspects of our income-producing lives is an absolute necessity. How can we use that to make more wealth for society?
Hmmm.
Surely you see my dilemma. After all, the professional politicians and career bureaucrats who implement government-led coercion are the dumbest people in society with the biggest history of self-promotion, creating all sorts of policies that do a great deal of harm to the most defenseless among us.
Ah! But those “leaders” are very good at creating emotional reactions in voters! And we all know that the vast majority of people make decisions emotionally rather than rationally (my Principle #3).
So I’m led to an inescapable conclusion: If we sincerely want to create more wealth for society in the twisted Pearlstein-World of government coercion in all aspects of our lives, professional politicians and career bureaucrats must be replaced with an environmentally sustainable cadre of wealth-producing, freedom-loving, small business owners who can whip up a lump-in-the-throat emotional connection with the concepts of freedom, creativity, industriousness, perseverance, self-reliance, and independence. Which means we have to view Pearlstein’s final sentence in his essay1 as a resounding indictment of the current miserable state of government, and an unstated endorsement of complete change in government leadership of the form I have just expressed.
1“In almost any form of capitalism, running the government is not the same as running the economy, and neither is like running Bain Capital.”