Entrepreneurship Is the Key to Equality

The Marxist agitators are out in force, chomping at the bit to bring about the destruction of the American way of life. They're certain they're going to get it right this time, exploiting (again) civil unrest and widespread concerns about injustice.

But notwithstanding profound historical injustices like slavery, broken treaties with Native American tribes and deplorable factory working conditions during the Industrial Revolution, Americans have stubbornly refused to flock to collectivism as a solution.

Why is that?

Our Constitution and emphasis on individual liberties is a big part of the answer. Another important (but less acknowledged) part is the role of entrepreneurship in the American dream.

It is so easy to start your own business here that we take it for granted. But ease of entrepreneurship contributes significantly to both individual satisfaction and societal benefit -- especially wealth creation. And it isn't just about starting a business; it is about the ecosystem in which a business can grow. Scholars have produced reams of evidence tying intractable poverty in underdeveloped nations to complex, multilayered bureaucracies in governments very like those Marxists seek to install. But small-business owners have neither the wealth nor the connections to navigate government complexities or pay lawyers to do it for them. Stilted from the start, they are perennially cut off from the kind of business growth needed for economic development. Multiply that across an entire country and you end up with widespread impoverishment and little hope of improvement.

The left doesn't understand this phenomenon at all. As with so many other things, its worldview seems constrained by the experience of 19th-century Europe, where those in control of the land in agrarian economies took control of the factories in increasingly industrialized societies.

That was never the story in America, where the wealthiest individuals in our history started from nothing. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil (and the world's wealthiest man in his day), was abandoned by his father and raised in modest conditions by a thrifty mother. Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate and philanthropist, was born in a one-room weaver's cottage in Scotland and immigrated to the U.S. with his family at age 13. Cornelius Vanderbilt quit school at 11 to work on his father's Staten Island ferry.

Today's super-success stories -- people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sara Blakely -- have similarly unremarkable backgrounds; none came from great wealth.

In general, the left's understanding of "business" is shamefully inadequate. But consider who the major players are: In the media, Hollywood, academia or Washington, D.C., how many have ever started their own businesses? Artists and athletes are businesses in their own right, but far too many of them blow through everything they earn. Academics work in an atmosphere where the ultimate professional achievement is tenure -- which (in theory) guarantees that you cannot be fired, no matter how poor your performance. And Washington, D.C., pays most of its attention to the big businesses that can afford to spend millions on lobbyists.

Most of the left equates all business with "big business" and big business with corrupt outliers like Enron, pushing the false and tired trope that businesses only become successful by exploiting others. They ignore the millions of businesses that have become successful by providing excellent, quality products and services that people need, want and are willing to pay for.

The real story of business in American is about small, family-owned businesses and the entrepreneurs who have started them. According to the most recent U.S. census reports, out of over 34 million firms in the United States, fully 77 percent -- about 26 million -- don't employ anyone other than the owners. Of the remaining 8 million firms, the majority (65%) employ fewer than 20 people. Ninety percent of all businesses are family businesses. These small businesses matter for so many reasons: Operating them teaches financial skills, management skills and service skills, and they create wealth, not just income -- something that has been a hot-button issue with African Americans for decades and is behind many of the calls for reparations.

One would think that at a time when the nation is talking about Black economic opportunity, we would be hearing more about successful Black entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, Charles Clinton Spaulding, John H. Johnson and even Oprah Winfrey, the nation's first Black female billionaire. Their stories are America's story, and what they accomplished others can accomplish as well. This is a powerful message that is being almost completely overlooked.

Entrepreneurship is truly one of our country's most diverse undertakings (that is literally what the word means in the original French). Untold numbers of immigrants have arrived with nothing and brought themselves and their families out of poverty by the businesses they started. This is still true today. In Silicon Valley, more than 50% of our high-tech "gazelles" -- young companies with at least a billion-dollar market capitalization -- were started by immigrants. Much smaller mom-and-pop businesses started by immigrants bringing new foods, music and arts to the public's attention. In so doing, those cultures become quintessential parts of American culture.

In other words, the economic integration is a driver of societal integration and upward mobility.

Changes to government policy are fine as far as they go. But if we want to create greater economic opportunity and equality for African Americans and everyone else, what we really need are more entrepreneurs, and more support for them to help them prosper.

That -- not Marxism -- is what will transform lives for the better.

Democratic Party = Dictatorship (don't vote Democrat)

Their Lenin statue is already here.

The NFL Is on the Brink

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL's megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America's national sports event.

The league has survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn't reintegrate until the mid-'40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially-blind meritocracy.

The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far, the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.

The league's owners are a cross-section of America's most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families -- many of them politically well-connected.

Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.

In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. He claimed he was protesting the treatment of African Americans.

Kaepernick was an odd revolutionary. His mother is white, his father is an African American of Ghanaian-Nigerian ancestry, and he was raised by a middle-class white couple. Kaepernick's only prior controversy was being accused by another player of using the N-word. He denied it but was still fined by the league.
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Kaepernick's rejection of "The Star-Spangled Banner" eventually spread throughout the NFL. Even though he was a backup quarterback, Kaepernick became a resistance idol. Soon he was a corporate ad man pitching Nike sneakers.

Then game attendance fell. So did television viewership. Apparently, lots of fans had no desire to spend their Sundays watching 20-something multimillionaires lecture them that the American flag was not worth honoring.

In 2018, the league belatedly banned players from kneeling for the national anthem. By then, Kaepernick had left football and become a megaphone for even more corporate sponsors.

Now the NFL is in the news amid national protests and violence following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police.

The inspirational song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" -- also known as the Black national anthem -- will be played before every game of the first week of the season. The league is considering letting players wear protest insignia on their helmets or jerseys. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized to players for not listening to them about racism.

Yet the NFL capitulation poses fundamental problems for the league. It has now essentially green-lighted the sort of activism that in the last few years has been eating away its profits.

NFL owners and head coaches are almost all white. But nearly three-quarters of the players are black. Those who play the game obviously want to see more diversity in coaching and ownership.

In a culture so obsessed with identity politics, is it the players or the owners and coaches (or both) who do not "look like America"?


Given that about 13 percent of the U.S. population is Black, and given that the Black Lives Matter movement embraces concepts like proportional representation, today's NFL teams hardly qualify as diverse. Social activists might argue that the league should mentor and recruit more Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans to better reflect their percentages of our diverse national population.

Perhaps an NFL compromise could ensure that 30 percent of coaches and owners are nonwhite, thus reflecting current U.S. demography. But then, in reciprocity, the players would match such mandatory demographic diversity -- leading to Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, whites and those of mixed ancestry accounting for 87 percent of the player population. The NBA might also take note.

This progressive model of proportional representation could also apply to overrepresented white athletes in hockey, tennis, golf and swimming -- sports faulted by identity politics groups as being unfairly overrepresented by whites.

Obviously, such racial gerrymandering will not happen because fans value meritocracy over ethnic affiliations.

Or at least they did.

If the multibillion-dollar NFL decides that multimillionaire players have no obligation to stand to honor a collective national anthem, and that there will be separate anthems and politicized uniforms, then millions of Americans will quietly shrug and change the channel.

And that silent protest will make the 2016-17 anthem protest look like child's play.

AG Barr Calls Out Hollywood's Appeasement of Communist China

During a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan Thursday, Attorney General Bill Barr went after Hollywood for capitulation to the Chinese Communist Party. 

"The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg, an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government, indeed, whole-of-society, campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower," Barr said. 

"Hollywood actors, producers, and directors pride themselves on celebrating freedom and the human spirit. And every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood’s ideals of social justice. But Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights. This censorship infects not only versions of movies that are released in China, but also many that are shown in American theaters to American audiences," he continued. "Many Hollywood films that have been altered, one way or another, to conform to CCP propaganda."

Barr didn't stop at Hollywood and also warned of China's ambitions in technology and global trade domination. 

"A centerpiece of this effort is the Communist Party’s 'Made in China 2025' initiative, a plan for PRC domination of high-tech industries like robotics, advanced information technology, aviation, and electric vehicles. Backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, this initiative poses a real threat to U.S. technological leadership," Barr said. 

In the aftermath of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has increased pressure on China. During an interview with Townhall earlier this week, President Trump said he will soon be making an announcement about further enticing American companies to manufacture products in the U.S. or friendlier countries.

"You'll see over the next few weeks I'm doing something that is extremely bold. You'll see. I think you'll be extremely impressed by it. I've been fighting this with China for a long time. You had the globalists, they want to make everything in China. We can make our pencils here," Trump said. "I'm very upset with China, I think what China did is a disgrace."

"Whether they knew it or not I won't get into that but one thing, they knew it well enough that it didn't get into the rest of China but it did get out to the rest of the world including Europe and the U.S. then they tried to blame it on Europe, then they tried to blame it on American soldiers, they did everything," Trump said. "It's the China virus, whether you like it or not, it's the China virus...I am very angry with China."

Are We Headed For A One-Party State?

’ve been in the habit for many election cycles of telling people when they asked me how important the election was, I would always say it’s the most important election since the last one and will be the most important one until the next one. I think this may be a little different here … this election is different. This is big, no doubt.” - Brit Hume

If you’re a Trump supporter, this election cycle so far has been sort of like sitting down to watch your favorite college football team play a much-anticipated game against a hated rival. You’ve got friends over, popcorn popped, nachos, drinks, the works. Big screen blaring in the man-cave, excitement in the air. The kick-off happens and you settle in for a few hours of football bliss with your friends. Then, your all-thumbs kickoff-return man fumbles the ball, which the other team recovers for a touchdown. “OK, we can come back from this,” you think. But down 7-0, your QB wants it all back on the next possession, nay the first throw of the next possession, which then gets picked off and promptly returned for a pick-six. (I’m a Tennessee fan, y’all. I’m used to scenarios like this.)

Two more sloppy possessions and a porous defense and you’re down 28-0 and it’s not even halftime. Suddenly, the pizza is cold. The beer is warm. The nachos don’t taste so good. Your friends want to leave, and the party you’d looked forward to for so long looks more like a funeral parlor scene than an epic evening with friends. You turn the channel or go outside to do some yard work - anything to get your mind off what’s happening to the team you love. Maybe you check the score in an hour, but your evening’s been ruined. Your disappointment might even turn to anger at your team or at least the players or coaches who screwed up or didn’t seem to try hard enough. “You can take a loss, but at least fight,” you tell them in your mind. “At least make a game of it. At least make the time I spent rooting for you worthwhile.”

It’s one thing to lose on a last-minute drive, but quite another to be out of the game before it’s barely started.

Sadly, you probably know exactly where I’m going here. So far, the campaign of President Donald Trump isn’t even making a game of it. They aren’t showing up. They’re fumbling the ball. The QB is tossing picks to linebackers. You could drive a mack-truck through that soft defense. Yeah, it’s brutal, made all the worse by the fact that the other team is playing the game from a literal basement with a QB who looks about two steps away from a nursing home Alzheimer’s wing.

When polling comes out, it’s not even close. 14 points here. 10 points there. Down in every battleground state and even GOP strongholds like Texas and Georgia seemingly aren’t safe. Yeah yeah, I know Hillary was thumping Trump in 2016 too, but this is different, and we all know it deep down. Like a football game gone horribly wrong, the temptation might be to turn away, to focus on other things, to try not to care. And while we’ve certainly got to live life and try not to make the absurd, gut-wrenching politics of the current age absorb us so much, there is infinitely more at stake this November than any football game.

I’m not here to analyze every Trump mistake, nor to blame the entire unfolding fiasco on him. It’s a team effort, and so far the team has let us down, big time. What I do want to do is make everyone vividly aware of the stakes. A Joe Biden presidential win likely means Democratic control of the Senate as well. “No biggie,” you may say. We’ll just “get ‘em next cycle.” The problem with that, however, is there are several structural changes that Democrats can and will certainly make that could make it impossible for any Republican to win a national election ever again. 

Before you dismiss me as a Chicken Little (and if you do, believe me I hope you’re right and I’m wrong), consider a sobering discussion Fox News host Tucker Carlson had with Brit Hume last week. After analyzing the part of Joe Biden’s unveiled Marxism-lite plan that includes the legalization of at least 22 million illegal immigrants currently living in the U.S., Carlson asked Hume if it was “fair to say no Republican could ever win a national election at least in the foreseeable future?”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption in the foreseeable future, and it wouldn’t take 22 million,” Hume told Tucker. “Let’s say the number were half that. 11 million new voters, the overwhelming majority of whom would vote for the Democrat, would keep the Democrats in power in the White House for sure for several election cycles at least.”

Beyond the electorate change, which would be bad enough, Hume and Carlson covered two other things Democrats could do quite easily with simple majorities in both Houses - abolish the filibuster (something the normally solid Mitch McConnell didn’t have the guts to do) and make the District of Columbia a state. If Democrats win in November and accomplish this trifecta in the next two years, in the words of Tucker Carlson, “we are headed at very high speed toward effectively a one-party state at least for the foreseeable future.”

In other words, the presidential and Senatorial elections about to take place in November 2020 are by far the most important elections of our lifetimes, and it’s truly not even close. Trump’s 2016 victory and judicial nominations bought us some time and maybe even the ability to fight back on some fronts going forward, but a November loss could be a permanent game over for national conservative governance of any kind.

As to Trump’s much-needed upping of his game, Hume wondered if the president “can stop talking about himself long enough to talk about something else and talk about their agenda and his message.” I sure hope so, because what’s at stake is far more important than the president’s ego. Is he up to the task? We’ll see. Like the football game that seems hopelessly out of control in the first quarter, it doesn’t look good so far. But the good news is the Trump campaign is like a few football teams we’ve known over the years. Streaky. Error-prone. Porous D. But damn, that offense can be pretty dynamic at times. Like 2016, it would be a mistake to ever count him out. But no matter what the scoreboard says, conservatives and liberty lovers of all stripes had best do more than his or her part until the clock says zero, or all could be lost forever.