Posted on 10/14/2021 8:37:37 AM PDT by Starman417
Donald Trump failed at business… a lot. USFL, Tour de Trump, Trump Resorts, Trump Airlines, Trump University, ect. Leftists love to point that out. But that’s not the whole story. Trump had great successes as well. Not only has he developed world class properties around the globe, but he was also the producer and star of one of the most popular television shows on TV for a more than a decade. Most tellingly of all was his renovation of the Wolman Ice Rink. New York had spent $13 million and six years trying to renovate the Central Park icon when in 1986 they admitted they’d failed and had to start from scratch. Trump offered to do the job in six months and under the $3 million budget. Reluctantly the city gave him the contract and he finished in 4 months at a cost of $2.25 million. In just four months Donald Trump demonstrated exactly how dysfunctional government is!
But it’s his failures that provide the life lesson that leftists never get: Whether in business, love or most things non-government related, failure is the sign that someone was willing to risk the consequences that come with it in order to actually try and accomplish something. I say non-government related because government is one of the few aspects of life where failure is the rule rather than the exception, and rarely does it result in soul searching.
Proof abounds! From a failed fifty year War on Poverty to the abject failure of government schools, to twenty year wars that end exactly where they started, government continues to grow and accumulate more power year after year, regardless of the demonstrable and perpetual lack of success.
But government is not the nation. Government is not the people. Government is supposed to be a mechanism by which citizens protect individual rights and defend the nation. But that’s not what it is today. Today it’s everywhere, all the time. There is nothing in our lives that is more ubiquitous than government regulation.
Leonard Read wrote an essay called I Pencil that looked at the countless elements and activities necessary to make #2 pencil. The whole point of the piece, written in 1958 in the midst of the Cold War, was to demonstrate the complexity of what goes into making a simple pencil, and how society benefits from freeing up markets to provide all of the necessary inputs and how it’s unlikely government control could accomplish that task. It’s extraordinary, and it’s just a simple pencil!
Now exponentially expand the complexity of that process from a pencil to our modern society and you understand what the challenge is. On the one hand, you look at the iPhone or Google or Tesla and you might conclude we’re doing pretty well with government regulating as much as it does… but in reality, that’s a mirage. While a Tesla may be a step up from a 55 Ford, it’s still just a car. While carrying your iPhone in your hand is a leap from being tethered to a wall phone, it’s still just a mobile phone and a personal computer, both invented in the early 70’s, years after the beginnings of the Internet.
Over the last 50 years things have gotten smaller, faster and portable, but we haven’t cured cancer, we don’t have teleportation, time travel – as far as we know, and haven’t been back to the moon or beyond. We have lots of apps and services, but not much truly revolutionary.
Compare that to the 50 years from 1850 to 1900 when Americans invented such revolutionary things as the light bulb, the safety elevator, the telephone, the phonograph, the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher. Or between 1900 & 1950 when they invented air conditioning, plastic, vulcanized rubber, television, talking movies, the photocopier and the transistor. Not to mention the airplane, helicopters, and nuclear power.
While technology is most certainly unleashing heretofore impossible advances in research, medicine and data analysis, (MRI machine, sequence of the human genome…) the relative lack of tangible revolutionary advances is extraordinary. And why is that? Are we at the end of science? Have we accomplished everything that man can do? Obviously not. It’s almost as if there’s something holding America back...
There is. It’s called regulation. Federal regulation from a seemingly endless array of agencies: IRS, EPA, OSHA, DOE, DOT, etc. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulation alone costs the US almost $2 trillion per year in lost productivity. That’s essentially 10% of our GDP, annually!
Over the 50 years between 1921 and 1970 the American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 4.02%, while between 1971 to 2020 it grew at an annual rate of 2.73%, dropping down to 1.77% for the last 20 years. The result of that slowdown has been staggering. In 2020, after growing at a rate of 2.73% a year for 50 years the American GDP was approximately $21 trillion. Had it instead grown at the same rate it had the previous 50 years, the 2020 GDP would have been almost twice as high, $39 trillion. Imagine the R&D a whole additional US GDP could fund! $18 trillion, or put another way, every American household would have had another $50,000 to spend annually.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
One of the best ways to learn how to succeed is through failure.
Today’s namby-pamby culture wants people to be coddled and not put in positions where they may fail. And if they do, we find ways to bail them out.
This needs to change.
Unfortunately tax payer funded ventures become a public welfare fund for losing ventures that never get cut.
Easy, they squatted in the GOP and made it so unpopular that the crazies in the Democratic party had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted.
Yale Business School teaches about the Wolman Rink in its 101 course. Basic study of pure genius.
As to POTUS 45s failures.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
True, but with out effective regulations things such as the Iroquois Theater fire happened.
That is a great, evocative headline and a wonderful accompanying picture.
Unfortunately, whoever wrote the headline didn’t read Vince’s article because nowhere does the article address that topic.
That headline question can be expanded to ask “How can a muscular, can-do, post WW II country that valued liberty and the individual become governed by limp-wristed, effete, woke communist leftist collectivists inside of two generations?”
Still?
Take a broad view of men in general, there has been a slide to ward suicide and use of drugs due to the loss of purpose and use in society today. Warriors and strong men have been taken over with innovation, technology and automation. Brains is the future and destruction going forward.
I read most of it-very interesting. The sad fact is that the left will in no way buy it. While society moves ahead there will be those who won’t follow something they don’t understand. Resentment and envy. Then there are those that profit from the resentment. If government does it’s job no one notices. Just look at the fires in Calif. Cut out the dead trees and who gets credit for fires that don’t start? Jesse Jackson called it economic violence while he counted his money. Envy and resentment is a siren call. Takes little effort to follow.
Lawyers.
Because Americans are too afraid to demand the trial, conviction, and sentencing of Demonicrats to be hanged for murder, crimes against humanity, and treason.
It’s well thought out piece I agree with.
It’s just the author lost me when he said, “We have lots of apps and services, but not much truly revolutionary.”
I would argue that better communications and information is an enabler of all sorts of innovation and prosperity.
The internet killed a vast layer of “middleman” and “information toll collectors” that freed up labor to move on to more useful pursuits.
Demoncrats and RINOs would have found a way to tax it and waste it.
“Proof abounds! From a failed fifty year War on Poverty to the abject failure of government schools, to twenty year wars that end exactly where they started, government continues to grow and accumulate more power year after”
Liberals don’t think it failed.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.
Ask not for a lighter load ask for broader shoulders.
“Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature.” — Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Edward Carrington January 16, 1787)
The ultimate remedy for unconstitutionally big, alleged election-stealing, Democratic Party-pirated federal and state governments oppressing everybody under their boots...
Consider that all the states can effectively “secede” from the unconstitutionally big federal government by doing the following.
Patriots need to primary federal and state elected officials who don't send voters email ASAP that clearly promises to do the following.
Federal and state lawmakers need to promise in their emails to introduce resolutions no later than 100 days after start of new legislative sessions that proposes an amendment to the Constitution to the states, the amendment limited to repealing the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments.
Insights welcome.
I am against regulation probably more so than anyone here, but.... this guy is dead wrong and commits a common fallacy - that human progress occurs through tangible revolutionary advances.
There just is not that much of that. To the extent technical revolutions occur, it is because of the march of smaller more ordinary innovations that suddenly create - together - an opportunity that was not there before. It's not a blue sky genius think tank thing, but a lot of ordinary hard work that together adds up to big things. The modern cell phone is a revolution from what started with Bell, which was just an advance on two tin cans and a string made possible through the discovery of electricity which made the opportunity for telegraphy... The cell-phone is also just a stepwise advance on the original solid state diode, inch by inch to transistors to integrated circuits to microprocessors .....
The big breakthrough everyone likes to point to is the atom bomb. But the bomb was patented very soon after the discovery of fission. Once you knew about fission energy, bombs and reactors were largely a matter, not of physics, but of engineering, and a lot of the engineering is pretty straightforward.
Or, as anyone who has run a business will say,:"Having bad judgement is what gives you good judgement". Get knocked on your ass a few times and you learn...
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