The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The jobless times that vex the jobless soul

28 July 2010

Volume 12, Issue 30

Access now the “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday here at The Wonder Springs Chronicle and every Wednesday at Deep Woods Moola and Redux Rendezvous.

To make a donation to the Wonder Springs community please do so at the address below, or follow the donation links on the website.

>>PDF copy

>>Print copy

Welcome to jobless times that vex the jobless soul.

Welcome to the new decade of the early twenty-first century, where the future is based on hope. The hope that Christmas past will again invigorate Christmas present, or the hope that Christmas future cannot come too soon. Hope, hope everywhere and none of it changes reality, for we have no concept of reality, other than the future hopefully repeats or improves upon the past.

Japan has had a lost decade for the last couple, because their economy has developed permanent stagnation. So the country that just some twenty to thirty years ago was the business model for the world, now is just another economic player in a global community of lethargic materialism.

Europe for its part has done better than Japan, but it is sort of a unified Europe after all. But in the context of world economics, it seems that the proper concept is “Been there, done that, and got the shirt.” They seem however beginning to realize that loving one another, while better than war, still doesn’t necessarily make for a happy family.

Here in the United States we have recently made hope our God. Well if not really a god, hope in change seems to be a figment of perverse imagination, really creates nothing but more regulations, present deficits, and a future of higher taxes, coupled with either deflation or inflation.

The past is where we feel the most comfortable, so if we all hope together that past-future will evolve right before our eyes. Can I get a witness?

There is a television commercial that I find very disturbing. It comes to us from the chemical company Dupont. The essence of that commercial is that “We don’t invent anything we just innovate.” When you think about it seriously and expand the concept, innovation is what the world economic system has been doing, not for decades, but for generations.

What happens when innovation runs its course and we need to invent something new?

“Well, invention will take care of itself!”

Really? Name the last real invention that had a significant impact on the world. When did it take place?

I’m a pretty creative guy, but the best and most recent I can come up with is the personal computer. But when you investigate further you find that both Microsoft and Apple are based upon innovations from big corporations that either couldn’t see into the future, or thought the enterprise avenues were not worth the risks.

All you need to do is to carry that mindset back another generation and you should be able to see clearly the path that got us to the point of where we are today. The problems in the world today all stem from relying on inventions at least a century old, and we just hope that this material innovation will continue to give us the perception that we are making progress.

The problem is that truthfully nobody wants to make anything anymore; we just want to use it. That’s true with perhaps the exception of the Chinese. However if we broaden the perspective in to philosophy we might understand that perhaps the industrial age has run its course and hence we need to invent a new and less materially oriented future. That reality would not make the Chinese the makers of a new world order, but rather a humongous dinosaur.

Other than the wishful thinking of the intellectual elite class in America, and all the president’s men and women, Marxism and socialism have pretty much run their course. The older Scottish creation of capitalism really no longer creates capital, but just innovatively shuffles it from one titanic to another.

My God we have a problem that most people are unwilling to look at and it centers on a three-letter word. That word is God! Put simply we no longer invent or truly create anything simply because we have systematically removed the God who created everything — from everything we hope to do. How far will we need to fall and how long will it take before we again begin to understand that hope in mankind to create any positive future is just a human centered theology of glory?

As we have said many times the things of God begin with the individual. This is true not only with individual salvation, but with everything else. The problem that we face today is we have done virtually everything possible to eliminate the individual and force them to be part of some collective. That is true whether we are talking about being a good corporate employee, to being a bureaucrat, joining a church, to being a member of AARP. The unspoken indicative of a good person is to be a collective member of a good group.

By extension good people get a good job, raise their family, send the kids to college, buy lots of stuff and invest for retirement. Then once they really are beginning to understand how the world really works, they must retire, travel, play golf, and pretty much spend the rest of their days being a leach on everyone else. This is a great model, because once you know how the world really works, you become a threat to the model itself.

The whole institution of Wall Street is the holy temple of this way of life, for it is Wall Street where you must invest your meager wealth, for the hope of eventually converting it into money. Sadly, in recent years real estate has lost its zeal, for the Fat Cats on Wall Street, in collusion with government sponsored infinitely leveraged home loans, that were sold to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are now forcing a deflation of home values that will eventually equilibrate with the salaries you can make working your job.

To further this holy temple of making money on Wall Street, George W. Bush sought to create a distinct human species of Laissez-Faire Scoundrels. Sadly about six years into his reign, Alan Greenspan retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve, when the curtain began to be pulled back on real estate and a pending financial crisis began to seem like a forgone conclusion to everyone — except the good people who’s investments made it all possible.

Hopefully we believed that Barack Obama would give us some change that we really could believe in. That security would be centered on the reality that there are not any Wall Street Fat Cats in government. However in the name of preventing future Wall Street greed, Barack decided we would keep the power structure responsible for the failure in place. I think the reasoning went something along the line, “Since they understand the problem, they should be able to fix the mess they helped create. Such is the wisdom of change!

Thankfully a couple of weeks ago FED chairman Ben Bernanke essentially told Congress that he really didn’t know what the economic future holds, so he really doesn’t know what he would do to fix something that might just happen. That too is surely reassuring?

Be that as it may, it is widely reported for half a century that small business owners create most of the jobs in the country. What is never reported is the rest of the equation. That is probably true because everyone who should be looking at the net jobs, not just the created jobs, will find that net job creation comes quite rapidly after the birth of small businesses, thereafter jobs become static at best, and in composite figures net job losers, just like in global capitalism.

For the last two weeks we have repeated the mention of the study by the Kauffman Foundation that shows that net positive jobs are only created in startup companies. Really hopefully this third time is a charm. As far as I know the only other person who read the report is Fran Tarkenton. Surfing through the channels one night I mistakenly hit the Fox News button on my remote during Hannity. On his “Great American Panel, I recognized the football legend. The subject of the discussion was job creation and taxes. Blah, blah, blah! Fran began to speak and said, “Three million jobs are created each year by startup businesses, one million are lost by all the rest.”

Shucky darn, I am not alone after all! Sadly, Sean then burst into one of his bloviating talking points about how it is better to be rich and not pay taxes. Which, as usual with Sean, had absolutely nothing to do with anything else the other panel members had been saying.

The government Census Bureau data used in the Kauffman Report begins in 1977 and goes forward to 2005. I for one would like to speculate that since most of this data is from the time of decreasing marginal tax rates, and inversely a decrease in tax avoidance business development opportunities. What would that jobs data look like for the previous years of the century? Therefore that speculation is that many more jobs were created by startups during that earlier period and perhaps even established businesses may have added some jobs.

That would show that the Reagan era tax cuts, at least as it pertains to job creation was really Voodoo Economics and furthermore trickle down is really just a trickle, or a trick. Seriously however and moving beyond my speculation, what is really happening is that from its inception, America’s progressive tax system does not so much provide for free market enterprise, but rather picks winners and losers, thereby producing a net effect of weakening the entire country — both enterprise and government.

To eliminate the continued weakening of already anemic economic conditions, Russia instituted a Flat Tax in 2001 that currently stands at 13 percent. Follow the Flat Tax link to learn more about a true enterprise inducement instead of regressive tax structure.

Putting this into a historic global context, that you may not find opined anywhere else; for the last 100 years the United States of America has been continually experimenting with two Social Darwinist elitist taxation propositions, which closely models two prevailing old century economic systems.

The oldest, and also currently the American vogue, is the Marxist – socialism Collectivist Elitist model in which the government takes all the wealth and redistributes it to the poor, taking a healthy cut for itself and the state sponsored non benevolent bureaucracy, giving handouts to their crony friends, and letting the rest trickle down in the name of social justice.

Beginning in the Reagan Revolution and continuing through Bush 43, was the application of Objectivism of the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels, that says if humans cast their fate with basically good karma, good things will happen for all, but especially if you have access to capital in any form. However debt leveraged capital is best, because it reduces individual risk and lets the rest trickle down in the name of material consumerism.

Through all the smoke and mirrors and the manipulations of the wizard behind the screen, we were told that those in charge knew what they were doing and in the process the American Dream of the pursuit of happiness would be fulfilled without having to work for it. Those truly willing to be entrepreneurs and take the risk to invent something need not apply, because their work was risky and risk is something to avoid like the plague — or better yet, is the plague.

As a result all inventions evolved into innovation and the unique American species that we introduced in Redux Rendezvous IV of the Independenceus arduous was cultivated out of all the enterprise fields.

But just as the Marxist Collective Elitists survived in academia from the 1970s, through the Reagan Revolution unto the election of messianic Obama, the seeds of the wild effrontery of the common named Liberty Bell have been scattered all across the land by the providence of the Divine. The variety characteristics of this now very rare apple are reproduced below.

Independenceus arduous: (Liberty Bell) Difficult to establish, once established requires little care, can live for centuries, roots fix nitrogen from the air much like legumes, but also converts other minerals into plant available nutrients, the fruit looks unremarkable, but the fruit has long term effects on humans making them hardworking, generous, and seems to produce lasting happiness in desert conditions.

Business development is really a trade best learned through agronomy and natural ecology. Since the 1980s we have called this Business Ecology, Enterprise Symbiosis, and probably the most descriptive Métis Phylogenesis. A simple outline of these natural law principles and common sense will be found by following the Leadership Tab above, which will take you to our sister site of The Creation Leadership Center. The Phylogenesis Tab (direct link) there will take you to that outline.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, these truly jobless creation times are the vexation of the jobless soul. What makes it worse is virtually everything currently being proposed by those who self-righteously use myths they have heard repeated so often, that they assume they are truths, is that crucial contextual reasoning is being thrown into a wind of blathering noise.

What this nation needs is first and foremost is to make the choice that to continue on the present path really provides no sustainable future. That path has become a highway for a generation and all we have really done is change lanes from time to time.

America became great, because it birthed inventors and the entrepreneurs of the world. To build that nation again, we need to build a twenty-first century foundation, with the building blocks of individual freedom, liberty, equal justice, and lest we forget equal access to capital. That is a job we can all take part and eventually we all will receive our reward, and some of it may be in the form of money. More importantly that building will represent, who we are, and what we believe. For this is the right and the privilege the Creator has given to humanity, and it is God who will provide the resources.