By Robert Ringer - Monday, June 25, 2012
Watching the U.S., the EU, Japan, and other once prosperous countries going broke is a sad sight to behold. And what they all have in common is that they’ve tried state capitalism — a shotgun marriage between capitalism and socialism — and found that Margaret Thatcher was right when she said, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Now, spoiled parasites everywhere are angry because their hosts have run out of other people’s money. The message of the parasites is straightforward: “We don’t give a damn if you don’t have enough money to pay our entitlements. We want them anyway!”
For convenience, in this article I will lump together all left-wing state capitalists — liberals, progressives, socialists, communists — under the umbrella of “progressivism.” In fact, let’s make that “retrogressivism,” because the term progressivism is a misnomer. Progressives are really Retrogressives, because their words and actions make it clear that they hate progress.
By contrast, the Entrepreneur thrives on progress. As a result, his creativity, efforts, and willingness to take risks have resulted in Western civilization having the highest standard of living mankind has ever known.
Because the Retrogressive is an enemy of human progress, he is also the natural enemy of the Entrepreneur. The Retrogressive harbors enormous disdain for the Entrepreneur because of his annoying habit of creating products that people want rather than those the Retrogressive believes they should want.
Given that a hero is a person who accomplishes extraordinary feats under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, I would argue that the Entrepreneur is a bona fide hero. After all, he makes a living accomplishing extraordinary feats under extraordinarily difficult circumstances (think government taxes, regulation, and harassment).
But isn’t the Entrepreneur driven by a desire to create wealth for himself? Absolutely. So how does that make him a hero? For one thing, successful Entrepreneurs stay in business and, as a result, create jobs, produce products and services that people want, and do the one thing government can never do: stimulate the economy.
The Founders did not give the federal government the authority to “create jobs,” “get the economy moving,” or “strengthen the middle class.” These are nothing more than Retrogressive euphemisms for increasing government power and crowding out Entrepreneurs who create real wealth, real jobs, and a fundamentally strong economy.
Further, the Entrepreneur’s eating habits are directly tied to results. Many of the most successful people in our nation’s history have lost everything, or come close to it, by putting everything they owned on the line to take the entrepreneurial plunge.
Thomas Jefferson struggled financially throughout his life and died broke, but it never dampened his enthusiasm for entrepreneurial pursuits. Through all his financial difficulties, he not only was instrumental in helping to create “the great American experiment,” he also founded one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, the University of Virginia.
Again, making money is what motivates Entrepreneurs. Not helping people . . . not “saving the world” . . . not protecting the human race from “climate change.” This does not mean that he doesn’t care about these things. It’s just that none of them have anything to do with his chief business objective — making money.
The bonus to all this is that the invisible hand of the marketplace guarantees that an unintended consequence of his actions is that others will benefit from his efforts. The smart Entrepreneur realizes that in order to achieve his financial objectives, he must create value for others.
Unfortunately, as Tocqueville put it, “There exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”
Barack Obama and his cadre of Obamaviks are counting on this depravity to win in November and finish the job of burying the remnants of America’s great experiment. Our government is now saturated with Retrogressive politicians and bureaucrats who view the Entrepreneur as the evil enemy because he stands in the way of their desire to control all aspects of every individual’s life.
Retrogressives are dangerous people. They lie; they steal; and, above all, they believe in the use of force. You cannot change them. You cannot reason with them. The only solution is to defeat them.
The reality is that the United States is now embroiled in a second civil war. The divide between liberty and tyranny is irreconcilable, and it’s time for those who believe in liberty to come to grips with the reality that the agenda of the Retrogressive is to transform the United States into a collectivist utopia where the government plans, controls, and, yes, owns everything.
Thus, the major question of our time is, which side shall prevail? Will it be the Retrogressive, who extols the virtues of a collectivist society in which men and women are living, breathing automatons? Or will it be the Entrepreneur, who believes passionately in the right of the individual to determine his own destiny, to work as hard as he chooses, to earn as much as he possibly can, and to keep the fruits of his labor?
It is the Entrepreneur, not the government, who built America and made it the most prosperous country in the history of the world. And the only way the U.S. can be rebuilt is for government to get out of the way and allow the Entrepreneur to move the country forward.
Economic growth and stability can come about only by unleashing the creative genius of the Entrepreneur, allowing the market to take its natural course, and ridding the economy of artificially created wealth. And a good start on that would be to vote out of office in November all Retrogressive members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — who are standing in the way of progress.
To preorder Robert Ringer’s new book, The Entrepreneur: The Way Back for the U.S. Economy, Click Here.
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Copyright © 2012 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.
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