Mark suggests that my ideas “have not faced real world testing.” He is right to a certain agree. But I think a better way to look at it is that when the country was founded, the choices they made had not faced real world testing. We now have the benefit of experience, and need to make adjustments made on that experience.
Mark doesn’t agree with me, but I can state with 100% surety that he does not understand me. He suggests that my idea requires “massive government intervention,” when nothing could be farther from the truth. My system will break the back of big government, big union and big corporations. As such, everyone, at first glance, is opposed to my ideas. (lucky me) It will make no one comfortable, including the churches. Even those who agree with me, whom I have talked to in depth, don’t fully realize the nuance of my ideas. How could they? They haven’t had my “real world” experience. What Mark suggests my ideas lack is exactly what they have and why they will work.
This, of course, forces me to use my experience to justify my ideas. While people do seem to respond best to such methods of inquiry, they are the ones I feel most uncomfortable writing about. A long time ago Roger said that writers have to write about themselves, since that was the topic they know best. While I dislike the idea, what Roger said was, in fact, true. I guess if I am to expect others to agree that ideas are true that they don’t like, then I must do the same. Here then, is a brief synopsis of my “real world” experience.
I started a business 17 years ago with a $5000 investment. During that time I have always been a very small business with a limited number of employees, payroll, etc. If I go bankrupt tomorrow, it won’t be because I don’t know how to run a business, but because I simply cannot control my boredom with it. I know what the tax laws are, and how they work. I used to be a Schedule C, now I am a C Corp. I once worked for a company that owned a photographic film processing division, and claimed the filtering of silver from the waste solution as a tax credit under the silver mining recovery credits in the tax code. I can do my own taxes, and I was once audited. They owned me money.
My business is somewhat unique. I am a screen-printer, but I am also a promotional items distributor. Where most people who inhabit both these worlds tend to be primarily one and dabble in the other, I am an expert in both, and our sales are pretty much 50/50. This is not by chance. I grew up in the screen-printing industry, but my fascination with politics has always been to advertising. The first t-shirt I ever printed was IMPEACH NIXON, while I was in high school. Black Prang dye on a white t-shirt. That was pretty much state of the art at the time.
Since I hung out my shingle, I did a t-shirt given to Muhammed Ali, pens for the Grateful Dead, and an American gymnastics competitor in the next Olympics will own something I printed. I have had customers who used to be drug dealers, and have had a customer who was a rising star at Arthur Andersen, moved over to private banking, where he embezzeled five million dollars. I’ve done business with the state government and federal government, agencies, hospitals, people who have set up their own non-profits, small businesses and large corporations. I’ve even printed people’s marriage proposal on a golf tee flag. The world has come to my door, and I am very lucky for it. I know lots of people in business, and their varying degrees of success. I know how a new business thinks, a middle-manager, an academic, and an experienced owner all see the world. I know what makes them different, and I know what makes them the same.
I also observe myself. The role I occupy is even more interesting. I am a manufacturer. I am an old world artisan, like Ben Franklin and his printing press, but I am also a broker. I can sell you a Bic pen, which I did not manufacture or print. I represent factories, which puts me in a second role as a merchant. I control the marketplace by deciding which factory will get the work for your order, and I get to decide what products I want you to buy. In addition to occupyiong those two worlds, I am also selling advertising. That finely crafted system of manipulation which did not even exist 200 years ago. Like most things, advertising is a double-edge blade. It can tell you information, like what to do in the case of an accident, or it can tell you a lie, and convince you to believe something that is not true.
It is also, I have come to recognize lately, a way to express our pride. If pride is a sin, then America is awash in sin. Advertising drives our culture. The question I have been puzzling for as long as I can remember is, “What drives advertising?” Remember, it did not exist 200 years ago. It has a life and a hunger all its own. Word of mouth advertising is not good enough, we need to feel like we are doing something proactive, even though the return is usually much less than 3%. As long as we can cover the expense, we don’t question the effort. The marketplace has already proven that lawyers can exist without advertising, and most small businesses survive without mega-doller ad budgets. Despite the obvious, we still think that the world will cease to run without advertising.
The problem is not advertising. Advertising is a symptom of something else that is wrong. Everyday we throw away tons of newspapers, but children go begging for new textbooks. All that printing, and all that paper, all diverted away from our most important responsibility: our children. And no one questions the system? Instead, they point fingers at each other. We are locked into a bi-polar disorder. Mark assumes I am in favor of big government, because if I want to change the role of the corporation, then I must be in favor of big government. Everyone thinks there are only two choices. At one point, we only believed in one choice, that there had to be a king. The marketplace became the second choice. I present a third.
People will continue to make immoral choices under my system, but their drive to make them and their ability to hide them will be more limited. Mark said he was sharing a beer with a friend who wanted to create a better corporation, but couldn’t because the system stood in his way. Profit-sharing cannot exist in a vacuum when you are the only company doing it and interest is causing inflation. Under the current system, corporations must be predatory to survive. They are actually victims of the Interest Mechanism. Mark thinks I am attacking them, when what I am doing is protecting them, and with them, all of us.
As Thomas Paine once said, “A long habit of not thinking a thing
wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” The Battle of Lexington and Concord was less than fifty miles from where I sit. So too is Logan Airport, where two planes taxied on a journey that would change the history of the world.
The “real world” has come to pay me a visit, as it did to my fellow citizens 200 some years ago. Violence is only a short-term solution. At one point, you need to think about the problem, and act on the solution. I am ready. The question is, are you? We only have a minute to be ready, or all will be lost.
Cheers.
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