Thanksgiving Message 2024

My special thanks this year go to business, both large and small. Business is the mainstay of the free Capitalist economy. What amazes me is how innovative and productive business continues to be given how much the Capitalist—i.e. free—portion of the economy has shrunk under the weight of the massive, and still growing, regulatory welfare state. Add to that that business, especially the most successful, is the most persecuted minority in America today. It is under attack, not for its vices, but for its virtues. By whom? By egalitarians, who label their money-earning success as "greed." With all of the Woke claptrap about “oppressed” groups, business is somehow not among them. Yet business gets blamed for every societal ill, even as it manages to keep us all alive and somehow moving forward under the meager remnants of Capitalistic economic freedom—and still make a profit. So, here’s a shout out to American business: THANK YOU for your profit-seeking service. 

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Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’

 Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’

I posted this answer:

Absolutely! 

When entrepreneurs expend time, energy, and resources to start, build, and run businesses, aspiring workers who fill the jobs these businesspersons create exploit the business for wages and salaries. In doing so, thay drain off sales revenues, cutting deeply into the business profits of the owners.

In the pre-Capitalist era, before wage labor, self-sustaining workers pocketed 100% of their sales revenues as profits. When Capitalism’s free market unleashed society’s most highly visionary, motivated, and productive workers—the economy’s Prime Movers, the people whom Karl Marx and his followers deny exist—the explosion of wage-paying jobs they created cut those net pre-tax profit margins from 100% down to today’s average of around 10%. 

The result of the rise of advanced industry under Capitalism was the explosion of exploitation by wage labor of the capitalist business Prime Movers. So, yes, Capitalism is most assuredly based on the exploitation of others.

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I offer this answer with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Workers, of course, no more exploit business by accepting their wage-paying jobs than business exploits workers by hiring them for wages to contribute to the business’s productive mission, as the fool Karl Marx falsely claimed. 

For a more thorough discussion of how this is so, see my answer to the Quora question, “What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour [sic] which produces surplus value? I recommend only positive answers in favour of labour [sic] being a source of value.”

Capitalism, in fact, is the anti-exploitation social system, if by “exploitation” we mean taking unfair advantage of another—because Capitalism is based on equality of moral agency; individual rights (and the corollary respect for the rights of others); trade (win-win relationships, including employment arrangements); the outlawing of private and governmental force except in self-defense (voluntarism); and the rule of objective law under a constitutionally limited government that does nothing else but secures these rights.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value?'

 QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'

Marx and His Exploitation Theory BY GEORGE REISMAN 

Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand

To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?

Did Unions Create the Middle Class?

The Unsung Heroes of the "Vaccine Thanks" that the Jersey Journal Forgot

The Jersey Journal ran a refreshing editorial titled Vaccine thanks -- for those who make ‘em, take ‘em and give ‘em out. The Journal opines:

What a difference a year makes.

Last Thanksgiving, most of us were hunkered down with just the members of our immediate household while phone calls, text messages, emails, FaceTime and Zoom helped us count our blessings with extended family and friends without risking a COVID super-spreader event.

Within weeks, vaccines started to get into arms and each month more and more people became eligible and rolled up their sleeves – and for that we are very, very thankful today.

The Journal offers Thanksgiving thanks to: 

• The scientists who developed the vaccines and who continue to develop increasingly effective treatments against COVID-19.

• The Trump and Biden administrations for fast-tracking vaccine production and distribution.

• The healthcare and administrative workers who get the shots into our arms.

• And each and every person who has been vaccinated.

What’s missing from this list? The elephant in the room—the pharmaceutical companies.

Business corporations are the institutions that organize the factors of production, make the crucial decisions, do the planning, provide the industrial facilities, and figure out how to get products into the hands of consumers. Business is the crucial link between the laboratories of the scientists and inventors and the useful products available to the end users in the market. The thinking, planning, and decision-making work of the management, and the investors who put up the financial capital, are crucial to the vaccine success story. In a time when the most overused word in the English language is “hero”, the Pharmaceutical companies are the unsung genuine heroes that the Jersey Journal’s vaunted thankfulness overlooks. 

“Big Pharma” should be prominently second on the list getting thanks. Profit-seeking business corporations are the unsung heroes not just of the pandemic but of the standards of living we enjoy, from the food we consume to the ability to make phone calls, text messages, emails, FaceTime and Zoom that we depended so much upon before the vaccines came along. It’s not that these others on the Journal’s list are not important to the productive process. It’s that without the commercialization services that business provides, there would be no one else to thank. Without these innovators, specifically the pharmaceutical companies—which, by the way, employ over 300,000 people in NJ—there would have been nothing for Trump and Biden to “fast-track” (relax obstructive government regulations of), and the vaccines would never have left the scientists’ labs, been produced by the hundreds of millions of doses, and gotten into the hands of the healthcare and administrative workers, let alone “our arms.” Imagine the $trillions of dollars in economic activity that would never have happened, the countless jobs that would not have come back, and the millions more who would have died, without Big Pharma.

So let me complete the Jersey Journal’s thank-you list. Thanksgiving thanks to the unsung heroes of the vaccine success story, the pharmaceutical companies who continue to make it possible to fight the pandemic.

Related Reading:

Menendez opposes fellow N.J. Democrat Pallone’s plan to lower drug prices By Jonathan D. Salant | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Pfizer Will Earn Billions in Profits from the Vaccines. It Should Be Much, Much More. by Scott Lincicome for The Dispatch

Without “Big Pharma,” Government Research Would Be Useless

Pharma Shouldn’t Apologize to Useless Do Gooders for their Life-Saving Vaccines

Basic Cancer Research Funding: Don’t Forget Pharma

Once Again, a Business Champion Morally Neuters Her Own Case

In A Brief History of Corporate Social Responsibility—and Why It Must Stop,  Kimberlee Josephson writes:

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) gained notoriety with Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 publication Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, and although times have since changed and CSR has taken on various forms, a constant question remains unchanged.

What is the role of business in society?

Some claim that a greater focus on corporate social performance over corporate financial performance is now warranted, while others adhere to a more classical viewpoint, siding with Theodore Levitt’s assertion that business should simply aim to achieve material gain while operating in good faith. Levitt, a German-American economist and professor at the Harvard Business School, spoke of “The Dangers of Social Responsibility” in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article. He posited that profit maximization over the long term should be the primary goal of business as this would have a spillover effect improving the wellbeing of society.

Not bad, so far. But ethics is the subject that continues to trip up the pro-Capitalists.

The propensity to exchange to benefit oneself as a means for societal advancement was most notably espoused in Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. Milton Friedman later drove this message home in his seminal essay in the New York Times Magazine about how the “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

The collectivist premise that the good of society is what justifies profit-seeking corporations is a fallacy that has deep roots. And it is deeply destructive to Capitalism. To "exchange"--i.e.,trade--to "benefit oneself" is not a "propensity." It is a requirement of individual survival and flourishing. It follows that self-benefit is not a means to "Societal advancement." It is a means to the personal pursuit of happiness. “Society” benefits, for sure, but only as a consequence of the successful achievement of personal happiness and flourishing.

Yet, the prioritization of self-gain has proven to be a hard pill to swallow for a culture that seeks emotional fulfillment via altruism. As such, businesses have not only been encouraged to engage in CSR, but also to harness it and pursue a higher calling.

Unlike the stages of the CSR Pyramid, which tended to be industry oriented, firms stretching beyond their domain of competence to prove themselves as worthy contributors to society at large (rather than streamlining efforts toward core stakeholders) is disconcerting for shareholders and distracting for budding entrepreneurs.

And well it should be! The creation of value for consumers and jobs for employees is precisely the act that makes business “worthy contributors to society.” There is no “at large” beyond which business owes some benefit, other than to respect the rights of others. 

 

The spearheading of virtuous ventures and advocacy advertising show no sign of slowing down—and it won’t, until social pressure shifts back to value rather than virtue.

There's so much wrong here. CSR can't stop when even opponents of CSR keep giving altruism the banner of virtue, while separating the pursuit of value from virtue.  How can "social pressure" even begin to "shift back" to value when even the champions of business are stuck on altruism as virtue? The young champion of business Kim Josephson once again proves Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction. And altruism can only be overcome by first explaining the real nature of altruism and then adopting a spirited defense of altruism’s antipode, rational selfishness.

Related Reading:

QUORA *: ‘Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?’

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 1

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 2

Why businesspeople need moral principles--Jaana Woiceshyn

In Defense of the Corporation—Robert Hessen: This book was first published in 1979 to defend “the right of the corporation to exist and function freely.” Hessen’s goal was to counter Ralph Nader’s argument that corporations are “creatures of the state.” The book is relevant today because Nader’s call for federal chartering of corporations is the precursor to Elizabeth Warren’s neo-fascist "Accountable Capitalism Act."

The Capitalist Manifesto--Andrew Bernstein

Elizabeth Warren wants to weaponize and federalize corporations for social justice activism--Mary Chastain   

Forbes Turns to an Anti-Capitalist

I often have more of a problem with fellow pro-capitalists than anti-capitalists because the pro-caps tend to accept the anti-caps’ basic premises, thus letting the anti-caps frame the issue and capture what they can’t on their own, the moral high ground.

But sometimes I get outraged, as I did when I read the Forbes Inside Scoop column titled Capitalism, Built To Last, written by Randall Lane, the chief content officer and editor of Forbes, and published under the tag “Billionaires”.

Randall Lane writes,

Forbes publishes the Just 100 in partnership with Just Capital, a non-profit company started by hedge fund billionaire and Robin Hood Foundation founder Paul Tudor Jones, one of the keenest capitalists. For him, the Just 100 was born of patriotic duty. "There is no bigger threat to our democracy than wealth disparity. It is a story normally reserved for monarchies, dictatorships and plutocracies," Jones tells me. "And yet we got in this pickle because over the past 40 years the corporate focus on profits took on manic proportions relative to other stakeholders such as employees, communities and the planet.” [my emphasis]

The Just 100 statement reads  

Shareholder returns mean nothing if a company's workers, customers, communities and environments aren't considered, too. That's the reasoning underlying the third annual Just 100, our ranking of America's best corporate citizens with our research partner Just Capital.

As it is every year, the Just 100 is a reflection of the issues that matter most to Americans and a ranking of how the nation’s largest publicly traded companies perform in these areas.

The relationship between shareholder returns and workers, customers, communities and environments is important but not relevant here. I covered this issue in depth here and here. My concern here is the Lane quote above.

Jone’s (and Lane’s) implication is that there is no difference between capitalist fortunes built on enriching willing consumers through voluntary trade, and the fortunes acquired by thieving monarchs, dictators, and plutocrats throughout pre-capitalist history! Is there anything the anti-capitalist Left can propagandize that approaches the destructiveness of lumping fortunes by productive work and fortunes by looting into the same package?

NO! This equivocation of capitalist fortunes with the looters’ fortunes of old into a package deal is a central feature of the free enterprise-hating egalitarian socialist Left. With “defenders” of capitalism like Paul Tudor Jones, who needs the socialist Left? And who needs Forbes? Shame on Forbes for bringing the anti-capitalist fox Jones into the capitalist henhouse. This, published in an allegedly pro-capitalist magazine! It is straight out of Elizabeth Warren’s playbook. I’m glad I canceled my Forbes subscription.

My answer to Jones’s disgusting equivocation is, thank you capitalism, including those who thrived over the last 40 years! Let’s consider just one. Ben Silbermann became a billionaire “on paper” when in April 2019 he brought public the company he’d spent the last decade building. That company is Pinterest, which, at the time it made Silbermann a billionaire, boasted 250 million active subscribers, a group that includes my wife. It has now surpassed 300 million! How does that put Silbermann (and his co-founders Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp) in the same category as monarchs, dictators, plutocrats, and other like thieves? How many of those grew their fortunes by creating a product that 300 million people find beneficial enough to voluntarily subscribe to?

My answer to Lane’s lauding of Paul Tuder Jones and his misnamed Robin Hood Foundation is, thank you to Michael Dell and Bill Gates for the computer upon which I am typing this post and to Sergey Brin and Larry Page for the Google Docs and Blogger I’m using—and, on behalf of my wife, to the newest billionaires like the Ben Silbermanns. You guys are part of a class that is only possible under the glorious, “pursuit of happiness” freedom of capitalism--a class that represents the greatest humanitarians that ever existed.

Related Reading:

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 1

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 2

“Francisco’s Money Speech”

Russell Crowe vs. the Real Robin Hood

The Truth About Robin Hood

Inequality Has Surged Since 1989, but the Lifestyle Gap Has Shrunk --John Tamny

QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'

Oxfam Attacks Prosperity, Part 1

Oxfam Attacks Prosperity, Part 2

Social Security vs. Robin Hood

Obamanomics vs. Robin Hood

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality—Don Watkins and Yaron Brook

Capitalism and the Moral High Ground—Craig Biddle

On This Veterans Day, Remember the Productive Americans Who Support the Greatest Military in History

This is the time of year that America rightly salutes, and gives thanks to, our military veterans who have protected this nation from foreign enemies for more than two centuries. I join in that celebration. My thoughts about them are conveyed in my Memorial Day tribute, and need no restatement here, except to reiterate the essence of that post:

The highest tribute I can pay to those who perished in that cause is to say that they were cut from the mold of the Founding Fathers; that they did not set out to die for their country but rather that they set out to fight, often at great personal risk, for the only values under which they desired to live—that radical set of ideals that is the United States of America. [See Related Viewing link]

But America’s veterans are not the whole story. So, I’d like to use this Veterans Day post to acknowledge the unsung hero of America’s military prowess, the productive American citizen. No military as strong and as competent as America’s can exist in a vacuum. It requires something else - something indispensable – a great economy.

America's economy, historically the most productive the world has ever seen, is the foundation that supports our military personnel. American taxpayers pay trillions of dollars in defense taxes. American defense contractors invest in and produce the most advanced weaponry in the world, weaponry that American soldiers rely upon to do their jobs, stay alive, and defeat the enemy. American technology produces the high tech means for our intelligence community to gather the information our soldiers need to keep track of the enemy.

What enabled the creation of the economic powerhouse that enabled the creation of our military powerhouse? What is the foundation of that foundation?

In 1776, the Founders of this nation signed the Declaration of Independence, which sanctioned the individual to egoistically pursue his happiness in support of his life, by guaranteeing him a government that protected his unalienable individual rights – his liberty – to act upon his own reasoning mind. That short document unleashed the power of the human mind, possessed individually by every person. The result was an unprecedented explosion of productiveness leading to exploding general prosperity and a standard of living unimaginable by the wealthiest noblemen of centuries past. The cause of that progress is simple: the unleashing of every individual to self-interestedly strive to make his own life the best it can be, by his own effort, in voluntary trade with others, free from the coercive interference of his fellow man, including the government. Another name for this social statement—free market capitalism. America was built not by sacrifice, as it is fashionable to assume, but by personal achievement unleashed by individual liberty.

America’s response to the threat of the Axis powers at the onset of World War II demonstrates this incredible power behind America’s military power—American free, private enterprise. If you’ve ever visited the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, you’d be struck—I know I was—by the section that displays the array of private, profit-seeking companies that rose to meet the threat posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Companies from Boeing and Caterpillar to Harley Davidson and the Mars Candy Company converted their consumer-oriented production facilities to produce for the war to defend America. Dozens of household names are profiled in the display, and undoubtedly far more smaller companies labored anonymously in support of the war effort.

Germany’s Hitler was said to have ridiculed America as soft, because America was good at making consumer goods like razor blades and washing machines, but not military hardware like aircraft. This was mentioned in a fantastic film narrated by Tom Hanks titled Beyond All Boundaries, presented by the museum. Indeed, charts on display at the museum showed that, in 1939, America’s military was utterly dwarfed not only by the commulative size of the Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan, but in comparison to those countries individually as well. But just a few short years later, America’s military dwarfed all three combined, as America’s industrial might turned its focus from producing consumer goods to producing for the American military. Hitler obviously underestimated what can happen when a free enterprise nation, which only wants to live in peace, freedom and prosperity, is threatened by tyrannical aggression.

Tyranny, as the history of WW II demonstrates—and as Germany, Italy, and Japan learned the hard way— is no match for a free market capitalist nation when that nation is aroused to turn its industrial might to self-defense. America won not only because of the bravery and skill of its soldiers, but in no small measure because America simply out-produced—in quantity and technological might—the enemy. Not only did America rearm amazingly fast, it did so even while rearming Britain and supplying arms to Russia, China, and other nations battling against the Axis powers. As the museum’s website explains:

Total war meant that all levels of the economy and all segments of society dedicated themselves to victory. FDR urged Americans to join the war effort by “out-producing and overwhelming the enemy.” While scarcity, rationing, and shortages became regular topics of conversation, so too did talk of duty, patriotism, unity, and victory. The United States, which had the world’s 18th largest military in 1939, mobilized itself for total war production almost overnight once the nation entered the war. The immediate conversion of peacetime industries into war production facilities involved companies of all sizes and types. Toy companies began to manufacture compasses. Typewriter companies made rifles and piano factories produced airplane motors. The Ford Motor Company ceased producing cars and began turning out tanks and bombers. And behind each soldier stood hundreds of civilian workers making everything an army needs to fight around the globe. The Depression was over. Full employment was a reality and confidence in victory was strong.

From 1940 until the Japanese surrender, the United States produced more than 300,000 aircraft, 86,000 tanks, and 12.5 million rifles. Its shipyards were just as productive, building 107 aircraft carriers, 352 destroyers, and 35 million tons of merchant shipping. The US also supplied a majority of war materials for its Allied partners. By 1945, the U.S. had produced more than twice the war supplies of Germany, Italy, and Japan combined.

If Hitler underestimated America, some in Japan, it seems, were more prescient. As Japan’s political leadership confidently prepared for war with America, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto soberly warned:

Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians (who speak so lightly of a Japanese-American war) have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

After his nation's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto was said to have uttered, “I fear all we have done today is to awaken a great, sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Indeed, from a starting point of 18th largest military, America had, as FDR envisioned and as Yamamoto feared, out-produced and overwhelmed the enemy. So, let’s celebrate, along with the brave contributions of our vets, the productive American of all income levels—the CEOs, entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists and inventors, workers, investors—and the resultant industrial powerhouse upon whose shoulders our military might stands. Let’s celebrate the individual pursuit of happiness that is the fuel for that American strength. Let’s celebrate his willingness to pay for, build, and support the military whose job it is to protect his pursuit of the good life.

Today, the foundation of America’s economic and military might is under intense attack by those who would “fundamentally change America”—a change that, in actuality, has been going on for decades. Let’s stand up and reject that slow-motion “change” from liberty to tyranny, and instead renew our allegiance to the Founding Fathers, who engineered a change from tyranny to liberty. The best tribute one can give to our military veterans is to vow to fight for the rediscovery and reinstatement of the ideals that this country stands for: the supreme value of the individual human being, his freedom, and a government whose sole duty is to protect his right to live and prosper for his own sake.

Margaret Thatcher correctly observed: "Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy." That philosophy--the inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--is what the American veteran fought to defend, for herself and for us all. That is the fight that we all--we, as private citizens who value freedom, with freedom's most potent weapon, our individual voices--should continue at home.

Happy Veterans Day!!

-Mike LaFerrara

Related Reading:

Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II -- Arthur Herman

Atlas Shrugged – America's Second Declaration of Independence

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Why a Free Man Fights—Lt. Col. Scott McDonald, USMC

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