My Beauty Best Teacher

Kenyan Entrepreneur reacts to a David Brooks Haiti Op-Ed about "Progress-Resistant Cultures"

...culture has a lot to do with a country’s progress. I’ve said before that Africa’s poverty can be attributed to the fact that Africa does not have a culture of production. If something cannot be extracted from the ground (e.g. oil, gold, etc, etc) – we simply will not create or make it and this culture of non-production is the main cause of Africa’s poverty. That’s why foreign aid hasn’t worked. It’s because the do-gooder’s of the world have refused (out of fears of being labeled “racist” – have refused to confront this underlying question of culture).

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U.S. investors overwhelmingly see Democrat US President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a recent Bloomberg survey. It is not a surprise then to this humble blogger that the Great Recession continues- the unemployment rate 'only' stayed at 10% in December because 661,000 people gave up looking for a job and quit applying for unemployment benefits.

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and only one-out-of-five are confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency. Since the Great Recession began in 2007, some 8.6 million jobs have been lost and small businesses, the normal source for new jobs, are still shedding workers. Fewer than 10% added employees, while more than 20% cut back— and the cuts averaged nearly twice as many per firm as the hires at the expanding companies (source here).

Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 the recession started, although Republican lame-duck President Bush can be tagged with 2 years of the recession, and President Obama has now overseen an additional year of recession, with no end in sight. We've had recessions before, but most have only lasted 2 years before we recovered- this one is different because it has gotten worse in the last year and now looks to go on several years longer.

Bloomberg reports:

“Investors no longer feel they can trust their instincts to take risks,” said poll respondent David Young, a managing director for a broker dealer in New York. Young cited Obama’s efforts to trim bonuses and earnings, make health care his top priority over jobs and plans to tax “the rich or advantaged.”

To recover from this recession could take as many as five years or even more to recover all of the eight-plus million jobs lost since March 2007. That's because we would have to create an additional 1.7 million jobs annually beyond those for the 1.3 million new people who enter the work force every year. And jobs will not be created in a high regulation and high tax environment overseen by an anti-big-business President who's most stirring rhetoric can be summed up as 'business is bad.'

According to the Washington Post, the top 20% of the nation's households account for 40% of all spending, and now are facing a President who is determined to 'spread the wealth' and 'soak the rich'. These households, in the face of the threat of government, are now hoarding their resources and cutting back on spending, leading to a dramatic drop in economic activity in our nation.

The issues might come and go, the personal politics might come and go, and politicians will come and go, but in the end, the most important factor to consider when voting is whether to elect a President or Congressman or Governor or Commissioner who is going to encourage job creation, encourage business, and make people feel good about making money (and spending and saving and investing money). And usually, these people are not Democrats.

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh writes:

Africa is being ceaselessly raped by the political class, because “We-The People” are all sleeping on our responsibilities of conscientiously disobeying these tyrants and rising to repossess our land and heritage. Our pettiness empowered the rise of midget tyrants across our continent. That is to say that whenever a society is governed by the ‘organized irresponsibility’ of a clique of renegades, the timid acquiescence of the majority gave it its legitimacy. And when this becomes the case, such a society becomes an unwitting witness to the inauguration of its own decay. It consumes itself, a la Ola Rotimi, in the heat of its own unwisdom...History has equally shown that whenever or wherever bandits rule, organized irresponsibility rules. That is not the unsettling dimension of it all. The fearful thing here is not only the extent to which this irresponsibility is organized, but the ease with which it co-opts and conscripts the majority into a mode of default timidity; where they remain frozen; immobile, clueless, and disorganized, while reckless power rips their commonwealth asunder.

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Michigan businesses are now subject to a greenhouse gas reporting rule (source). This is a new regulation that just takes effect this year, and is going to cost local businesses time and money to figure out if the rule effects them and then more time and money to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. In my opinion, that time and money could be spent providing jobs, services, healthcare, and profits to our good state instead of satisfying this Obama-administration requirement.

These Obama policies make local companies spend their money and time calculating their greenhouse emissions and then reporting that data to the EPA. That process is complicated, and as much as I appreciate readers from Bodmann LLP, I don't want companies in Michigan spending all their time and money hiring lawyers and filing paperwork- I'd much prefer they be doing something profitable instead.

But yet, this is what happens when Democrats run Congress and the Presidency. They pass regulations and laws that direct resources away from efficient private businesses that provide jobs and goods into inefficient areas that produce paperwork and reports. Rather than having a company here in Michigan determine whether they are covered by this new EPA rule and, if so, developing the information needed to comply with extensive government regulations, I'd much rather these companies were productive and efficient with their resources.

Once, I was a libertarian. I even voted Libertarian. And then I grew up and realized that we have a two party system, and by voting Libertarian, I was only helping make sure that people who were far from libertarian were elected into office. After that, I became a reliable Republican vote, realizing that they were indeed the lesser of two evils, and that I'd rather have a libertarian-leaning Republican than an anti-libertarian Democrat.

Many libertarians though still vote Democrat or for a Libertarian minor party candidate, and so when I read an article like "For This Libertarian, Obama's First Year Looks Grim," by David Boaz, I am filled with an sense of anger and frustration. Libertarians, especially those who vote Libertarian, are idiots and fools and through their voting have made our country less libertarian than it once was, and the sad part is, they don't realize that they are part of the problem.

Many libertarians supported Obama last election, claiming that he was an independent and a moderate, and that he would be much preferred over the invading and free-speech breaking George Bush. Idiots. Now they lament:

As a libertarian, I'm sorry that Obama has not moved to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, to ratchet down the drug war, or to actually end the war in Iraq, the issue on which he rose to prominence. I think it's fair to say that his real ambition was to dramatically expand the size, scope and power of the federal government and that he saw these other issues as distractions.

Foolish libertarians. Why did you support Obama? Why did you fail to support McCain, which is in function the same thing as supporting Obama? Why did you vote third-party in Minnesota, thereby putting in office that joker Al Franken? Libertarians, by not voting for a conservative Republican, installed a super-liberal Franken, who has been the crucial vote on a range of anti-libertarian issues.

Liberals and Democrats can't help how they vote- they don't know any better. But conservatives, libertarians, and 'independents' should know better by now- we have a two party system, and if you aren't part of the solution and voting Republican, you are part of the problem. Save your sad stories and articles about dashed dreams, because they just remind me that you are stupid and foolish. Vote Republican next time.

As I wrote in Libertarians Screwed Themselves By Not Voting or Voting Libertarian:

No, as evidence of how stupid it is to vote for libertarian candidates, I point to Republicans up and down the ballot that are libertarians running as Republicans, and were screwed over when libertarians didn't vote, supported Democrats, or supported Libertarians.

Andrew Mwenda wrote in 2008:

Wealth creation is an active process. If we accept it as Africa’s challenge, it would follow logically to ask: who are the wealth seeking and wealth creating agents in society? The answer is: Private Enterprise! Enterprising people are always a minority, but the rule of capital is that it only survives by multiplying and multiplies by creating jobs and therefore incomes for many and taxes which governments use to provide social services – clean water, health and education to the poor. To be politically incorrect, the solution for Africa may be to invest in the enterprising few and make them richer. That will have laid the foundation to end the misery of the poor majority.

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