Disempowerment in the name of empowerment, welcome to the folly we’re now seeing unfolding in Washington.

We all have front row seats to the creation of a constituency of the weak, the disempowered, and the helpless that will likely suck on Uncle Sam’s nipple until the cows come home. This isn’t the hollowing out of the middle class anymore, this is castrating a whole swath of the lower to middle class population and rendering them soulless, purposeless, and completely beholden to a welfare system that will only propagate itself. And, we’re funding it by printing money as if inflation is some economical disease that has been miraculously eradicated by a vaccination called fiscal policy.

This isn’t compassion, this is pity. Worse, it’s downright idiotic.

First, the real pandemic is actually not Covid. We have a national health crisis because of the way we live. We eat nutritionally dead food — also called GMO food — and don’t get enough exercise, fresh air, sunshine, and use all sorts of healthcare, personal care, and household products that are chemically toxic. I won’t dwell on alcohol consumption (which is way up), tobacco, sugar, and caffeine which are all poisons in their own right to our body and compromise our overall immune system in dramatic ways. Then, when we get sick we treat our ailments and illnesses with synthetic drugs which treat symptoms but not root causes and so chemical dependency follows which has Big Pharma turn fat and highly predicable profits while our microbiome — gut health — is decimated and incapacitated. Add all of this up and you get the explosion of obesity, diabetes, cancers, heart disease, high blood pressure, autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and lord knows how many other chronic illnesses we’ve seen rise sharply in the last 40 years or so.

Now, the complete the loop on this. Who’s really dying from Covid? Well, excluding the elderly who are simply vulnerable due to old age, the co-morbidity statistics tell us the overwhelming number of (still tragic) casualties are those afflicted by all of these lifestyle related conditions. It’s not pretty, but those are the cold hard facts. Yet, we push experimental vaccinations and nobody talks about the lifestyle changes that would address the root cause of the death threat of Covid. We’re about a year into this pandemic, in that amount of time virtually all of these diseases and ailments are reversible or can be greatly reduced by making lifestyle changes. And why is nobody talking about any of this? Holistic health isn’t good for business, chronic illness on the other hand is wildly profitable.

We also don’t have an employment problem, we have a mismatch of skills and a lack of people with an incentive to work or willingness to re-school so they can work. Ask any contractor in any trade or any technology related company what their biggest problem is and you’ll know. Heck, I own a restaurant in the Florida Keys and we can’t find waiters, line cooks, or bussers. Why? They don’t want to lose their unemployment benefits, we hear it all the time. Or, just try to get a plumber or electrician to show up and you’ll know also. Yes, we lost a lot of jobs (10 million or so) and some of those won’t come back because some sectors and industries (e.g. retail) have been dislocated permanently. But, we have other sectors and industries that are booming (e.g. technology) or primed to boom (e.g. green energy). You might have to re-school, switch company, change careers, shift industry, or maybe even relocate, but there’s work for those that really want it.

So, don’t be fooled by the clever disguise of all this socialist righteousness. Trust me, Biden isn’t anyone’s savior although he and his army of political strategists and media advisors are doing their very best to spin the story that way. This is nothing but a carefully planned strategy to concentrate power. A power game meticulously orchestrated to shift the power balance from the many (i.e. the people) to the very few supposed to serve these same many.

History has shown us so many times (e.g. Nazi Germany, USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, etc.) the abuse and misuse of political power only has one final destination: an erosion of personal freedoms also called tyranny. There are zero examples in history of any form of totalitarian government that didn’t ultimately failed miserably. Some of these experiments are still ongoing like Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. It’s not looking so good these will prove history wrong. Feudalism, totalitarianism, fascism, socialism, and communism are all just forms of the same thing and it just doesn’t work. It inevitably ends up in tyranny with severe restrictions on personal freedoms and a stifling of entrepreneurship and free enterprise.

Capitalism has so far proven to be the only system that promotes democracy, personal freedoms, free enterprise, and entrepreneurship. But, left unchecked it has proven to have some serious flaws and drawbacks also, mostly the inclination for market participants to (a) ignore hidden costs (e.g. destruction of natural resources, runaway pollution, harmful products, etc.) unless regulated and (b) leverage and game the system to gain monopolistic positions as those ensure the greatest profits. So, we know it needs some sturdy bumper rails but overall it’s the best system yet by a country mile.

A new and improved variation of capitalism is conscious capitalism. It honors the core tenets of capitalism that make the system work like competition, free and open markets, and legal protection of private ownership but it layered in a higher standard of stewardship towards people and the planet. It’s like adding human decency, fair trade, and environmental responsibility to the core tenets. It’s not a perfect system yet, but it addresses the most obvious flaws we learned from the unchecked version of capitalism.

So, why is conscious capitalism so essential to our personal freedom? In capitalism the government is there to regulate, provide, and govern those things that are best organized centrally like the military, foreign policy and diplomacy, rule of law, the judicial system, and building and environmental regulations just to name a few. But, all else the free and open markets will self-regulate and conscious capitalism will go out of its way to protect these personal and private freedoms of enterprise, ownership, and speech because diminishing these freedoms will diminish the opportunity for the system to flourish. In free and open markets, companies have to compete for the best labor, capital, customers, suppliers, trade relationships, and investors which ensures the most fair and level playing field where the best companies thrive, the average survive, and the weak perish. There’s an intelligence to that, when done right nobody has the power to frame or game the system. In fact, the system self-regulates and corrects itself over time. Now, it’s not working perfect yet, there’s things that need to be tweaked and addressed but there’s no doubt this system trumps anything any of the totalitarian systems have produced, especially in terms of personal freedoms and the pursuit of happiness for all.

The direction Washington is headed is worrisome. As we move away from free enterprise, free and open markets, entrepreneurship and human ingenuity and inch closer to a welfare state where large concentrations of the population are dependent on the government to support themselves we are also inching closer to more Federalist concentration of power, more government control, and less and less personal freedom. Why less personal freedom? Just look at food stamps, that’s the government telling you what to eat. Next up is where to live, how to live, what you can say and not say, what medicines to take, what to wear, and the list goes on. Mind you, some of this has already crept into our way of living (e.g. widespread censorship on social media, mandatory vaccinations, and wearing masks) and way too many of us think all of this is perfectly normal and acceptable. Worse, most of us think this isn’t going to keep creeping. It will, unless we collectively say no more to this overreaching by elected and appointed bureaucrats.

I am not arguing for or against the conservative or democratic agenda, neither am I for or against Trump or Biden. Frankly, both parties and Presidents are merely puppets of bigger interests but I am here to advocate the merits of conscious capitalism and how essential that system is to our democracy and personal freedoms. Maybe most alarming is that this has all the markings of a bureaucrat power grab playing out under the disguise of social justice and fairness which is all just a marketing shit show.

It’s a power game plain and simple and your and my way of living and personal freedoms are at stake, please don’t get fooled by what’s playing out before our very eyes. I can’t say for sure if he’s even aware himself but Biden is wearing a mask, literally and figuratively.

Love & Truth,

Robert