Month: December 2013

Optimism: America’s Greatest Days Are Yet To Come, Mike Lotus Writing About America 3.0 on CommPRO.biz

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Thanks to CommPRO.biz for publishing my recent piece on optimism.

The subtitle of America 3.0 which has provoked the strongest response is this:

America’s Greatest Days Are Yet To Come.

In the article I ask:

 
Do you agree? Or do you think America’s greatest days are long gone? But if America’s greatest days are yet to come, then our personal lives and our business careers take on a more hopeful cast.
 
In the USA today we have a shortage of optimism. For the first time, Americans say their children and grandchildren will have a worse life than they did. But despair about America’s future is a factual, historical and analytic error. We are not on an inevitable road to tyranny and poverty. Predictions of the end of American freedom and prosperity are deeply mistaken.
 
Optimism must be based on facts, or it is just wishful thinking. So, what is the foundation for optimism about our future?
 

You can get the short answer in the CommPRO.biz article, or get the full and complete answer by reading America 3.0!

Book Review – Homeland Insecurity: Dark Invasion

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This book is subtitled 1915 – Germany’s Secret War by Howard Blum. It is a fascinating and very readable account of a corner of American history not very well explored lately; what happened in the early years of WWI, when the assassination of an Austrian arch-duke set Western Europe on fire – and America remained tenuously neutral. Very soon it became apparent to those in highest authority in Germany that the war would not be a walk in the park; that it would be a long and bloody war of attrition. In those circumstances, the United States could not be easily dismissed – even if it was considered such a backwater by the German general staff that it was lumped together with Mexico, to the disgust of Captain Franz von Papen. He was then assigned as military attaché to the German embassy in New York in 1913 – but in 1915 he was tasked with recruiting spies and saboteurs to wreak havoc.

Technically, the United States was a neutral, although quite a fair number of the wealthy social elite as well as the political leadership of the time were inclined to favor the British, and maintained strong cultural ties with England. Business and financial ties also favored the Allies – and considerable agricultural and industrial bounty flowed freely to England, France and Russia, to the indignation of the German government. This was fiendishly one-sided neutrality, to their way of thinking. Von Papen and his fellows dove into a covert war with considerable relish, although there was the danger (a real one, as it turned out) that German efforts to hamper aid to the Allies might backfire, and alienate the U.S. out of neutrality and into open war against Germany.

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Mike Lotus Interviewed About America 3.0 On C-Span

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Thank you to the Washington Journal show on C-Span and its gracious host Peter Slen. Thank you also to callers, whose questions and comments I tried to respect and respond to.

Mr. Slen asked open-ended questions and gave the me the chance to speak at length about America 3.0 and what we are trying to get across. The entire show was about 45 minutes, which is a substantial amount of time, and a great opportunity.

The video of the interview is here.

(One thing I notice is I keep saying “we think.” D’oh. It is almost as bad as y’know. Good lesson for next time.)

My Review of America 3.0

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First of all I want to thank Michael Lotus and James Bennett for taking the time and energy to write and promote America 3.0. It cannot be underestimated how much work this book took to research, write and publish and these 2 gentlemen (I really only know Mr. Lotus, but I am making assumptions on Mr. Bennett) are very busy individuals who have to earn a living for themselves and their families.

Throughout, they made a giant effort to make the book positive, upbeat and solutions-focused. This approach is radically different than the “conspiracy theory” or “single issue” approach that mars most books of this genre (although there really aren’t a lot of books that spring to mind when I think of likely comparisons). Even though the book would generally be classified as politically on the “right” by the general public, the authors go out of their way to not characterize their opponents as “bad people” and show the fundamental (positive) motivations that drive some of their actions, even if the results ended up being disastrous or misguided.

As a well-informed reader (by the standards of the world at large, if not always by the extremely high standards of Chicago Boyz, and often when I read Trent Telenko’s articles on military history I feel rather ignorant indeed) there were many areas of the book that were very new to me, increasing my interest in the topics that they raised. Given my focus on business, economics, energy, taxation, and military history, I really haven’t thought much at all about the role of the family and how it shaped America’s growth, but that topic was the seminal driver for the book. It felt very true and aligned with my experience, that the nuclear family and the ability of sons and daughters to marry off and “find their own way” contributed greatly to our successful outcomes. In the course of my business and travels I see the facts arrayed differently, and I can also see how individuals that I know from these countries have adjusted (and often embraced) this new, freedom-seeking and independent course of living.

The idea that we can reform our institutions and have the Federal government take over tasks that it logically should hold while devolving other roles to state and local government makes a lot of sense. They also discuss the “great haircut”, a single event to reform our finances across all the institutions simultaneously, as a logical approach, along with new barriers to ensure that it doesn’t re-occur.

I will think about the areas of my expertise and how they can be applied to concepts similar to America 3.0 in the future. There is a lot of de-centralization coming with energy and services and these can be aligned to the capabilities and responsibilities of our citizens, rather than being a top-down phenomenon in the process of disintegrating, which is the current trajectory.

Thanks again to the authors for an excellent book, and they are a credit to this site and what the founders have attempted to portray, which is a positive, forward look at the issues that we face and how we can solve them with political, economic and personal freedoms.

Cross posted at LITGM