Musk went on to mock those in attendance by stating any Chief position, like CEO or CFO is a made up position. He stated that the only positions that matter when filing for a corporation are the titles of President, Secretary and Treasurer.

Elon also stated in the interview that the Federal Budget Deficit is “insane” and called for President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan to be “deleted.”

But the real highlight came when Elon stated that the government allocates capital very poorly, and capital allocation should be done by private people who can do it properly. He then described the government as a corporation with a monopoly on violence, a phrase that is popular with libertarian thinkers.

While in past years Elon Musk has described himself on Twitter as having socialist tendencies, it appears he’s had a degree of reconsideration. Especially considering socialism is heavily reliant on this monopoly of violence.

This shift in thinking was very noticeable during an exchange Elon Musk had on Twitter with David Beasely, the Executive Director of the UN’s World Food Programme. 

After claims that $6 billion of Elon’s money would solve world hunger were made by CNN, Researcher David Eli inquired why the UN couldn’t solve world hunger last year when it had amassed more than $6 billion. Elon replied that if the UN could prove how $6 billion could solve world hunger, and be transparent about how funds were used, that he would immediately sell $6 billion worth of stock and donate it.

David Beasely with the World Food Programme chimed in stating that CNN’s claim was not accurate (no surprise there), but essentially stated “it’s a start” while seemingly not accepting Elon’s condition of transparency and accountability.

Elon then replied “What happened here?” and linked an article about UN Peacekeepers forcing children in impoverished countries to perform sex acts on them for food.

Apparently government programs are only not very good at resource allocation, but they’re also incredibly sinister about it.

Watch the entire interview with Wall Street Journal below.

The post Elon Musk: “Government Is A Corporation With A Monopoly On Violence” appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Thomas Catenacci on March 17, 2021

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Wednesday that would targeting companies who pay executives 50 times more than their median worker.

The legislation, titled the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, aims to combat corporate greed and “end outrageous CEO pay,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a press releaseWednesday. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Chris Van Hollen, along with with Reps. Barbara Lee and Rashida Tlaib, joined Sanders in introducing the bill.

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Sanders said in a statement. “That is what this legislation will begin to do.”

Warren said the bill was a good start in an effort to decrease rising income inequality in the U.S. The Massachusetts senator added that workers can be credited for the profits generated by corporations, but executives have reaped the benefits.

Corporations that pay their CEO, or top-paid employee, between 50 and 100 times more than their median employee would be hit with a 0.5% tax increase under the legislation. The penalty steadily increases based on how much more a corporations’ top employee makes than the median worker until it reaches 5% for corporations that pay their top employee more than 500 times the amount they pay their median employee.

“Corporate greed is a disease that has long afflicted this country—but the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the gross income inequality and pay gap between CEOs and their employees in a way it never has been before,” Tlaib said in a statement.

If companies that currently have these pay patterns didn’t alter their executive compensations, the legislation would raise $150 billion in tax revenue over the next ten years. The tax increase would be tacked onto companies’ current corporate tax rate.

The legislation would penalize Walmart $854.9 million, Home Depot $550.8 million, JPMorgan Chase $172.8 million and Nike $147.7 million if the companies maintain their current executives compensation, Sanders’ office said in the press release.

The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act also would give the Treasury Department the ability to make rules preventing tax avoidance and would make private companies’ pay-ratio data available for the public.

The post Bernie Sanders Introduces Bill Raising Taxes On Companies That Pay Executives 50 Times More Than Median Worker appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

As the COVID-19 death toll eclipses 34,000 in the U.S., it’s fair to say that the American people have a right to be worried about the public health crisis posed by the novel coronavirus. It’s also fair to say that, as terrible as this outbreak is, this is not the greatest threat facing our country today.

With the latest figures predicting an unemployment rate of 20% by 2021, we are on the verge of plunging ourselves into another economic catastrophe, the likes of which this country has not seen since the Great Depression.

Rather than prioritizing finding a vaccine, increasing test availability, or building up the dwindling supply of medical equipment, the government has declared total war on free enterprise. And by picking and choosing which workers are “essential” and which are not, the government shows its true priority: control.

These sweeping stay-at-home orders (like that from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer) are the “let them eat cake” of the 21st century. Fewer than one-third of Americans can work remotely, and the rest are left to wonder how to make a $1200 check last for an ever-longer economic freeze. 

Politicians don’t bat an eye when they tell people to stay at home, not go to work, and wait months to earn another paycheck. They won’t have to wonder how they’re going to pay the rent, keep the lights on, or feed their children — unlike the 22 million Americans who’ve filed for unemployment in the last month. 

The beauty of a free market is that it is based entirely on consent. Workers consent to share their skills for certain pay under certain conditions, and in turn, businesses consent to pay them for their labor. Either party is free to walk away if the arrangement no longer serves them. The government has no business monitoring those transactions, yet lately, it is going so far as to ban them in the name of safety. 

It’s time to drop the ax on this Sheriff of Nottingham business. Americans do not want smug, well-fed bureaucrats and greedy career politicians making decisions for them concerning their health and financial well-being. 

When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the average family got over $2,000 back (and that wasn’t even a major change to the tax code). Cutting taxes is still a perfectly viable option — but we can all guess why it’s not the one the government is interested in. 

In a turn in the exact opposite direction, Congress shoved through a gargantuan stimulus package that put us $2.2 trillion deeper into debt. To make it worse, Representative Thomas Massie was tarred and feathered for criticizing the bill as the crony wealth transfer that it is. 

What kind of upside-down world are we living in when the first response to a crisis is to increase our national debt by twelve figures?

Not one of the congressmen who voted for this stimulus package will pay the price for it. My children, my grandchildren, and generations of future Americans will read in the history books about this good-intentioned, but ill-fated attempt to spend ourselves out of an economic downturn.

They will be the ones to pay for this mistake.

If Americans are mad that $1200 is supposed to get them through this, wait until they find out how much tax revenue the government brought in this year. Out of the $8 trillion politicians squeezed out of us this year, taxpayers are getting a measly 3.1% of it back, while the remainder goes to corporations and government programs.

Shutting down private industry and pouring stimulus money on the spoils is not how a free country tackles a crisis. We should not be fooled by candy-coated spending bills or empty promises of economic revival. Our economic liberties and our very way of life are under siege.

Emma Meshell is a spokesperson at Young Americans for Liberty (YAL).

The post A Second Great Depression Is Not How We Will Defeat COVID-19 appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

More on the filter and its female inventor in a moment. First, some interesting coffee facts I learned from personal experience or during research for this article.

The Evolution of Coffee

In the last 500 years, coffee went from an exotic libation confined to east Africa to as universal a beverage as there is, aside from water itself. According to historian Jonathan Morris in his Coffee: A Global History,

Coffee is a global beverage. It is grown commercially on four continents, and consumed enthusiastically in all seven: Antarctic scientists love their coffee. There is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station.

I’ve been drinking coffee since 1982, but until a visit to Taiwan about five years ago, nothing else had eaten the beans before they became the grounds that made all the brown stimulant I drank.

It was in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei that I tried my first cup of coffee made from the droppings of civets, a tropical forest cat. The animal first eats the coffee cherries that fall to the ground, then excretes the beans—a truly “natural” de-pulping process. I couldn’t discern any special taste to the costly concoction, but I brought some home anyway just to introduce it to others. A long-time friend in Fuzhou, China still emails me from time to time and asks me if I’ve had any “sh*tty coffee” lately.

Coffee was likely first cultivated in Ethiopia in the 14th Century but a hundred years later, the epicenter of the coffee trade moved to Yemen, which then dominated the business for at least 200 years.

If you like a little chocolate mixed with your coffee, in what we today call a café mocha or a mochaccino, you’re drinking something whose name came from the city of Mocha in modern Yemen. From the late 15th Century to the early 18th, Mocha was the world’s leading port from which coffee was dispatched. By ship it traveled to cities throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean and east Africa.

The first coffee houses in Istanbul opened in 1554 and within 40 years, their number reached 600. They attracted people who enjoyed the drink while gossiping against the regime. Scorning the coffee houses as dens of subversive iniquity, Sultan Murad IV ordered them all closed in Istanbul in 1633 and throughout the Ottoman Empire shortly thereafter. Just like America’s prohibition of alcohol three centuries later, this one simply drove coffee drinking underground until the government surrendered a few years later.

By the 1780s, an astonishing 80 percent of the world’s coffee poured forth from Caribbean islands, and most of that from what is now the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t until the 19th Century that Brazil emerged as a major producer, followed by Colombia and the Central American states.

The Coffee-Sugar War

A fascinating but brief coffee-sugar war erupted between 1897 and 1903. The principal figures involved were the American entrepreneurs Henry Osborne Havemeyer of American Sugar Refining Company and John Arbuckle of the giant coffee firm, Arbuckle Brothers. When Arbuckle decided to challenge Havemeyer by entering the sugar market, Havemeyer retaliated by muscling in on the coffee business.

The result was a price war from which both sugar and coffee consumers greatly benefited, but which yielded millions of dollars in losses for the two companies. It’s one of many failures of that great bogeyman theory, predatory price cutting. You can read more about it in FEE’s archives here.

It may come as a surprise but it’s the natural oils in coffee to which we owe the entirety of its glorious taste. As Antony Wild explains in Coffee: A Dark History,

Most coffee oils are immensely complex and have foiled the best efforts of scientists to simulate them adequately, which explains why artificial coffee flavoring is without exception of a poor standard. Although these oils constitute less than 3 percent of the end product by weight, without their presence coffee would neither smell nor taste of anything. In effect, 97 percent of the coffee one buys by weight is tasteless, baked vegetable matter and caffeine, which is unaffected by the roasting process and constitutes between 3 and 6 percent of the final weight of the coffee.

Until the early 20th Century, all the major names associated with coffee were those of men—from sultans to shippers to industrialists. Then along came a diminutive housewife in Dresden, Germany named Melitta Bentz. In classic entrepreneurial fashion, she was alert to a problem, solved it, then took the risk of creating a company to market her invention, and succeeded.

Melitta’s Contribution

Melitta Bentz was 35 in 1908 and frustrated with grounds in her coffee. It was a common complaint but one the rest of the world seemed willing to tolerate. Percolators of the day over-brewed coffee at the expense of its taste, imparting an annoying bitter flavor. Linen rags would retain the grounds but were messy and required frequent cleaning. Surely, something else could provide an appealing compromise, she thought, and be quicker, easier and cleaner.

She experimented with several materials. She wasn’t satisfied with any of them until she grabbed some blotting paper from her son’s school book, punctured it multiple times with a nail, put it in a brass pot she filled with coffee grounds, then poured hot water over it. Bingo! No bitterness, no grounds! It was an instant hit with her friends, switching on the proverbial light in Melitta’s entrepreneurial brain.

Melitta was granted a patent for her filter in July 1908 and within months, her company was up and running with its initial four employees: Melitta herself plus her husband Hugo and sons Willy and Horst. Producing filters at first within their home, they sold more than a thousand of them at the Leipzig Fair in 1909. Demand for the simple, newfangled invention exploded thereafter. In 1936, Melitta improvised her original design and turned her filter into the now-famous cone shape with which we are all familiar.

Melitta’s Legacy

Production of the filters was paused briefly by World Wars I and II but surged again afterwards in each case. But for those interruptions, the family-owned business flourished for decades, even after Melitta’s death in 1950. Today it employs thousands in Germany, Florida and New Jersey. A belated obituary in The New York Times in 2015 quoted a company spokesperson as saying,

Most Melitta locations still have a photograph of her on the wall. Every employee knows Melitta Bentz and her exceptional role as the mother of the corporation.

I don’t know if the millions of coffee filters sold by her company made Melitta Bentz rich or not. I’m guessing she might well have made it into the income category some envious people disparagingly label as “the one-percent.” If so, that would actually make my coffee taste even better.

Melitta Bentz is an important figure in the storied history of one of the world’s most popular beverages. She came up with a better idea. She possessed the courage to invest in it. She earned the willing patronage of millions of happy customers. She employed thousands of people. She hurt no one in the process; indeed, she left the world in a small way better than when she found it.

Not bad for a housewife from Dresden.

For additional information, see:

“John Arbuckle: Entrepreneur, Trust-Buster, Humanitarian” by Clayton A. Coppin

“The Predatory Bogeyman” by Lawrence W. Reed

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World by Mark Pendergrast

Coffee: A Global History by Jonathan Morris

Coffee: A Dark History by Antony Wild

A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World by Jeannette M. Fregulia

“Overlooked No More: Melitta Bentz, Who Invented the Coffee Filter” by Claire Moses

“Melitta Bentz, Beating the Grinds” – A 4-Minute Video

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post How a German Housewife Fed Up With Grounds in Her Coffee Revolutionized the Famous Drink appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The laundromat and dry cleaners are open. The UPS store is open. Target, Marshalls, McDonald’s, and the hardware stores are open. The farmers’ market is selling pies. Dunkin’ Donuts is doing a brisk business in coffee and the usual fare. CVS is welcoming all.

All grocery stores are open. But for the empty shelves that usually hold toilet paper, everything else is stocked up. Veggies. Meat. Milk. Soups. Cosmetics. Trucks are arriving to restock shelves after brisk sales of just about everything.

Automotive places are changing oil, repairing issues, and taking new customers. Antique malls are hocking wares. Coffee shops are serving lattes and muffins. Restaurants have lunch and drinks. Clothing stores are holding special sales on winter clothing as they always do this time of year. Gas stations are doing business. People are driving around, walking around, greeting each other in a friendly way, smiling at each other.

It’s normalcy all around, which is important because if you had only been holed up in your home and watching TV, you might believe that the world outside is in total pandemonium. It seems like many people are pushing for that or even think complete panic is justified. Instead what we are seeing is a sense of calm caution. Social distance. No handshakes. Big smiles instead. Lines at sinks in public bathrooms where people are washing hands. Hand sanitizer is everywhere.

Otherwise, there is calm. No one is freaking out. The shelves are stocked up so you don’t see hoarding.

I’m grateful for all of this. The people who make this possible are heroes. They are probably preventing pandamonium. So long as people feel that essential needs can be met, they maintain civility and morality (which is always a casualty in panics), giving us all a much greater chance of getting through this.

And while we are passing out blessings, save one for Domino’s Pizza. This is how you innovate.

It would be so easy to join the “shut down everything” chorus that you see online. How grossly irresponsible such demands are! In any case, most businesses are refusing to do so. And so far as I can tell, all the employees and certainly the customers in these places are happy for the opportunity to serve. And serve they do: enterprise is performing an amazing public service right now, and getting no praise for it in the media, so far as I can see.

You say: but they are all profiting from pandemic disease! I say: I hope so. They should all be justly rewarded for their service.

Also, while millions of people are extremely worried about losing their jobs, the people working today have an assurance that their businesses can continue to meet payroll because they are doing commerce. People are talking about survival right now but having a job and keeping the income flowing is also surviving.

Of course you could say all these activities are low risk because they involve only small gatherings, whereas many places have banned gatherings over a certain size (how that is Constitutional is another question). But in the United Kingdom, they have gone the extra step of maintaining calm by not banning sports events, concerts, and the like.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Britain isn’t alone in taking a more restrained approach. The Canadian government has also held off banning mass gatherings, although several of the country’s provinces have announced their own tougher measures. Germany is also proving far less interventionist than other European nations.

I don’t know what should and shouldn’t be shut down. But neither does the government have some special magical access to information on risk probabilities and the proper way forward. In fact, government is the last institution that should be making this judgment. Government acts out of self-interest; enterprise acts in the public interest. The obvious answer here is to leave the decision to private actors who are in the best position to make a good judgment on what should shut and what should open.

I do know that the more commercial life can continue as cautionary normalcy, the more we’ll all be in a position to get through this. The less economic damage is done. The more people keep their jobs. The less human suffering there will be.

The way to make an emergency worse is to shutter the shops and jettison commercial transactions of the goods and services we depend on for the good life and for survival itself. Commerce is society’s lifeblood. Nothing is gained from forcibly cutting it off.

In normal times, we take all of this for granted. We pick up meat and veggies from the store without a thought. We buy medicines and health aids routinely without consciousness that these things don’t have to exist. We go to the hardware store as if it were a chore, something we must do to repair the sink and get lightbulbs.

Take it all away and then we will see what the real apocalypse looks like. We would take an unnerving and scary pandemic and turn it into complete social collapse. This is a reality that none of us have ever faced and, god willing, we never will. And we won’t so long as we leave it to the discretion of commercial establishments and consumers to make their own choices. Take away that freedom and all we are left with is the barbarism of material deprivation and poverty.

And so I smiled and said thank you to every employee stocking shelves, running the cash registers, mailing my packages, taking my dry cleaning, and selling me bleach wipes. Blessed are those who eschew the crazy demand to “shut down everything” and instead continue to serve the people.

The post Celebrate the Heroes Who Stay Open appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

If you’re hauling large payloads, durability is crucial. Musk boasted the “truck” was “bulletproof.” When Tesla’s chief designer Franz Von Holzhausen threw “a metal ball at one of its armored windows, audible surprise could be heard as the glass smashed—twice.”

Musk exclaimed, “Oh my f—— God. Well, maybe that was a little too hard.”

Tesla has enjoyed success but has also left a trail of broken promises. Musk, like many entrepreneurs learns from mistakes. Musk graciously tweeted: “Franz throws steel ball at Cybertruck window right before launch. Guess we have some improvements to make before production haha.”

For an entrepreneur, setbacks and failure come with the job title. Successful entrepreneurs pick themselves up and go right back to figuring out how to best serve the needs of consumers.

Accepting responsibility is the only way to lasting change.

Shattered Windshields

Like Musk, many of us have “shattered a windshield.” A major presentation flops. A person rejects us. A poor decision puts our career plans in grave jeopardy. We’ve all been there.

When setbacks happen, perhaps you are consumed by thoughts such as “I’m a miserable failure” or “My life is ruined.” Do you wallow in those thoughts, fall into depression, or substitute addictive behavior for needed action?

How you think about your failure determines your future success. Research by famed Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck helps reveal how your fundamental mindset about your abilities and intelligence is a significant determiner of your success.

Dweck asks us to become more aware of our thinking. When facing a challenge, is your thinking dominated by questions such as, “Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?” If so, you may have what Dweck calls a fixed mindset. In some form, those questions arise for most of us; but when they consume our attention, they may inhibit needed action.

“Challenges often frighten a person with a fixed mindset,” writes Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Why? If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that your abilities are set in stone. If you apply effort yet fail, the failure says something permanent about your abilities. If you choke during a presentation, thoughts of how to improve are submerged in a tsunami of negative thinking.

Dweck explains how “believing that your qualities are carved in stone…creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.” You don’t want to “look or feel deficient.” You cover up your errors and refuse to learn from them.

Secretly your suffering is immense. Going through life with a fixed mindset, Dweck writes, is like “always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens.”

A growth mindset is the alternative. Dweck explains,

This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

If you are wedded to the ideas that your level of intelligence is a fixed trait and that not much can be done to change the kind of person you are, you have a fixed mindset. But, if you believe that you can “substantially change” both your level of intelligence and the kind of person you are, you likely have a growth mindset.

Fixed and growth mindsets lie on a continuum. Interestingly, you can have a fixed mindset in one area of your life and a growth mindset in another. In any part of your life, unquestioned fixed mindset beliefs bind you. Becoming aware of your own beliefs automatically begins the process of change. Identification with a growth mindset beliefs emboldens you.

A growth mindset doesn’t protect you from failure. “Even in the growth mindset,” Dweck writes, “failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.” Musk’s self-effacing shattered windshield Tweet indicates he is ready to learn.

Mindset and Leadership

As an entrepreneur, Musk has a growth mindset. As a leader, his mindset is questionable.

Dweck examined the research in the seminal leadership book by Jim Collins, Good to Great and found:

[Successful leaders] were not the larger-than-life, charismatic types who oozed ego and self-proclaimed talent. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers—that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.

If “the more self-effacing growth-minded people” are the most successful leaders,” how Dweck wondered, “did CEO and gargantuan ego become synonymous?” In a recent cameo on Rick and Morty, Musk was willing to satirize his ego. Dweck observes,

Fixed-mindset leaders, like fixed-mindset people in general, live in a world where some people are superior and some are inferior. They must repeatedly affirm that they are superior, and the company is simply a platform for this.

To affirm they are superior, fixed-mindset leaders surround themselves with sycophants to clap for their often-disastrous schemes:

As these leaders cloaked themselves in the trappings of royalty, surrounded themselves with flatterers who extolled their virtues, and hid from problems, it is no wonder they felt invincible. Their fixed mindset created a magical realm in which the brilliance and perfection of the king were constantly validated. Within that mindset, they were completely fulfilled. Why would they want to step outside that realm to face the ugly reality of warts and failures?

Musk is well known for his emotional immaturity and explosive temper. He instills fear by firing people on the spot. At the Tesla factory, stories like this abound:

At about 10 o’clock on Saturday evening, an angry Musk was examining one of the production line’s mechanized modules, trying to figure out what was wrong, when the young, excited engineer was brought over to assist him.

“Hey, buddy, this doesn’t work!” Musk shouted at the engineer, according to someone who heard the conversation. “Did you do this?”

The engineer was taken aback. He had never met Musk before. Musk didn’t even know the engineer’s name. The young man wasn’t certain what, exactly, Musk was asking him, or why he sounded so angry.

“You mean, program the robot?” the engineer said. “Or design that tool?”

“Did you f—— do this?” Musk asked him.

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to?” the engineer replied apologetically.

“You’re a f—— idiot!” Musk shouted back. “Get the f—— out and don’t come back!”

The young engineer climbed over a low safety barrier and walked away. He was bewildered by what had just happened. The entire conversation had lasted less than a minute. A few moments later, his manager came over to say that he had been fired on Musk’s orders.

This incident was not an aberration:

One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career.

Be like Musk, the entrepreneur. Don’t be like Musk, the leader.

A Growth Mindset Is the Secret Sauce of Success

People who have a fixed mindset believe their work should be effortless; as a result, they expend little effort in what they do. When work is challenging, they quickly lose interest. When things go wrong, they tend to blame others. Whatever a person with a fixed mindset aspires to, they believe they have a natural-born aptitude or not. Practicing is for people who are not endowed with the talent they think they have.

Compared to those with a fixed mindset, individuals with a growth mindset have entirely different beliefs about abilities and practice. They do not believe that anybody can accomplish anything. They understand natural ability is important. However, they also believe in devoting continuous and ongoing effort to develop their abilities.

If you’re a sports fan, you often see the impact of mindset. Some players, while blessed with physical gifts, never seem to improve. They are unwilling to devote the effort needed to improve their game. They have a fixed mindset. Those with a growth mindset may have lesser physical abilities but their game keeps improving.

To become more growth-minded, shine a light on your fixed mindset beliefs. Dweck coaches us with these questions:

What happens when our fixed-mindset “persona” shows up—the character within who warns us to avoid challenges and beats us up when we fail at something? How does that persona make us feel? What does it make us think and how does it make us act? How do those thoughts, feelings, and actions affect us and those around us? And, most important, what can we do over time to keep that persona from interfering with our growth…? How can we persuade that fixed-mindset persona to get on board with the goals that spring from our growth mindset?

Beware of constant judgment; it’s a sign of having a fixed mindset. Dweck writes,

The fixed mindset creates an internal monologue that is focused on judging: “This means I’m a loser.” “This means I’m a better person than they are.” “This means I’m a bad husband.” “This means my partner is selfish.”

Giving Up a Sense of Entitlement

Dweck has observed, “Many people with the fixed mindset think the world needs to change, not them. Thus, “they feel entitled to something better—a better job, house, or spouse.” They think that “the world should recognize their special qualities and treat them accordingly.”

Are you willing to change your mindset? If so, you will see the world differently.

You begin to consider the idea that some people stand out because of their commitment and effort. Little by little you try putting more effort into things and seeing if you get more of the rewards you wanted.

Yet, life doesn’t come with a guarantee:

Although you can slowly accept the idea that effort might be necessary, you still can’t accept that it’s no guarantee. It’s enough of an indignity to have to work at things, but to work and still not have them turn out the way you want—now, that’s really not fair. That means you could work hard and somebody else could still get the promotion. Outrageous.

Over time, further changes occur:

You begin to enjoy putting in effort and…you begin to think in terms of learning…

As you become a more growth-minded person, you’re amazed at how people start to help you, support you. They no longer seem like adversaries out to deny you what you deserve.

Dweck’s theory can be applied in business, in relationships, in sports, with your children, and with your students.

Soon you will break another windshield. Learn from your failure and your life will seem full of new possibilities.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: YouTube

The post What Elon Musk’s Shattered Windshield Can Teach Us About Mindset appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Every year Gallup issues the results of a public opinion survey concerning people’s views about the degree of honesty and ethical behavior in a variety of professions and occupations in the United States. Its last such survey was released in December 2018.

According to Gallup’s questioning of adults over 18 years of age, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, 58 percent of respondents held low or very low opinions of Congressmen’s ethics and honesty. Only 8 percent held high or very high positive views concerning the honesty and ethics of those holding a Congressional office.

Indeed, the only occupations with negative ratings near that of Congressmen were telemarketers, with 56 percent of those in the survey saying they held low or very low opinions of those calling and annoying them over the phone, and car salesmen who were viewed low or very low by 44 percent of those responding to the questions; like the view of Congressmen, only 8 percent of those surveyed considered car salesmen as highly or very highly honest and ethical. .

Journalists were ranked low or very low in honesty and ethics by 34 percent of those in the survey. Stockbrokers were viewed negatively by 32 percent, labor union leaders were viewed as low or very low by 31 percent, while only 28 percent felt that way about the ethics and honesty of lawyers.

Businessmen Not Held in the Highest Esteem

So, who were held in relatively high or very high esteem in terms of honesty and ethical conduct? In descending order: nurses (84 percent), military officers (71 percent), medical doctors (67 percent), pharmacists (66 percent), high school teachers (60 percent), and police (54 percent)

What about those commonly considered in the “business sectors” of the economy? Business executives were considered high or very high in honesty and ethics by only 17 percent of those in the survey. This compared to accountants viewed highly or very highly at 42 percent, followed by funeral directors at 39 percent, building contractors at 29 percent, bankers with 27 percent, real estate agents with 25 percent, stockbrokers with 14 percent, and advertising practitioners at 13 percent.

Clergy were viewed positively in this way by 37 percent, while journalists were viewed highly or very highly by 33 percent in the survey.

Not long after the release of this Gallup poll, the Deloitte International Consulting firm, headquartered in London, UK, released its February 2019 global survey of almost 10,500 “millennials” (those between the ages of 25 and 36) with higher education in professional jobs in the private sector in 36 different countries.

Only 48 percent said that corporations in general operate ethically, and a majority were critical of such businesses focusing, primarily, on earning and maximizing profits instead of giving a higher priority to pursuing “socially useful” goals and objectives. However, those in the political arena are seen in a much worse light. More than 71 percent considered that political leaders have a negative effect on society and social problems. Business leaders, on the other hand, were viewed as generally having a positive impact on society by 44 percent of the respondents.

It may not be too surprising that those in government earn such low marks in the minds of Americans or many others around the world. After all, politics often seems to be little more than an arena of corruption, power lusting, hypocrisy, and confusion. Scandals of a financial or personal nature affecting those in political office or in the government bureaucracies constantly fill the pages of newspapers and airtime on the television news programs.

Ethics and politics do not seem to go hand-in-hand very much in modern America or, indeed, anywhere else in the world.

The Ethical Quality of Business in a Free Market

The mixed estimation in which private enterprisers are held in the eyes of Americans and others is more troublesome. The reason I say this is that businessmen operating in a free market function on a totally different plane than those who make their living in politics.

Indeed, There is no more honorable and moral way of earning a living than as a private enterpriser and entrepreneur in the competitive arena of the free marketplace.

To use a Biblical phrase, many are called but few are chosen to take on the leadership role of enterpriser and entrepreneur. Voters do not enter a voting booth to appoint the businessman to his position as head of an enterprise.

His is a self-selecting appointment to his position. I mean by this that a businessman sees himself as running an enterprise of his own or as a senior executive in a company or corporation. He wins his position not through promises to voters but by deeds performed for consumers and stockholders.

In the market economy, those who imagine, design, implement, and direct enterprises and businesses do not need to initially gain the agreement, approval, or consent from large numbers of coalitions of individuals or groups, as politicians must do in the electoral process.

The Leadership Qualities of Market Entrepreneurs

Indeed, the idea or ideas on the basis of which the private enterpriser is led to start up, organize, and implement his activities leading to the production of some goods or services may be neither understood nor believed in by the vast number of others in the society – that is, before the product is finished and offered to the consumers, who may or may not reject it, resulting in the enterpriser earning profits or suffering losses.

The taking on the task of entrepreneurial leadership, therefore, requires drive, vision, determination, discipline, and the financial support from his own savings or from those who he is able to persuade to lend him the needed funds or to partner with him to bring his idea to market. He is, therefore, a risk-taker as well as a profit pursuer.

Success is not measured in voter ballots as in a political election, but by the degree to which the entrepreneurial leader succeeds in winning customers for his product or service as reflected in total revenues that exceed the total costs that have been incurred in bringing the product to market.

Can he more successfully anticipate the direction of future consumer demand than his rivals in the market? Is he alert to profitable opportunities that others have missed by introducing new products, better and improved products, or less costly products that gain the “votes” of consumers through the dollars they spend on his product in comparison to his competitors in his own and other markets?

Indeed, the Princeton University economist, Frank A. Fetter (1863-1949), once referred to “the market as a democracy where every penny gives a right to vote.” With their dollar “votes,” consumers determine who shall gain and retain their entrepreneurial position in the market, and who may lose it.

While the entrepreneur initially selects himself and undertakes his enterprise without the prior approval or agreement or financial support from the general consuming public, it is the consumers who ultimately determine whether or not he shall maintain his entrepreneurial position in the market system of division of labor.

The business leader must be distinctly single-minded and passionately devoted to his role in that division of labor. Others employed in the enterprise may show up at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. But he does not. He is at work “24/7,” even when he is far from his office desk.

Are the company’s supply chains operating efficiently? Are the executives and managers who report to him seeing that their divisions and departments are functioning properly? What are his competitors planning and doing? What’s his own company planning next in terms of advertising campaigns, product improvements, technological innovations, and anticipating the changing patterns of consumer demands?

The burden of meeting the payroll of salaried employees for which he is responsible, as well as the obligations he has entered into to “deliver the goods” to customers and clients means as a leader of his business his mind cannot just shut off when the official business day comes to an end.

A good part of the ethics of private enterprise, therefore, is reflected in the integrity, discipline and quality of character that must enter into those individuals who choose the role of entrepreneurial leadership.

The Ethical Principles of the Free Market

The hallmark of a truly free market is that all associations and relationships are based on voluntary agreement and mutual consent. Another way of saying this is that in the free market society, people are morally and legally viewed as sovereign individuals possessing rights to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property, who may not be coerced into any transaction that they do not consider being to their personal betterment and advantage.

The rules of the free market are really very simple: You don’t kill, you don’t steal, and you don’t cheat through fraud or misrepresentation. You can only improve your own position by improving the circumstances of others. Your talents, abilities, and efforts must all be focused on one thing: what will others take in trade from you for the revenues you want to earn as the source of your own income and profits?

Long ago, in the 1760s, the famous Scottish economist and moral philosopher, Adam Smith (1723-1790), argued that among the benefits from commerce and trade was not only the material improvements in man’s condition. It also served as a method for civilizing people, if by civilization is meant, at least partly, courtesy, and respect for others, and an allegiance to honesty and fulfillment of promises.

When men deal with each other on a daily and regular basis, Adam Smith said, they soon learn that their own well-being requires of them sensitivity for those with whom they trade. Losing the confidence or trust of one’s trading partners can result in social and economic injury to oneself.

The self-interest that guides a man to demonstrate courtesy and thoughtfulness for his customers, under the fear of losing their business to some rival with superior manners or etiquette to his own, tends over time to be internalized as habituated “proper behavior” to others in general and in most circumstances.

And through this, the other-orientedness that voluntary exchange requires of each individual in his own self-interest, if he is to attain his own ends, fosters the institutionalization of interpersonal conduct that is usually considered essential to a well-mannered society and cultured civilization.

If all that I’ve said is true, why, then, are businessmen and business in general held in such low esteem and confidence, even though ranking higher than citizen confidence in politicians?

The Misguided Disapproval of Business and Businessmen

First of all, there is the intellectual climate that has dominated discussions concerning business and businessmen in society for a century and a half. The anti-business and anti-capitalist attitude that prevails in America and many other parts of the world are all part of the original socialist critique against private property, profit-oriented enterprise, and the employer-employee relationship.

Private property is the most beneficial institution ever developed by man. It has created incentives for work, savings, and investment, since private property in the means of production enables those who generate wealth through their personal efforts and investments to have the right to reap the rewards of their own productive activities.

The profit motive acts as the stimulus for individuals to devote their energy in productive ways. Profits are the “rewards” for having successfully brought to market what consumers want and for managing production in such a manner that revenues are greater than expenditures. In other words, successful profit seeking creates value-added for both the seller and the buyer.

In the free market, the employer must, at the end of the day, treat those who work for him in an honest, well-mannered way. If not, over time, he runs the risk of losing the better employees who eventually decide to look for alternative employment where workplace conditions are friendlier and more respectful as well as, perhaps, better paying.

So part of the suspicions and lack of confidence in business by many in the general society is due to a distorted, incorrect, and twisted view of how business and businessmen really act and potentially earn profits in a free market.

Unfortunately, this false imagery of business and businessmen pervades the media, the movie industry, the educational establishment, and through them our common everyday culture.

Government Intervention and Unethical Business Practices

But there is another dimension to the belief on the part of many in society that businessmen are not to be trusted, and therefore not fully deserving of the citizenry’s confidence.

Back in the late 1960s, a Wisconsin businessman named William Law, who owned the Cudahy tannery company, published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. He said that some of his American competitors in the tannery industry were lobbying the government to impose an import tariff on foreign leather goods that were successfully capturing more of the U.S. market.

Mr. Law admitted that such an import duty would raise the costs of his foreign rivals and make it more likely that he could maintain his market share and his profit margins. But he went on to say that he opposed the call for such anti-competitive restrictions on market entry of the foreign leather suppliers. He declared that he would rather face going out of business than stay in business by using government to rig the market to his advantage at the unjust expense of both American consumers and his foreign rivals.

Many years after Mr. Law wrote this op-ed, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with him, so I think I understand the premise underlying his argument. He considered that such an import tariff would be an act of theft at the expense of the American consuming public, which would make him an accomplice receiving ill-gotten gains.

He would be using the force of government to impose a penalty on the foreign competitor as well as the American import wholesaler and retailer, all of whom were wanting to bring the foreign-made leather goods into the United States, for no other crime than the foreign rival’s ability to make a desirable product at a lower cost than his American competitors. The foreign rival and his American supply-side collaborators would be punished for wanting to share the benefits from his cost-efficiencies with the American public by offering his product to them at a lower price.

At the same time, the American consumer is denied the opportunity of buying the foreign version of the product at a price mutually agreeable to him and the seller. As a result, the American consumer might have less to choose from, and would pay a higher price for leather goods than if the tariff was not there. The difference between the lower price the consumer would pay under free trade and the higher price he pays under the protectionist wall of the tariff is the stolen sum out of the consumer’s pocket, Mr. Law said, and into the domestic tannery manufacturer’s revenues.

Using Government to Plunder Some at Others’ Expense

Take the logic of this example and apply it to government subsidies covering part of a manufacturer’s costs of production at taxpayers’ expense; or paying farmers not to grow crops or guaranteeing them a minimum farm price support that is paid for through tax dollars and higher prices for consumers of agricultural goods; or to domestic business regulations that limit entry into various professions and occupations, which, again, limits consumer choice, prevents potential rivals from earning a living in those corners of the market, and make the product or service more expensive for the buying public by using government intervention to limit the supply.

In the financial and banking sector this has taken the form of “too big to fail,” which means that some of those who made bad investment and lending decisions are not required to fully bear the responsibility and the cost of their poor or misguided decisions. Instead, taxpayer money had been made available to wash away part of their bad decision-making sins.

In everyday life, we presume that the ethical thing to do if we see that someone has dropped their wallet is to return it to them. We take it for granted that if we see that someone has left their car unlocked with the ignition key on the seat, we should not take advantage of this to drive away and steal the car.

If someone does take the dropped wallet or speeds off in the car we label them a thief, a bandit, a crook. That’s because we take for granted an individual’s right to his private property and the income he has honestly earned.

Business ethics, calls upon every businessman to follow the rules of the game of the free marketplace: you don’t kill, you don’t steal, and you don’t defraud. This includes neither accepting nor lobbying to receive favors, privileges, or other special interest benefits through the powers of government to tax and regulate, all at taxpayers’ and consumers’ expense.

Many people sense that some businesses and businessmen are not playing by the rules when they obtain such favors, privileges and benefits through political power. The deeper problem is that the reasonable suspicion and disapproval of government special favors for various businesses easily spills over, over time, into a willingness to assume the worst about all business and businessmen in general.

This opens the door to those more ideologically driven by an anti-capitalist agenda to win the argument that it is business and businessmen as a group who cannot be trusted and who need to be watched, regulated, and controlled – if not just taken over – by government in the name of “fairness” and “social justice.”

The Ethics of Personal Life Should be No Different in Business

Even if a man is hungry, the honest and right thing for him to do if he sees that someone has dropped his or her wallet is to return it to the owner, content intact. And likewise, even if profits are down or even turning into the loss column, the unfortunate competitor should not pick the pockets of consumers or taxpayers by lobbying government for anti-competitive regulations or redistributions of wealth through subsidies or price guarantees.

The ethics of private enterprise and the morality of the market require both a preaching and a practicing of a respect for others’ individual rights to their property and to the rule of voluntary agreement in all transactions, even when market outcomes are not always favorable to oneself.

Richard M. Ebeling

Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. Ebeling lived on AIER’s campus from 2008 to 2009.

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

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What’s gone wrong? Part of the answer is that young people are too often caught up in the alternative path of getting rich through “entrepreneurship.”

The word itself sounds dreamy, so fancy and French. In the popular understanding, you get a great idea, disrupt an industry, get chased around by billionaires who throw money at you, end up on the cover of Time, and retire at 40 and sail the world on a yacht. If this is really possible, why would anyone choose the drudgery of just having a regular job like anyone else? Hey, be the CEO b****, as the movie The Social Network rendered the pep talk first given in a bar to Mark Zuckerberg.

Truly, it’s not just dreams of Zuckerbergism that has captivated the young generation. It’s also Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, that WeWork guy, and so on. Everywhere you look these days, there are people and programs urging people just out of school to forget working for the man; instead, just start a new business and become a folk hero.

The legend of the twenty-something business wunderkind is everywhere in pop culture.

Here’s the problem. The data are in. It turns out that the whole thing is a gigantic myth.

Young founders of businesses fail, almost certainly, and at a much greater rate that people who are much older, wiser, more skilled, and more knowledgeable about the industry. It turns out that succeeding in business is extremely difficult. It takes maturity above all else to achieve it.

We know this now thanks to a fascinating study by Javier Miranda, principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau; Benjamin Jones, professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and Pierre Azoulay, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They took a detailed look at the demographics of successful entrepreneurship. The results were so conclusive as to debunk the myth of the young startup founder. They paint a portrait that is much more consistent with your own intuition from experience.

They conclude: “The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success.”

In other words, up with middle age! Actually, more precisely, up with experience, skills, discipline, and knowledge, all of which are more common among forty-somethings after two two decades of work experience as compared with twenty-somethings. “Young people are just smarter,” says Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe so but it takes a lot more than that to make a successful enterprise.

Here are some key findings of the research:

–  Founders in their early 20s have the lowest likelihood of successful exit or creating a 1 in 1,000 top growth firm.

–  Across the 2.7 million founders in the U.S. between 2007-2014 who started companies that go on to hire at least one employee, the mean age for the entrepreneurs at founding is 41.9.

–  The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 highest growth new ventures is 45.0.

–  The most successful entrepreneurs in high technology sectors are of similar ages.

–  The “batting average” for creating 5 successful firms is rising dramatically with age. Conditional on starting a firm, a 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely to achieve upper-tail growth than a 30-year-old founder.

–  Younger founders appear strongly disadvantaged in their tendency to produce the highest-growth companies. Below age 25, founders appear to do badly (or rather, do well extremely rarely), but there is a sharp increase in performance at age 25. Between ages 25 and 35, performance seems fairly flat. Starting after age 35, there is increased success probabilities. Another large surge in performance comes at age 46 and is sustained toward age 60.

So you look at this data and ask the question: what is the best age to be an entrepreneur? It’s middle age, not young. Why then are there so many programs and pundits urging young people to forget about getting a job and instead change the world by founding the new Apple or Facebook? The whole thing seems to be based on a fashion, not facts.

When I first brought up this data to a friend, he immediately retorted that perhaps this is just because it takes several tries to get it right. You start in your 20s and keep being a “serial entrepreneur” until it clicks. The authors, however, found no evidence of this at all. In fact what happens is that young people attempt new businesses, go into debt, run out of luck, enter a period of demoralization, and then face the grim realities of life: you are far better off getting a job, buckling down, learning a trade, and then once you have experience and social capital, try your hand at starting something new.

The greater problem is that urging entrepreneurship on the young is creating an illusion that is distracting them from the best-possible path for life success: gaining skills, knowledge, and accumulating various forms of capital (financial, social, intellectual). Here is where we find a massive failing among people just leaving college today. Youth employment has never been lower. Having spent their lives in classrooms and all their free time consuming media, they are not gaining the values that lead to success. The notion that they should just hang up a sign and rock it has no empirical support.

Swearing that you will never work for wages and never obey a boss, while dreaming of the great new social media company you will dream into existence, is a potentially catastrophic path. The data indicate that this is almost certain to fail.

That said, a fundamental problem could trace to too narrow a definition of entrepreneurship, if by that word you mean seeing unmet needs and open opportunities and taking the risks necessary to meet them. It doesn’t necessarily mean starting a new business. That path is available in every industry for those who seek it out.

I recall being in the clothing business when I was in college and going to market with the buyer of the store. What to buy to put on display for customers fully 8 months in advance is a high-stakes gamble: if you buy too little of a successful product, you forego profits; if you buy too many to sell, you eat the profits on those you did sell. It’s an ominous choice.

At the wholesale market, I became convinced that a particular pair of navy corduroys with a yellow duck motif could sell (hey, this was the 80s). My boss was unsure. He wanted me to be sure. I finally persuaded him to take the risk and buy three runs of all sizes. When they arrived at the store, I knew I was on the line, so I sold them like a maniac. They did very well! Whether this was because it was a good choice or because I refused to face failure, I do not know.

The point is that it was a good example of entrepreneurship within a job, a realistic form that is fun with a low risk of failure. Here we find experiences that genuinely train people for a life of commercial success. Getting a real job is the best “incubator” there is.

The bigger problem with urging young people to start businesses is that this advice feeds disgruntlement with an actual path to success, which is not running a cool startup but doing the very thing that entrepreneurship chic implicitly puts down: getting a skill, obeying the boss, gaining wisdom, and developing a solid career bit by bit.

We should stop lying to young people about commerce and tell the truth that business is hard. Work is hard. Saving money is hard. Serving customers is hard. For some people, just showing up is hard. These are all learned skills. The fun comes once you master them.

An additional to baking entrepreneurship into your job, the best path is to take a job to provide income flow, while keeping your eye on a side business to start as your long-term capital plan. That way one can more easily become the other while you gather skills and information, while relieving the financial pressure for instant success. This is not only bends in the odds in your favor; it’s also just good financial management.

Start a business when you are young? Sure. Just don’t quit your day job yet.

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Politicians have looked weak in the face of such natural disaster, with many facing criticism from local residents for doing little more than turning up as “flood tourists” at the site of disasters, incapable of helping those in crisis and only there for a photo opportunity. The Environment Agency, the body responsible for combating floods and managing rivers, has also been blamed for failing to curb the disasters. But there’s an ever larger debate over the role of climate change in the current floods and storms, and it has been unremittingly hostile.

Politicians have looked weak in the face of such natural disaster, with many facing criticism from local residents.— Julia Slingo, ETF

For those affected by flooding however, their immediate concerns are not necessarily about the manmade changes to the earth’s atmosphere. A YouGov poll from February found that while 84% of those surveyed believed Britain was likely to experience similar extreme weather events in the next few years, only 30% thought it was connected to man-made climate change. Politicians have looked weak in the face of such disaster.

There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events. When heavy rain in 2000 devastated parts of Britain, a later study found the climate change had doubled the chances of the flood occurring, said Julia Slingo.

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Politicians have looked weak in the face of such natural disaster, with many facing criticism from local residents for doing little more than turning up as “flood tourists” at the site of disasters, incapable of helping those in crisis and only there for a photo opportunity. The Environment Agency, the body responsible for combating floods and managing rivers, has also been blamed for failing to curb the disasters. But there’s an ever larger debate over the role of climate change in the current floods and storms, and it has been unremittingly hostile.

Politicians have looked weak in the face of such natural disaster, with many facing criticism from local residents.— Julia Slingo, ETF

For those affected by flooding however, their immediate concerns are not necessarily about the manmade changes to the earth’s atmosphere. A YouGov poll from February found that while 84% of those surveyed believed Britain was likely to experience similar extreme weather events in the next few years, only 30% thought it was connected to man-made climate change. Politicians have looked weak in the face of such disaster.

There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events. When heavy rain in 2000 devastated parts of Britain, a later study found the climate change had doubled the chances of the flood occurring, said Julia Slingo.

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