Why Western Civilization Needs Defending
While I happen to be writing this essay in an election year, I’m not writing this to endorse a political candidate or party. Most politicians of every stripe have a simple philosophy — “I need to get re-elected” — and this problem transcends who you pull the lever for in an election. Regardless of your political tribe, try to read it with an open mind.
On July 13, 2012, President Obama was giving a speech in Roanoke, Virginia, and said this: “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Those three sentences sparked a brushfire in that year’s presidential election that he spent the next few weeks trying to walk back. “Of course, Americans build their own businesses,” he said on camera four days later.
But while the third sentence tried to take credit away from entrepreneurs, and the second sentence tried to give that credit to the government because of roads and bridges, President Obama’s first sentence was 100% true.
Twelve years later, that system he lauded is under assault.
I’ve lived this dream.
I’m a very blessed person. I’ve had the opportunity to work with an amazing team of people to build an incredible company.
Over twelve years, we transformed how financial advisors helped their clients understand risk, empowering millions of average Americans to invest fearlessly and achieve their own dreams.
Thanks to all of that hard work, we created a massive ripple effect of wealth creation.
- Average investors made fewer bad decisions out of fear, which allowed their financial assets to grow.
- That gave their financial advisors more assets to manage.
- Those financial advisors gladly paid us for the software that created this value for them and their clients.
- My teammates started families, bought houses and cars, ate in restaurants, and shopped in stores they wouldn’t have otherwise. Pre-pandemic, we were the largest employer in our little town — it was tough to walk into a restaurant without seeing a hexagon-stamped badge dangling from someone!
- The capital we raised was multiplied 20x before it was returned, largely to fund the pensions of teachers and health care workers.
This is the essence of “wealth creation” — everyone had more.
It wasn’t zero sum. Nobody had to lose for the world to get better, retirements to be more secure, and the average restaurant employee to take home a lot more in tips.
Free markets laid the foundation.
Why is the United States home to so many of these incredible stories?
How did this country, after only 248 years, manage to create nearly a quarter of the world’s wealth, even though we’re only about 5% of the world’s population?
It’s because of that unbelievable free-market system we created, and its two foundational elements.
- The rule of law — I knew that if we played by the rules, we’d be allowed to prosper.
- Private property rights — the teachers’ pension funds were willing to trade their hard-earned capital for our stock certificates, because they knew the system would protect their rights to that value.
Those two principals are the bedrock upon which our country built an abundant food supply, reliable energy, a powerful supply chain, institutions of higher learning, and a skilled workforce.
Of course, there was a basic governmental framework in place as well. We need police and prosecutors to enforce the law. We need roads and bridges. We need a fire department. We need a military to defend us. I’ve yet to meet a smart person who has an issue paying taxes for this small fraction of what our government is today.
But let’s be clear — China has police, roads, bridges, and a military. So does Russia. So does Cuba. So does Venezuela, and every other country where poverty is starving people to death.
What they don’t have is a system that uses the rule of law and private property rights to create wealth for their people.
And on the spectrum of systems from capitalism and communism, every country that slides closer to communism slides further down the GDP-per-capita chart of less prosperity for their citizens.
The math doesn’t lie.
It’s not just about financial prosperity, either.
Lest we fall prey to the argument that “this system is obsessed with money, and there is more to life,” let’s not forget the long list of benefits it has delivered for those fortunate enough to live in western civilization.
- Individual liberty
- Religious freedom
- Scientific inquiry
- Women’s rights
- Human rights
- Representative government
- Trial by jury
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of conscience
Believing in the exceptionalism of this system, and how America has been its greatest embodiment over the last couple centuries, doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to make it better.
The fact that western civilization has been a gift to the world and to every person who has lived in it — it’s as indisputable as the fact that human beings need oxygen to survive.
Yet, our system is under assault.
Despite all this, the 2020s have borne witness to a withering assault on the foundations of our free market system.
The aggressors seek to tear down the rule of law, private property rights, abundant resources, reliable energy, the pursuit of knowledge, technological innovation, and growth in productivity.
It’s systematic — and it’s not an accident.
- We are shutting down perfectly good power plants, and refusing to replace them with reliable sources of energy. Those who claim that our changing climate constitutes a crisis refuse to invest in modern, reliable and safe carbon-free power. (When these folks stop shunning reliable clean energy, buying multi-million dollar beachfront estates, and taking their private jets to climate conferences, I will start believing our changing climate is a true crisis.)
- Socialists (the trendy little brother of the Communists) have repackaged their economic theories into the “Degrowth” movement. They literally want the world to go from eating beef to eating bugs.
- Universities once skilled in teaching people how to think, persuade and build have pivoted to enforcing radical theories of anti-knowledge. They tell us the pursuit of excellence, objective truth, having a sense of urgency, and individualism are “white supremacy culture.” They tell us that free speech is “harmful” and “problematic” and that words are as dangerous as action. (Until it comes to Hamas-loving protestors calling for the genocide of Israel, and then all of a sudden, words must cross into action to be against the rules.)
- These universities (and the big corporations populated with their graduates) slyly swapped “equality” for “equity.” Deleting those two letters transformed the important principle of equal opportunity into the socialist idea that all outcomes must be equal — the pursuit of which led to the deaths of tens of millions in Russia and China under communism.
- They then sandwiched this new “E” in between two things everyone agrees with — diversity and inclusion — and created an army of bureaucrats and administrators to systematically erase actual diversity and inclusion. In many universities, administrators now outnumber the students themselves, ballooning the cost of higher education and saddling our kids with over a trillion dollars in debt.
- Their latest tax proposal is a 59% top tax rate, and meanwhile, our governments are setting billions of dollars on fire, creating “programs” with six-figure-salaried-administrators who “study” our problems and “solve” them by writing checks to their friends to create TikTok propaganda videos. Instead of funding new power plants, California ran an ad campaign telling people to turn things off from 4pm to 9pm — when the sun goes down and they need light!
- Gulliver’s Travels told the tale of a million little strings making it impossible for a giant to move. We’ve created that Lilliputian web of laws, rules, reviews, permits, taxes and fees that make it insanely expensive to build anything great. California has spent $10 billion building precisely zero operational miles of its high speed rail system. In 1937, we built the Golden Gate Bridge for an inflation-adjusted $700 million. Now we spend $400 million just to install safety nets on it.
- Big corporations leverage armies of lobbyists to create regulatory capture of their industries, insulating their businesses from competition. Their latest effort, labeled “Responsible AI” or “AI Safety,” is all about keeping the profits of the next wave of technology for the favored few.
- There are proposals in Congress to redefine the word “income” to include unrealized paper gains in stock market value and apply income taxes to them. It’s an Orwellian approach to good old fashioned Soviet-style wealth confiscation, and would force any growing business to be sold to a big corporation, just to cover the taxes.
- A judge in Delaware ordered the confiscation of Elon Musk’s compensation as CEO of Tesla from 2018 to 2022. Never before has a judge decided what companies and shareholders (who voted to approve the stock option package) are allowed to pay their employees in exchange for the work they do to create value in a free market.
On the razor’s edge of losing it all.
I’m not that worried about well-intentioned young people who don’t yet understand the fragility and greatness of this grand experiment. Many of these kids will grow up, get a job, and develop an understanding of reality.
I’m much more worried about the activists who are intent on tearing it down.
Whether they label themselves socialists, communists, collectivists or totalitarians, their assault on our system will destroy the future prosperity of my kids and yours.
We can’t allow them to succeed.
What can we do about it?
This is where it gets personal: I believe it’s our responsibility to push back against the darkness in our world.
Many people articulate this as a responsibility to “give back” — and I agree. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into trying to create opportunities for people who haven’t caught the breaks I have.
But I also believe that Joe Lonsdale is right — our greatest social responsibility is keeping the socialists, the people breaking things, and their ideas, out of power.
For you, that might look like voting this time.
Or volunteering for a politician who promises to work against the big government / big business cartel and fight for free markets.
Or helping to create experiments in public policy that can help your state become an outlier in education, or job growth, or innovation freedom.
This is one of the reasons I recently joined the board of Mountain States Policy Center, a non-partisan think tank helping to make sure the best free market policy ideas take root in the mountain states.
The bottom line?
It’s time to just say no to these de-growth communists who want to tear down the progress of western civilization.
If we truly want to pay it forward to future generations, it’s the only course we can take.
Thank you to Cacey Klein, Micaela Barraza and Andy Martin for providing feedback on drafts of this essay.
