Planners in Hamilton County use a democratic gloss to wiggle forward with their ideas about cities and their residents.
By John Anthony
In spite of President Obama’s slick candor and a sympathetic media, the devices he uses to create his centrally “governed” society are vulnerable.
Like an underdeveloped nation torn between wealthy landowners and the struggling poor, President Obama is careening America toward third-worldism. Washington, D.C., is now the land of the elite, while middle-class wealth withers and the ranks of dependents swell. This gap between the connected rich and the dependent poor is the lifeblood of totalitarians.
Rulers rely on compassionate sounding schemes like affordable housing, social justice and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs to create legions of dependents.
But, when the dependency decreases, so too does the political stranglehold. To change the direction of Obama’s transformation, America’s poor and middle-class must become less dependent. In other words, they need real wealth-building opportunities.
Seeking wealth creation
American exceptionalism did not just happen. Americans built their success on the entrepreneurship of millions of small businesses, not on the conniving of global enterprises and public-private partnerships.
By developing a system in which anyone can share in the capital of the business they help build, wealth is no longer the exclusive domain of the rulers and the privileged.
By creating opportunities to earn personal wealth rather than “spreading around” that of others’, you limit the government’s access to its single greatest weapon — a public increasingly susceptible to bribery through transfers of unearned money.
Capital sharing creates other advantages. Wealth is property and therefore, the foundation of freedom. The new capitalists are less likely to vote for central control over free markets; for regionalism over local choices; or for dependency over opportunity.
‘3rd way’
The challenge is, “how do you create more capitalists, while helping business owners and satisfying an insatiable government?” There is an answer.
By chance I came across an old friend, Veny Musum. In the 1980s we worked together and helped transform a small hair care start-up into the internationally recognized health and beauty giant, Paul Mitchell. Veny understands business. He is also about as conservative as it gets.
Together, with a liberal associate Upendra Chivukula, he authored a book called The 3rd Way. Upendra is the former Democratic Deputy Speaker of the N.J. General Assembly and is currently the non-partisan Commissioner of the Bureau of Public Utilities. Politically, Veny and Upendra are opposites.
Their meeting point is a genuine desire to help people get ahead. The 3rd Way does that. It also shatters America’s progressive transformation because it operationalizes a workable way to lessen the number of dependents and create more capitalists.
Please read all of John Anthony’s essay
John Anthony runs Sustainable Freedom Lab in Chattanooga and is a national speaker on the topics of regionalism, Agenda 21, sustainability and property rights.
