Happiness just happens for the Productive who Expect Results, and it does not for those for whom ideology is the substitute…
CONSERVATISM IS NOT IDEOLOGY. IT IS THE ANTIDOTE TO IT. – Roger Scruton
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Normally demand is what YOU want. Supply is what I am giving you here.
Add China to the mix and we explore the economic rule that too much competition creates ruinous results. It’s not that a restaurant row on one block in your town provides too many options. Rather, you have too many options when every block becomes a restaurant row. You were happy with the outcome that you had so many choices and dishes, but the proprietors of these establishments have gone broke, leaving you little or no choice at all, leaving staff jobless and unhappy.
After all, most of you reading this couldn’t care less about the industry or the man I will cover here; businesses and products you’ve probably never even heard of or cared about. Those of you who are happy to begin with will be delighted because you will explore THE PROCESS, as well as the ambition that drives men such as the subject.
You might even dip your toes into exploring how capitalism actually works outside Marx’s & Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Meaning in the real world. That last hyperlink is the entire book, my pleasure, a gift to you, my KKKomrades. You are welcome. On that note, it only takes one with no business or economic sense to make sense of that book.
For Engels it might have worked out very well indeed if only Sigmund Freud were around to help him with his psychosis.
In his time Engels was probably one of, if not the, wealthiest industrialist in all of Germany. Marx was a pauper and literally an idiot. Both were an embarrassment for the Jewish people.
Not long ago we took a leisurely walk right across Friedrich Engels’ properties near his mansion and factories in Engelskirchen, Western Germany, near Holland, the guests of family living nearby. We discovered a bit sadly given our presence and ready for a personal audition, that Friedrich had great difficulty giving economic lectures while dead.
Despite the industries I cater to here are other niche businesses of interest to a relative few. Their business models operate similarly to many other niche businesses that have managed to make a footprint with only a few dozen to a couple of hundred employees. Collectively (sorry about the pun Karl and Friedrich) both of these businesses have become multibillion dollar global industries. Similarities to the high end audio business abound too. These provide the best products and cater to the few for whom less than the best won’t do. Put another way, these are exactly the kind of consumers who would enrage a communist or socialist.
They all stage international shows around the world, taking over large hotels and arenas, catering to distributors who order hundreds if not thousands of very expensive products. Each show is attended by tens of thousands of fans flying in from all over the world to see, touch, feel and hear these products. Most fans are successful and happy themselves, as are those who frequent high end audio shows and purchase million dollar hifi rigs – and Swiss watch unveils of $100,000 timepieces to add to their collections.
See the YouTube video above, go FULL SCREEN, and if you have headphones, use them, you’ll understand what it is about.
Many designers and CEOs come from aerospace and the military. So have the computer assisted CAD technology and machinery with which these products were manufactured. And when one of these businesses gets successful, the Chinese buys up the business, commercializes it, and makes it significant only to the bottom line for their investors. At that point the business, as well as the products, become marginal for those who were attracted to the marque in the first place.
Most of these concerns grew out of hobbies as interests turned into businesses.
Pertaining to this story only, initially the manufacturers were mostly American and are now global. The knifemaking company about which this is written is arguably the equivalent (for a different specialty in their case) of the Swiss watchmaking industry.
Both fabricate precision mechanisms out of high-grade, raw, commercially-available materials bought in bulk; their prototypes use CAD computer-assisted-design; precision tooling, very expensive CNC and other milling machinery – heat and cryo treatments, laser and water cutting tools, and robotics to manufacture ultra-high quality objects of desirable function, utility, and great beauty that ends with the pride and satisfaction of ownership.
The chief parts for these cutting tools are the equivalent of the watch cases that surround watch movements, each is made by another department of fine watch companies. To fabricate each, case and movement, blade and the handles in which the blade operates, requires expertise – often years of apprenticeship.
Take LIONSTEEL in Italy…a maker of terrific, innovative and dependable products that wins at shows almost every year. You can use the arrows to scroll through the photos at the link above for the closeups of technical brilliance. As it were, I have the pictured item and it is spectacular – and you’re out of luck: these are made of UNOBTANIUM and I am not selling mine. 19 second video.
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THE ISSUE OF CURIOSITY – CAN CURIOSITY MAKE YOU HAPPY?
Can one make a case for that self-examination and curiosity drive ambition? Is there a reason why you should be interested in how a TESLA is manufactured if you have no interest in buying or driving one?
After all, in what way would that knowledge be of benefit to you?
But what if the knowledge would be of immense benefit for another part of your lives?
Would that perk your curiosity? So where am I going with these thoughts?
Most people’s “heroes” are probably people who don’t much deserve your giving them the time of day: People who talk a lot, mostly nonsense, and waste chunks of your lives. None of them produce anything of value. None of them invent anything. Not one is an original thinker. Take Hassan Piker. Or his double Tucker Carlson. Take the people to whom you listen on podcasts; clickbait artists who are determined to convince you of things not so.
These self-promoters tend to be celebrities, politicians, influencers, narcissists, and psychos clickbaiting the naive who found no direction for their lives. Need evidence?
If the narcissists and podcasters, radio hosts are your heroes, you probably won’t appreciate real heroes – people who produce, provide jobs for others, innovate, make other’s lives better and more valuable, put food on other people’s tables and cars in their garages, people who rise against all odds, become models for others to emulate, and live within the heroic ideas of Ayn Rand whose fictional heroes – usually builders and industrialists – are more real than your heroes are fake.
Chances are you would ignore the words of economists Milton Friedman and the poignant observations of Thomas Sowell…And yet theirs are the most important words that affect your personal lives and beliefs.
THE VIDEO POSTED IN PART III WILL PROVE THESE OBSERVATIONS EMPIRICALLY!
How can you relate the allocation and alternative uses of available resources? Or cause and effect? An example: John bought a gorgeous red Ferrari for $300,000 in 2015 (plus taxes, plus, plus) and sold it end of 2025. Book value would fetch about $220-250,000, But inflation has wiped out at least 20% of the US dollar’s value during the Biden era. That leaves the actual 2015 dollar value of the proceeds at $175,000 at best for your original “investment” of $340,000 (including taxes, plus, plus.). Or half.
If John had resisted the urges that motivated him to spend a third of a million dollars for a depreciating asset, the car, and rather invested that same amount in the NASDAQ tracking stock QQQ, he’d have $1,750,000 today. Allocating the same resource for an alternative use. Now it is possible the dude with the red Ferrari enjoyed a few blonds in the back seat (wait, there is no back seat). But the fellow with the big bankroll has a big future because he kept investing, will continue to reinvest what he has, and his investments will keep growing to amounts he could not spend in ten lifetimes (on so many blonds that he lost count before he started spending.)
Chances are, if the suit fits the above characterizations for people you know, or for yourself, or you are born with a lack of curiosity, filled with resentment, anger, feelings of victimhood and entitlement, you already know theirs (and your) lives have failed. Chances are you don’t own the Ferrari, the big bank and stock accounts, a pied-à-terre in Europe, and were likely rejected by every blond, brunette and redhead you’ve ever met.
If you believe that the wealthy caused your misfortune, and not yourself, you have failed. Chances are your failed fellow travelers never took responsibility for the outcome of their decisions or even examined what cause and effect has had on their lives. That is if they had ever given their decisions a thought at all.
Have you ever given thought to the obvious, that successful and happy people rarely if ever listen to podcasts and to the opines of influencers who produce nothing?
Rather they see themselves in the shoes of the common man who doesn’t appear anything special – your average Joe – a bloke who may not even have a college education. For example, a guy who is but a machinist, or an electronic tinker in a garage like Steve Jobs. Chances are, being curious to begin with, the productive will spend the few moments it will take to read this story to discover why the man in the video became a success.
The video is as short as my story is long and it’s all about the thinking and the process.
?THE PROCESS HAS ANOTHER CLUE ABOUT THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE.
That word is “PRODUCTIVE!”
I speak to those who chose to fail – because you didn’t like what it took to understand the process in the first place and doing something about it. For example, being productive.
Those of you about whom I speak couldn’t care less about heroes or the very characteristics, thought processes, activities, and personal beliefs required to become one.
Heroes are not born. They are made.
It starts with…
CURIOSITY
Those of you who couldn’t care less about THE PROCESS or how an IWC/Jaeger watch is made really understand very little about the world and human nature – or yourselves. You just think you do.
JAEGER-LE COULTRE – IWC’S SISTER COMPANY.
You are not interested in the process or what it took to understand and apply that process. That may be a problem. Understanding the process is the solution.
Sloth, disorganization, being unaware of time going by, and laziness may be the other problems… We will not address them here.
Chances are anyway, if the characterization fits, you probably don’t like the very productive America or Israel much either – or yourselves. Yes, the two go together. And you cannot afford IWCs, a Leica binocular, or Medford knife – and not because you didn’t want them desperately. However I am not saying that consumer goods will make you happy. I am saying that having a choice will.
You can choose how your life goes or not. If you believe that consumerism is what this is about you’ve lost yourself before this story began. But wanting goods others have and enjoy, or made, and your not having them, and your making up snug, false, politically-idealized justifications for why you cannot afford or want them, certainly will not make you happy.
Because how America became what it is, prosperous, free, productive, and free to choose its path, and mostly happy, was a process.
It was a deliberate process – and the 1619 Project and DEI was not even close to being a part of that process. In fact the people who glomed onto these falsehoods never had a process in mind. They were only interested in the supply of ideologies and other people’s blood and sweat, and their productivity, meeting their demands.
Otherwise your accepting any of that blather promoting the Obama-era nonsense is evidence you’ve been oblivious to THE OVERHEAD and that everything mattered to you but THE PROCESS.
CHAPTER III WILL FOLLOW.
© Andrew G. Benjamin is in finance, real estate and equities, a former advisor to New York City mayor‘s office (Subcommittee on Taxation, Finance and the Budget). Benjamin wrote extensively about politics, transnational and domestic, intelligence and military affairs, security and strategy, economic issues, Mideast, terrorism, technology and high end audio. Copyrighted material cannot be disseminated commercially without permission from its author or publisher; and are used herein for information and educational purposes only under Sec. 107 of the Fair Use Notice.
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