Multi-billion dollar tariff refunds entered the headlines in August – alongside data center construction and Democratic party candidates who win with their repudiation of property rights. More specifically, about $104 billion has been returned to the likes of Walmart, Apple, Ford, Target, Home Depot, Nike, Amazon, and Lowes.

But this didn’t happen by itself. In February, the United States Supreme Court ordered the refunds in a decision that repudiated President Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. However, the Trump administration claims about an economic emergency were only political desperation and fueled by bad information and rotten advice about international balance of trade arithmetic.

In the double entry accounting system, these current account deficits are offset by capital account surpluses, all of the transactions are voluntary and mutually beneficial, and if foreign imports are subsidized by foreign governments, that is a transfer of wealth to America.

To summarize, the approvals represent 60% of the $166 billion total that was recognized for refund by Customs and Border Protection (CPB) - and most of that is being returned to the largest importers first. This is not a windfall, it is money that was confiscated and is being returned. As such, the refunds must be reported as income, but it is the quarterly earnings reports for these companies that are generating the headlines.

For background, the Trump administration announced “reciprocal tariffs” in April 2025 on dozens of countries. They include all of America’s important trading partners, and one justification is the tariffs imposed by these governments on American exports. That is why they are named “reciprocal.” The rationalization is that the revenue to the federal government will help reduce budget deficits, but more likely, the additional revenue will increase borrowing capacity.

Regardless of government spokesman or media hype, tariffs are a tax imposed on businesses that import raw materials, value-added goods, and consumer products - depending on which industries the president wants to reward or punish. It is protectionism and it is the State picking winners and losers. And as an outlay of cash, tariffs increase costs for manufacturers, increase prices for consumers, and decrease prosperity for the entire society.

In a balanced report from Yahoo Finance, some of the ideas being considered by retailers to best deploy the cash reserves were summarized by senior director David Silverman at Fitch Ratings:

“The upside is that these companies have spent the last year plus thinking about mitigation strategies, thinking about supply chain shifts, thinking about merchandising, … and at least now to the extent that there are updated tariffs …these companies have built somewhat of a playbook to figure out what to do about them.”

For the company receiving the refunds, it is a liquidity event and a net loss. There are costs attached to calculating their tariff liability, remitting the funds to the CPB, loss of interest income, higher prices paid for inventory to avoid the tariffs, and costs associated with calculating and applying for the refunds. Yet, there are also costs related to corporate communications to mitigate the negative publicity for receiving their earned property.

Why? Because when economic inequality is universally accepted as a problem for governments to solve, the world wide web will attract posts like this on X:

“Walmart just received a $2.9 billion dollar tariff refund, massively boosting the company’s profits. Regular people paid the cost of tariffs by and large across America. But now corporations are getting huge checks from the government, while working people get nothing.”

Piling on, here is the August 22nd headline from CNN Business:

“Tariffs raised the prices you paid. Most businesses won’t be passing tariffs refunds back to you.”

Yes, Walmart, Apple, Ford, Target, Home Depot, Nike, Amazon, and Lowes will manage their cash differently, but they are net losers after compliance, accounting, and finance costs are tallied - and customers are net winners when the refunds are processed. Regardless, each of these companies are miniscule by comparison to the leviathan governments imposing tariffs on the transactions that benefit everyone.

As to the rhetoric, “regular people, by and large, huge checks and working people” are meaningless phrases and all too much noise. The very existence of each retailer has improved the lives (low prices, endless variety) of everyone who has visited, passed by, lived near, or seen an ad from these businesses. Just ask a few of the foreign visitors to America for the World Cup earlier this summer how much they love the selections and prices at America’s big box stores.

This is what profit striving companies always do: think about mitigation strategies for arbitrary government edicts, supply chain shifts, merchandising, and build a playbook. But that is almost impossible when there are political executives like President Trump and Canada’s Prime Minister Carney wielding the force of government in arbitrary ways, as the Wall Street Journal reported on August 24, 2026:

“I’ve basically gotten a Ph.D. over the last year in tariffs because I feel like that’s my sole job,” Mary Buchzeiger, CEO of the Michigan-based auto parts supplier Lucerne International. Everybody is paralyzed with fear right now because of these changing regulatory tides . . it’s impossible to make good plans and solid plans and be able to move forward.”

To conclude, President Trump’s tariff policy destroys capital, raises prices, and the money is paid by the importers of record. Those companies are prolific distributors of variety at better prices than any time in the history of the world. And while it is morally and practically superior for tariff refunds to be received by the importers of record, the greatest economic atrocity is the uncertainty that prevents entrepreneurs from doing what they do best - invest and plan for an amazing future.

To put this in perspective, what could have been achieved if the private sector was not devoting talent and capital to tariff compliance, antitrust avoidance, diversity hiring, inflated medical benefits, university endowments, professional lobbyists, and social security matching? On top of that, the economic and social costs of President Trump’s wild tariff policies are impossible to calculate, but could damage entire industries.

On August 25th, The Economist published a less than fascinating article titled What Makes a Great Investor? Naturally, that is a compelling title — the concept is vague, subjective and aspirational. Even better, it gives The Economist license to define “great investors” as they see fit. It’s their publication and they deified themselves as The Economist, after all.

Right out of the gate, the article did not disappoint with this 1992 quote and story about Quantum hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller speaking to his boss, George Soros:

George, I’m going to sell $5.5bn-worth of British pounds tonight and buy Deutsche marks.

The idea was that the Bank of England was trying to sustain an unsustainable exchange-rate peg which speculative pressure could break, forcing the depreciation of the pound and netting Quantum a huge profit.

This story and its aftermath are relatively well known, but the root cause for this currency arbitrage opportunity is never discussed. On the surface, Druckenmiller and Soros are “great investors” because they discovered potential gains in an overvalued asset and were willing to put their skin in the game. The last part is true and important, but the rest of it is neither great nor investing.

Selfish or Selfless?

Practically speaking, the source code for Soros’ and Druckenmiller’s massive gains was the incompetence of the Bank of England — and by extension, all central bankers. And morally, the Quantum hedge fund trade may be considered selfish — but objectively speaking, it is an example of selflessness.

Selfless because Soros could not have enriched himself without the existence of foreign exchange markets created by economic overlords for the systematic devaluation of money. Furthermore, The Economist doubles down by redefining “investing” as speculation:

Plenty, including Mr Druckenmiller, reckon he thereby demonstrated two cardinal virtues of great investors: the wisdom to spot a winning chance and the nerve to bet the house on it.

Certainly “great investing” involves wisdom, but the ability “to spot a winning chance” presumes omniscience that does not exist — except when the incompetence of others is in play. After all, reality always wins and evil is impotent. But having “the nerve to bet the house on it” presumes clairvoyance — or stupidity. Not surprisingly, The Economist confirms this:

What a great investor really needs is a big dose of luck and a distinctly odd character.

Yet, all economic outlook reports hedge themselves and tell their readers, we are cautiously optimistic, expect continued volatility, but our long-term growth story is intact, and there is the potential for policy errors, but markets are always uncertain.

And The Economist is no different. In this piece alone, it seems that big doses of luck and a distinctly odd character are short-lived and subjective:

Today his would-be successors need luck, too. Most people who work in finance have to be right pretty much all the time. But a stock analyst can have an even lower hit rate and still be considered excellent, since no one can do much better. The fund managers building portfolios from analysts’ recommendations can merely hope to pick the right ones.

In summary, outlier trades — the hugely profitable ones that are equally rare, do not define “great investors,” they define outlier events. However, there are two excellent points in this piece that help define great investors — having skin in the game and anticipating the possibility of outlier events. Those are the ones that occur less than five percent of the time - or two standard deviations from the median historical outcome.

To Make Money for What?

First, a great investor understands the cause, purpose and meaning of money. Next, he respects the information of prices and the elegance of markets. Those two steps are necessary to clean out the fallacies of the State controlled economy: the illusion of free money, the injustice of prices, the inefficiency of markets and the exploitation of profits.

The truly great investors are the angel investors and venture capitalists who expect to lose 90% of the time, but they do not rely on luck. They take calculated risks. Great investors deploy risk capital in value-creating ventures — not in fiat currency futures. And they find talent, anywhere in the world, without regard to the wheel-spinning central bankers fixated on interest rate price fixing and fiat currency manipulation.

For the middle-class, mass market, affluent investors who are great, The Moneyball Method answers the question: to make money for what? And the “what” are the explicitly defined objectives and value-driven strategies that give purpose to every “great investor.” In concrete terms, the objective data for each investor’s cash flow strategy is combined with the objective data of capital market price behavior.

That includes every outlier financial event that has been documented over the last century. Great investors do not ignore these large deviation events — they anticipate their likelihood and calculate their impact in terms of the dollar hit to their net worth.

But most importantly, great investors reverse the traditional “best practices” of those who try to predict the future, beat the market and measure performance looking backward. Beating the market is for authoritarian governments and George Soros. In the end, it fails — and markets do not fail.

Instead, we use the most reliable historical data, anticipate market behavior, measure performance looking into the future, and always know our risk capacity. That builds pride.

Today I would like to start a new series about the ordinary abundance of our daily lives — the inventions that gird our world and the enormous risks in capital that created them for us, and the time and heavy labour they made free. They have created the most valuable commodity for us — time. We couldn’t live without these effeciencies but they are so normal to us, it is impossible to think of an era when they didn’t exist. Join me as I explore the history of abundance in our modern world!

The inspiration for this series is this wonderful website. I would urge you to check it out for yourself and marvel at the extraordinary ordinary abundance of modern life.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

In this season finale, I want to talk to you about the experience of creating this podcast, some of our greatest hits, my ideals, my motivations, my values and what I hope to achieve in the future with season 2, which will restart on the exact same day we started season 1 — September 2. If you are an Objectivist you know the importance of September 2 in the Atlas Shrugged, I won’t spoil it for you, but it is also the date when Ayn Rand began writing Atlas Shrugged — her greatest intellectual artistic project. We are so proud as a team to be honoring her in a small way with our own intellectual, artistic project and we are happy to have you all along as we try and make an impact with the Moneyball Method.

See you around in Season 2!

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

Over the last four years, the price of copper has doubled to $6.62 – and over the last twelve months, the theft of copper products has spiked 77%. Of course, copper’s greater market value is an incentive for cargo crime rings, but a significant reason is the 50% tariffs on semi finished products that were forced onto copper importers by the Trump administration in August 2025.

Yet, the price of a lot of things have doubled over the last four years, including the US stock market – and to keep things in perspective, the price of oil has also risen over the last year, but only to the same levels as July 2022. And over forty years from the mid 1960s to the early 2000s, the price of copper fluctuated between 40 cents and $1.40 per pound. For that time, these fluctuations can be attributed to the dynamics of normal industrial supply and demand.

Doctor Copper

In fact, copper is so sensitive to economic activity that Wall Street analysts refer to it as Doctor Copper. Not only is it the essential component for wiring, plumbing, electronics, power generators, power lines, automobiles, and industrial machinery, no other commodity that can replace copper at scale. Accordingly, the price of copper is a reliable leading indicator for the economic vitality of the global economy.

That is significant. In the most complex economic system the world has ever known, there are alternative production inputs for most materials – at a price - and those prices constantly adjust to each other. The effect is to spontaneously maximize production and distribution efficiencies, but with no viable alternative to copper, it is particularly valuable to everyone, everywhere, all of the time. So is water, but that falls from the sky and fills vast reservoirs easily discovered by plants and animals. But to get closer to the story of copper, we need to dig deeper.

America’s population grew by about 100 million – or 33%, during the 40 year period ending in the mid 2000s, but because of ever-improving methods for the exploration, extraction, refining, and recycling of copper, its price stayed within the 40 cents to $1.40 range. That is because of innovation driven by the profit motive - and only the force of government planners, theft or fraud could mess that up – or the public policy think tanks that inspire government planners and seduce voters.

China Syndrome

Then the China super-cycle of authoritarian central planning created a demand-side shock. Debt fueled spending drove the construction of new urban centers and industrial capacity that spiked Chinese GDP to over 10% annually through 2011. Naturally, the Chinese government needed copper for power generation, machinery and electronics (like everyone else), and that ended with nearly $4.00 per pound copper price between 2006 and 2009.

To boot, construction demand in the United States and Europe were factors – and there was a direct correlation between copper prices and the frequency of industrial metal theft incidents.

“With copper prices at $3.00 per pound, there is a lot of incentive to find more metal and thieves are willing to look just about anywhere for it. With eager international buyers, increasing exports, and people willing to look the other way at questionable sources, it is easy to understand why copper theft is becoming more common.”

And in terms of electronic equipment, televisions have been replaced by computer servers, storage hardware and crypto mining rigs. But to get closer to the story of copper, we need to dig deeper.

Population Bomb

During the 40 year period mentioned above, there was a now famous wager between University of Illinois economist Julian Simon and Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich was famous for his doomsday book titled The Population Bomb (1968) and Simon was less well-known for his renaissance book titled The Unknown Resource (1981).

The bet was set on September 29, 1980, the ending measurement date was ten years later, and the conditions Simon requested was for Ehrlich to select a basket of raw materials with prices not controlled by government regulators. For his part, Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that the inflation adjusted prices would decline, and Ehrlich was betting they would rise due to overwhelming demand from a population explosion.

As you know from above, the population increase occurred, and you may have guessed the inflation adjusted prices of the commodities basket fell. In 1980, they bought $1000 worth of the total basket in equal shares, and in 1990, Ehrlich wrote Simon a check for $576.07. Tin had fallen by more than half on an absolute basis and they all had fallen on an inflation adjusted basis.

The Ultimate Resource

Essentially, Ehrlich was using Club of Rome style projections. These are models that employ finite levels of natural resources against an exponential increase in consumption across all markets. In contrast, Simon believed that supply would increase as a greater number of human minds were solving for more efficient exploration, extraction, refining, and recycling.

It was demand side destruction versus supply-side innovation. But to get closer to the story of copper, we need to dig deeper.

In today’s AI electrification super cycle — one first driven by crypto currency mining rigs - and more recently by hyper-scale data centers, the price of copper has jumped sharply again.

Think about that, the formerly attractive TV targets consume mostly time and money, but crypto rigs and servers consume electrons for the preservation of money and knowledge. And the cultural shift is greater. The proponents of the Abundance agenda (free housing, groceries, medical care, education and child care) are calling for the repeal of environmental regulations to build new electricity generation.

That is a radical turn for environmentalists at war with money and the mind. Their new government “investments” in electricity will power the artificial intelligence and robotics that will do the work in their communist utopia. What does copper have to do with any of this you might ask. What is it about copper that makes it uniquely suitable for so many applications that are essential to modern life?

Free Electrons

For plumbing systems, copper is light, strong, durable, antimicrobial, ductile, does not rust and is fully recyclable. That is an amazing combination — much like the network of scientists, engineers, manufacturers, merchants, artists and bankers (aka producers) that comprise free markets. Certainly, I am no chemical engineer, but copper atoms arranged in their crystalline structure are tightly packed and stable.

However, it is the electrical conductivity of copper that makes it ideal for power transmission, electrical equipment - and black market fungibility. I am also no electrical engineer, but there is one electron at the fourth energy level of each copper atom that is free to move about the entire lattice of the copper crystal. Second only to silver, which is rare and expensive by comparison, copper has one electron per atom operating freely that makes it a high density carrier for electromagnetic field operations.

That completes the circuit. High density free electrons flowing through data centers that create money and knowledge for human vitality is like high concentrations of capital flowing through free markets that create money and knowledge for human vitality. And both create the modern luxury of leisure time. Or as Isabel Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine:

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

It is election season in America — and notwithstanding the early voting and late ballots that are ripe for manipulation, Election Day this year is November 3, 2026. That means 100 million voters, pundits and candidates will twist themselves into econometric dolts over inflation, employment, taxation, money supply, tariffs, subsidies, and “our values” over the next 11 weeks. After all, the Ragin’ Cajun, aka James Carville, coined the term “It’s the economy, stupid” while working the campaign for Bill Clinton in 1992 — and it stuck.

Proving that the light between the two major political parties in America can be eclipsed by a Franklin — a single $100 bill — on its edge, there are nearly no voters, pundits or politicians of either stripe who disagrees with Carville. Nearly everyone believes that inflation is higher prices, protecting jobs is the government’s job, progressive taxation is justified, central banks control money supply, trade deficits are bad, and government “safety nets” are good.

Central Banking

A great place to begin is the “dual mandate” of the Federal Reserve, America’s ostensibly independent central bank: maximum employment and price stability.

To illustrate the fluctuations in the data going back to the 1930s, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released a bar chart for annual employment increases by presidential administration. It tells us that the lowest performing Democrat was President Obama — and his results were better than every Republican except President Nixon.

Clearly, the message is that employment in America is healthier with Democrats in office than with Republicans. However, there are a multitude of problems with that conclusion. First, the data includes government jobs, which produce nothing but destroy wealth by their very existence. Second, the data is purely correlation — not causation. Third, presidents and political parties have zero influence over private sector employment except to the extent they get out of the way.

Yet, voters, pundits and politicians love to use charts and data like this to pretend they are economically literate and can prove it with objective evidence. Charts like this are evidence, but they are not objective. To be objective, the context of the evidence and its causality must be considered in their entirety. Otherwise, the conclusions are subjective.

As the employment by presidential administration chart is popular among Democrats, the Trump administration published its own chart for consumer price index changes by presidential administration. However, the illustration only goes back to 1988, President Clinton’s first term — and the data was not released under the supervision of any reputable authority. For my purposes, it’s good enough, because none of it is worth a warm bucket of spit — except to the bazillion voters, pundits and politicians who live and breathe bad economics.

In Trump’s price inflation chart, there is an equal distribution among Democrats and Republicans of bad and less bad results. Naturally, Donald Trump is looking pretty good in this regard and Joe Biden is looking really bad. However, context and causality matter. The only influence a president or political party has on prices is to the extent they get out of the way. The historical price inflation experienced during the Biden administration was primarily caused by the economic lockdowns of the Trump administration.

Econ 101

Think of it in terms of supply and demand. When the supply of goods and services are severely cut by arbitrary means, prices will rise. When it happens slowly by organic means, markets adjust and the effect on prices is minimal.

Naturally, the lockdowns caused an immediate recession - and in turn, that unlocked the monetary devaluations that had been accumulating for the previous twenty years, all of which contributed to the historic spike in prices. And the natural consequence of that rotten economic backdrop is the rise of the nihilistic, horribly informed Democratic Socialists and their current rampage for destruction in Democratic party primaries.

Yet, no voter, pundit or politician of either party will tell you the true cause of this because they don’t know and don’t care to know. Instead, the party line pleases the tribe and becomes “my reality” with repetition: it is easier for Republicans to blame the “affordability crisis” on the Federal Reserve and housing regulations and for Democrats to blame it on oligarchs, privilege, and tax loopholes. And they both blame the only group that is improving the situation — the merchant bankers allocating capital to housing.

With that in mind, the latest villain for everyone who fancies themselves a political economics expert is data centers. They only exist because of concentrated wealth and sophisticated knowledge, and they promise to deliver wealth and sophisticated knowledge to anyone who chooses to leverage what exists — so activists must resist!

Data Centers

Not only do the stated concerns include groundwater protection, electricity prices, and NIMBY (not in my back yard), but the loud voices in certain rural communities have become mobilized by these fears. Of course, there are issues related to data center construction that seem legitimate, but like employment and price inflation related to presidential administrations, much of it is superficial.

Conversely, data centers are characterized objectively by Alex Epstein and his Center for Industrial Progress:

“So, you know, I have a two-year-old and an eight-month-old. By the time they’re school-aged, they’ll have access to genius tutors that will be basically free. I already have access to genius medical advice that can be life-saving or certainly life-improving.”

Hopefully, there will be an exponential increase in the use of genius tutoring, including economics for those who discover the free market economists, but today’s political campaigns have no interest in that. In Ohio, Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy published an opinion piece in the Columbus Dispatch on August 6, 2026 that proposes a three prong mandate for “communities” with new data center construction proposals:

1) You will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity. 2) You will pay lower property taxes. 3) The data center will be required to abide by all air and water quality standards without exception, and we will take the necessary steps to protect Ohio’s fertile farmland. If any of these three conditions is not met, the data center won’t be built. Period.

When you see tough talk like “without exception” and “period!” you know they mean business, sort of, maybe, not likely, forget about it. This is pandering. But like the political narratives about employment and inflation that dominate both parties, the entire conversation ignores what the State can do best: protect rights and get out of the way.

Econ 201

Continuing with that theme, the ideal scenario is complete separation of economy and state. The American model for separation of church and state works magnificently when it is not compromised. The same would be true for economic vitality and for the same reasons. Each individual has a right to their spiritual beliefs, and each individual has a right to their earned property.

Yet, to believe that centralized authority possesses the knowledge and expertise to manage a complex division of labor economy is a matter of faith. In America, the Federal Reserve creates the illusion of free money, the Federal Trade Commission creates the illusion of unjust prices, and the Treasury Department creates the illusion of inefficient markets.

But for the catechism to grow the flock, State functionaries need the cooperation of certain private sector partners. On the state and local level, that is accomplished with property, sales, and employment tax exemptions for all sorts of projects, especially data centers. What is not seen is that business owners — whether they be closet republicans or democrats, must compromise their supply-side principles to do business with government bureaucrats who never compromise their demand-side principles.

Econ 301

A core principle of the supply-side is decentralized knowledge transmitted by prices - and a core principle of the demand-side is centralized power over economic activity. In other words, voluntary production and trade for mutually earned profit vs. the force of government regulation for the mythical common good.

With that in mind, we can see that the employment and inflation charts by presidential administration are the demand-side propaganda of both political parties. They may demonstrate correlation, but not causation. And when private sector leadership cut deals that allow for the use of force, they are compromising themselves, their constituents, and long-term prosperity.

To illustrate the impotence of both parties, consider the so-called debt crisis. Everyone complains about it, yet they offer the same solution: more tax revenue. The difference is the method. Democrats scream for higher tax rates (demand-side force), and Republicans scream for economic growth (supply-side freedom), yet neither of them understand the problem: higher tax revenue. That is the primary cause — and another can of worms.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

The concluding sentence to my last essay about Ben and Jerry’s string of social activism debacles reads:

Ultimately, principled builders and creators will know they serve far more people effectively when there are more of them earning higher profits — and celebrating with a Milk and Honey ice cream cone.

That is because earning higher profits is a complex and noble challenge worthy of social recognition and Milk and Honey ice cream.

Not only must owners and managers anticipate the needs and desires of customers, they must attract talent and capital, serve their sometimes conflicting needs and desires, and do it with ever greater efficiency in the arena of competitors who are doing the same thing. Naturally, if a business fails to adapt, it will fail — unless it is subsidized by the force of government (confiscated money or monopoly protection) or social pressure.

Also asserted about Ben and Jerry’s business model before the Unilever acquisition was:

When you see that making the world a better place becomes the primary goal, you can assume with great confidence that it is not the primary goal.

The goal is to burn money and punish competence. And when organizations with principles that are opposed (such as producers and parasites) try to collaborate with each other, the parasites will prevail. That is because the producers must act inconsistently with their principles, but the parasites remain consistent.

The Financials

Consider America’s WNBA women’s basketball league. Not well known is the WNBA is a for-profit corporation. And prior to 2022, 50% of the stock was owned by the NBA and 50% by the league’s individual team owners, but today the split is 42% each with a 16% stake sold to a group of investors for $75 million. But as a private corporation, the WNBAs revenue and expense details are not available to the public.

Regardless, the league has gained a much higher public profile over the last five years because of a significant spike in game attendance, television viewers, sponsorship deals, but much of the attention is over the league’s mismanagement of the causes of the attendance, viewers and deals - the rainmakers.

Because there are no audited financial statements available for the WNBA — or comprehensive financial statements of any kind, we must rely on the few public disclosures the league, the NBA, or sponsors are willing to reveal. Of course, the release of that information serves a limited purpose for the group making the assertions.

In October 2018, NBA Commissioner David Stern told the Associated Press that the WNBA loses $10 million per year on average. Yet, in 2024, the Washington Post reported the WNBA is on track to lose $50 million on revenues that have doubled to $200 million. That may or may not be due to financial mismanagement, but consider the Sherwood News report of the league’s disdain for capital flowing to talent:

New sponsors seemed to emerge faster than the league could manage. In May, the Las Vegas Tourism Board announced a sponsorship for the Las Vegas Aces that would have given each player $100,000 — only for the league to turn around and open an investigation into the deal, out of concern it could give players an undue advantage in free agency.

Obviously, the WNBA’s financial strength and reporting transparency are a pawn in the collective bargaining positions of the players and the league, but if the league’s revenue growth and balance sheet were the result of superior management, the league would have solid ground on which to stand. They do not. The players receive only 17% of the league’s revenue — compared to about 50% in the NBA, NFL and NHL.

The Talent

Born from the notoriety and success of the 1996 USA Olympic team, the WNBA came to life with Rebecca Lobo, Cheryl Miller, Lisa Leslie, and Sheryl Swoopes. But for much of America, with the notable exception of Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird, women’s professional basketball was barely noticeable until another star player, Brittney Griner, was arrested in 2022 and jailed for months in Russia for possession of a cannabis vape.

Regardless of the medieval nature of much of what goes on in Russia, the imprisonment of Griner brings up some worthy questions. Those start with the league’s decision to do business with the Russian government, then expose their players to the force of an unjust system, and ultimately to Griner’s willful negligence and lack of awareness.

More on that later. For now, it is necessary to examine the catalysts for the doubling of revenue and the infusion of capital that the WNBA has enjoyed since 2022. Naturally, the quantitative cause is game attendance — and for the complete 2022 season it was 1.2 million, in 2023 it was 1.6 million, and 2.4 million in 2024.

Last year attendance pushed through 3.1 million fans watching games live because of new talent led by Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever. Of course, record-breaking attendance is only part of the story. Since Clark and her 2024 class of rookies entered the league, SportsDataIO reports:

The 2024 WNBA season has also seen unprecedented viewership numbers. Games are averaging 1.32 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, and CBS—nearly tripling last season’s average of 462,000 viewers.

In a rational world, principled owners would recognize and protect the assets and products that drive revenue. Revenue growth is the quantitative signal that the business is delivering value to customers and profitability is the quantitative signal that the business is delivering value to investors. And in the entertainment industry, the qualitative aspects are the talent driving the value creation — and it is center stage.

Ultimately, owners and management have a moral and financial duty — freely chosen by them, to protect and defend their people — including those who are the rainmakers.

The Reality

In the case of the WNBA, the talent driving the value creation are female athletes. There is no dichotomy. They are women and they are athletes — both, an integrated whole. Female by natural law and athletes by their self-determined talent. And WNBA owners and managers who do not defend all women athletes from imposters and thugs on these principles are parasites in these mixed organizational schemes.

To be clear, I have not been a consistent fan of women’s professional sports, but the most exciting thing I’ve seen was the goal scored from midfield by Carli Lloyd during the 2015 World Cup final against Japan. I remember thinking, “What is she doing? Why is she lining up a kick? She is giving the ball away!” Boy, was I wrong. Lloyd saw what I did not see. Even better, she had practiced this shot hundreds of times. Better yet, she recognized the opportunity. A second later I got it — and Lloyd got the goal — and the hat trick. She knew what she was doing!

In addition to that, my team sport has always been ice hockey, and the excellence and rivalry between the USA and Canadian women’s hockey teams is one of my top attractions for the Winter Olympics. In fact, I have the 1992 Manon Rheaume hockey card. The only sports card I own. Who is Manon Rheaume? She is an Olympic silver medalist from Quebec and former professional who signed a contract with the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning. Yes, the NHL — and appeared in two exhibition games. That never happens.

Women do not play in men’s professional leagues for a good reason — and men playing in women’s sports is despicable. Just as bad is WNBA coach Cheryl Reeve wearing a t-shirt on game night saying, “Trans Kids Belong.” That is child abuse. Children with gender dysphoria need and deserve the best care possible, not potential mutilation for a problem that is transitory.

Brittney Griner may have been willfully negligent and unaware — but of what? Of her extreme luck for being born in a country founded on the principles of individual rights and objective law. Too many young people today are equally misinformed. The same is true of the WNBA leadership that excuses the flagrant fouling of Caitlin Clark, because she draws the right kind of crowd, and excuses the intimidation and violence of the trans mob outside their arenas during the 2026 season.

Fortunately, the Cheryl Reeve and Megan Rapinoe (USA soccer) types of women’s sports are being outclassed, outhustled and outperformed by the likes of Sophie Cunningham — also of the Indiana Fever, Jennifer Sey of XX-XY Athletics, and Riley Gaines - former world class swimmer from the University of Kentucky.

If the WNBA hopes to live up to the virtues of its for-profit status, it must give up the destructive, nihilistic, pandering to the social justice crowd and protect its most valuable resources — women with character and talent. It’s what capitalists do.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

Eight hundred years ago seems like a long time, but I was reminded by a friend about America’s 250th anniversary that I have been alive for 25 percent — one fourth of the time it has existed. And that is miniscule compared to the epochs since the Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs. At the same time, everything we take for granted today was germinating in the 13th century, despite the obstacles that persist to this day.

Perhaps the most significant, yet horridly destructive event that began the thirteenth century was the sacking of Constantinople in the year 1204. Inspired and promoted by Pope Innocent III, it was the signature achievement, if you care to call it that, of the Fourth Crusade.

Having been lost to Emperor Saladin in 1187 after the Second Crusade, and abandoned by Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade, the massive expedition was originally intended to recapture Jerusalem. However, the mission shrank from its original proportions and was ultimately led by Venetian commercial interests. The sovereign city-state not only needed to recoup the capital owed them by the barons leading the crusading armies, but they wanted to expand their power in the eastern Mediterranean.

It is most notable that Constantinople was a large and thriving metropolis — and it was Christian. In fact, the wealth and sophistication of the city was beyond the imaginations of the northern European foot soldiers, servants, knights, and nobles of the previous Crusades. With their entourage of pilgrims that had taken overland routes to the Holy Land, they were unwelcome guest barbarians intruding on their cosmopolitan Byzantine hosts.

Beginning with the first Crusade, small Christian kingdoms were established along a narrow strip of the Mediterranean, but inland Jerusalem was lost to Saladin after the second Crusade. A patient and generous leader, Saladin was able to organize Muslim tribal warlords under his governance and finally defeat their Christian rivals who had “taken the cross.

Crusading Armies

The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath were largely disastrous. Reconciliation between the Eastern Greek and Western Latin Christian Churches was critically harmed, but that is minor compared to the tens of thousands that were killed or died of disease chasing redemption in the afterlife. Or the fragmentation of the former Byzantine Empire that led to the rise of the Ottoman Turks two hundred years later.

Ultimately, it is impossible to manage the intramural and intermural violence of competing death cults – faith and force are corollaries, but it is entirely possible to see the early thirteenth century as a turning point for the resurrection of Western civilization. Trusted money, financial instruments, risk sharing and societies of contract had been taking hold in Venice, Genoa and Florence for the previous several decades — and the logistical demands of the Fourth Crusade merely accelerated the development.

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What was promised to the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, by the leadership of the Fourth Crusade was 85,000 Cologne marks of silver for a fleet that would transport over 33,000 knights, squires, infantry and horses. This was an enormous sum of money to be paid in installments — and one that committed Venice to an entire year’s worth of production. The Venetians lived up to their end of the transaction, but the barons and their armies did not arrive with sufficient money or manpower to satisfy the contract.

In addition to the fleet, Venice also promised armed war galleys as military escorts in exchange for half of the territory and plunder to be acquired by the combined forces. That is uncomfortably similar to the mixed economy of today’s regulatory state — one that plunders the private sector for protection money. But to their credit, Italian merchants had been operating in Mediterranean ports as informal bankers since the Third Crusade, thus allowing the barons and knights to access money far from home.

Units of Value

And the deal for the crusade was essentially a futures contract – the barons negotiated future payment for services rendered up front. The difference is the size of this major transaction, which helped normalize the practice of forward contracts at scale. Naturally, deals of this kind involve risk for the party that owns the commodity, and financial “risk” is a term derived from the Tuscan “rischio” that evolved during this era.

Another financial instrument developed in the 13th and 14th century was Bills of Exchange that solved a problem dramatized by the Crusades: settling debts by parties in different cities, transporting purchasing power without the cost and security requirements of hard money — and doing it without violating religious edicts against usury. Instead of explicitly charging interest, bankers would be compensated for their “rischio” and the time value of money with discounted exchange rates for different currencies.

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And by splitting risk with traveling merchants, investors could buy a “commenda contract” that helped fund the transportation of a ship’s cargo in exchange for a share of the profits of the merchant. And it is not a stretch to consider these contracts as precursors to the spreading of risk through insurance contracts developed and perfected by Lloyds of London in the 17th century. The demand for this kind of risk and profit sharing increased during the Crusades and helped accelerate the growth of international trade.

Naturally, the reliability of bills of exchange, futures, and commenda contracts depended on trusted hard money. Beginning in 1194, Venice had the high value silver coin known as the grosso to facilitate payments, in 1252 the city-state of Florence minted the florin that was later used throughout Europe, and in 1284 the ducat became the dominant coin for Mediterranean trade.

And as reported by NPR, the significance of this cannot be underestimated,

“Suddenly everything has a unit value, and everything can be compared in numbers. A priest has a fee for a wedding and a funeral — is that more or less than the cost of a flask of wine, or a prostitute?”

Crusading Ideas

When Pope Innocent III discovered that his mission to liberate Jerusalem had been drastically altered to begin with the invasion of Zara in the Kingdom of Croatia, he excommunicated the entire army and the Venetians for the attack. He later rescinded the excommunication of the non-Venetians, but the authority of the Vatican was rapidly disintegrating.

Coincident with the rise of Venice and Genoa, and Florence soon to follow, was the reemergence of Aristotle in the West. Having been all but eradicated with the rise of the Catholic Church after the fall of Rome, the bulk of Aristotle’s corpus had been preserved and studied in the Byzantine Greek world, and during the 8th and 9th centuries, translated into Arabic.

It was during the 12th century that an informal network known as the Toledo School of Translators produced Latin translations of the Arabic texts. However, the most significant development was the Greek to Latin translations by William of Moerbeke in the mid and late 13th century. In fact, the Moerbeke texts were so highly regarded that they were used by the scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, who was also a contemporary and a collaborator

.Introduced to Aristotle in 1239 at the University of Naples, Aquinas began writing commentaries in the 1260s and integrated Aristotelian ethics, physics, metaphysics and analytics with Christian theology. And it is paradoxical that Aquinas helped save Christianity from an inevitable demise in the face of severe Church opposition. In the long run, the intellectual courage of Aquinas that led the West back to Aristotle into the Renaissance a century later — and eventually the Enlightenment.

As asserted by philosopher Leonard Peikfoff, the significance of this cannot be overestimated,

“The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles.”

Unit Omission

Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment portrayed man as a heroic being for the first time since classical Greece. By Aristotle’s ethics, character is the identity each of us can create for ourselves, and by his analytics, concept formation highlights our ability to understand the complexity of the natural world.

However, it was Aristotle’s greatest advocate and intellectual progeny, philosopher Ayn Rand, who developed relevant measurements and omission as primary to the formation of concepts:

“If a child considers a match, a pencil and a stick, he observes that length is the attribute they have in common, but their specific lengths differ. The difference is one of measurement. In order to form the concept “length,” the child’s mind retains the attribute and omits its particular measurements.”

In summary, the 13th century bore the brunt of the Crusade insanity that destroyed what little wealth might have been accumulating in northern Europe. But it was also the century that saw the creation of the Magna Carta in England that established property rights and consent of the governed as radical, new political principles. At the same time, sound money and sophisticated banking practices in southern Europe helped birth the Renaissance, but it was the emergence of reason that is the catalyst for all wealth creation in the first place.

Certainly, emergence is not immediate. While the Italian city-states were giving birth to the practical application of capitalist principles, Spanish universities took the intellectual baton from Aquinas and gave birth to the theoretical principles more than 200 years before Adam Smith. Omitting the units of measurement, Llewellyn Rockwell explained in Freeman:

“Trained in the Thomist tradition, they used logic to understand the world around them, and looked for institutions that would promote prosperity and the common good. It is hardly surprising, then, that many of the Late Scholastics were passionate defenders of the free market. The members of the School of Salamanca would not have been fooled by the fallacies that dominate modern economic theory and policy today. If only our modern understanding could once again arrive at that high road paved for us more than 400 years ago.”

But to reemerge on that high road, a plurality of individuals must practice what they preach: money is the cornerstone of civilization, prices are the information superhighway, markets are efficient and elegant, and earned profits are justice. I committed myself to these principles almost twenty years ago, practiced them with hundreds of clients for ten years, wrote the definitive book, and to quote my client who was speaking to the director of wealth management, “in all my years with the bank, this is the first time I know what I’m doing and why.” That is the crusade that matters.

Ben Cohen wants to make the world a better place. There are three ways to go about that. The first is to persuade others to change their ways by any means necessary. The second is to persuade others to trade by means of their own rational self-interest. The third is to sell more ice cream. Naturally, the first is far more popular than the second, the second is far more effective than the first, and the third is an absurd contradiction.

When you see that making the world a better place becomes the primary goal, you can assume with great confidence that it is not the primary goal. Unearned wealth and power is the primary goal — and the world will not become a better place. But there is money to be made in ice cream — and the cynical pandering of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream). When combined with voluntary trade, it is a case study worthy of The Moneyball Method’s scrutiny.

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Why? Because in a culture conditioned to believe that “making the world a better place” is a higher virtue than independence or integrity, there is a higher probability of commercial success. Regardless of the competitive value of the ice cream itself, Ben and Jerry were sellouts from the beginning.

Throughout the decades of 1980s and 1990s, Ben and Jerry championed political and social causes for the secular religion of anticapitalism. Those included the “1% for Peace” campaign that was aligned with Soviet interests during the Cold War, their “Peace Pops” against the consolidation of dairy farms in Vermont, salary caps on executive compensation they later loosened for themselves, and plowing a token 7.5% of profits into social change non-profits that accomplish nothing measurable.

If 7.5% is good, does it not make even more sense to donate half their profits to their favorite charities — especially since millions of customers buy their product for that very reason? Ben and Jerry’s could take the additional tax write-off, reinvest the other half for greater future profits, and compound their “investments” in social justice. Would that not make the world a better place with six times the initial impact?

Thirty years later, those social justice entities are tens of thousands of NGOs around the country that collect untold billions from governmental agencies in the biggest money laundering operation in world history. On the flip side, the Baltic states and most eastern European countries are free of the Soviet stranglehold and enjoying freedom and prosperity more than ever. And America’s farms are also more productive than ever, which keeps prices low, supermarkets stocked, and capital flowing to its most talented producers.

True to their character as pragmatists, Ben and Jerry sold their company in 2000 to Unilever for $326 million. In a transaction hailed by the State funded Wharton School of Business (University of Pennsylvania), the deal was unique for its creation of an independent board of directors that was nominally free to pursue Ben and Jerry’s phony virtues.

Doubling down on horrid ideas, those included their “dismantle white supremacy” campaign that coincided with the burning, looting, assault and murders (“mostly peaceful protests”) in dozens of American cities in 2020. And in 2021, Ben and Jerry’s board sided with the primitive and violent culture that has wrecked the Gaza region where they live and two years later produced thousands of murderers, gang rapists, baby roasters and hostage takers. As Isabel Paterrson called it in her 1943 classic, The God of the Machine, Ben and Jerry resemble the humanitarians with a guillotine in her book.

However, reality will always win, capitalism obeys reality, and poetic justice is superior to social justice. Unilever sold its Israeli trademark to a local entrepreneur — and as of two months ago, you can buy the “Milk and Honey” specialty flavor with honey swirls and Star of David fudge pieces, but only in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, etc. Now I have another great reason to visit Israel!

But I won’t be looking for Ben or Jerry. Their independent board sued Unilever in 2024 after the board had become impotent to use their platform to demonize Israel. Apparently, property rights (ownership) trump the board’s arbitrary whims. And in 2025, Unilever terminated Ben and Jerry’s CEO, created a subsidiary ice cream division named Magnum, and scuttled the board’s Watermelon flavor for Palestine.

It keeps getting better. Ben Cohen then crowdsourced a Watermelon Sorbet adorned with Palestinian flag emblems. He also attempted to buy back his namesake company, but it is not for sale and he doesn’t have the capital. And last month, Magnum cut funding to Cohen and Greenfield’s philanthropic foundation and they shut it down. However, the brand is performing very well and Magnum claims to be committed to the original mission, as reported by The Guardian:

“Since it was acquired in 2000, Ben & Jerry’s “footprint has grown from four to over 40 countries, [and] revenue has grown more than fivefold,” McKenzie-Gould said. The company’s overall social mission has received €500m ($576m) from the parent – more than the original purchase price.”

Armed with talent for campaigning, a foundation with no one left to shake down — and no skin in the game, Ben Cohen has chosen to go the boycott route.

On the benevolent side, corporate America is finally becoming wise to the social justice scam. Ultimately, principled builders and creators will know they serve far more people effectively when there are more of them earning higher profits — and celebrating with a Milk and Honey ice cream cone.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

In 1763, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac published the proverb, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” We are all familiar with that sentiment – and even then, it was not an original thought. But it was unique to the Enlightenment’s revolution of the mind.

Not only do you own your life, but you can transform yourself for the better — if you so choose. In addition, the proverb rejects the Biblical mind and body dichotomy and informs us that we are a complex system of physicality and consciousness.

Less obvious, but equally important, is the Almanac’s prescription: the most advantageous use of time for work and for rest. It is relevant to all three aspects: physical, financial and cognitive well being. Of course, that was 18th century America, capitalism had barely taken hold, and leisure time was rare. Perhaps the only Western society that had produced it for those who were not high born were the Dutch.

But this is 21st century America, recreational opportunities are in great supply — and an easy to understand system for health, wealth and wisdom is readily available — if you are willing to invest in yourself.

Healthy

Beginning with physical activity for long-term vitality, aerobic exercise – meaning a comfortable heart rate energy zone that activates your fat calories as your fuel source, has long-term benefits that will raise your fat-burning metabolism, increase endurance, lower body fat composition, lower resting heart rate, and fortify your immune system.

The tool you will need is a heart rate monitor and the information you will need is to know where your heart rate corresponds to an easy aerobic pace. This can be estimated using readily available charts for your age and sex, but the most accurate measure is a VO2 max test that will measure your fat calorie burn rate for every level of intensity.

Some systems use percentage of maximum heart rate as the baseline and others use functional threshold power. Either is fine. Your threshold is probably between 80% and 85% of your maximum heart rate, but for elite athletes it could be as high as 90%. However, high intensity training is not the subject of this article.

Here, I will emphasize the three energy zones at or below threshold: the mostly aerobic comfortable pace (55 - 65% of max heart rate), the speedy aerobic pace (65 - 75% of max heart rate), and the most efficient challenging but sustainable pace (75 - 85% of max heart rate) described in Stu Mittleman’s book titled Slow Burn.

The other thing to know is what physical adaptation those energy zones will help you accomplish: aerobic endurance, muscular endurance, or power. Ultimately, the objective data for health and fitness is your metabolic chart for heart rate, fat calorie burn, sugar calorie burn, and your threshold for converting to high intensity training. The best way to raise your threshold is to work underneath it.

But most importantly, are you willing to commit five to ten hours per week over a lifetime to maintain an energetic, low body fat habit that is fun and enjoyable as you keep track of your success?

Wealthy

This is not a “no pain, no gain” mindset. This is the efficient use of energy. And in the context of personal wealth, the similarities are remarkable. Naturally, the goals to achieve are different: cash flow for lifestyle expenses, money for family, travel, entertainment and medical care, wealth for education, retirement, major purchases, or gifting, and investing with confidence in all of that, but the philosophy and process is identical.

In this case, the first set of objective data are the results of your values inventory that require money, the amounts that are needed, and their preferred times. And because we are dealing with an entire socioeconomic system of capital markets, the second set of objective data are the historical asset class metrics of average return, volatility and correlation coefficients.

By controlling what we can control — including market risk exposure, and modeling that against the uncertainty of the future, we also end up with three energy zones called underfunded, fully funded and overfunded. And instead of a VO2 Max test to calculate aerobic threshold and fat burn, we run Stress Tests for any investment strategy you care to model and calculate the number of trial runs that meet or exceed you cash flow expectations.

Below 75% is underfunded, 75 - 90% of trial runs that meet or exceed expectations is fully funded, and greater than 90% of trial runs that meet or exceed spending goals is overfunded. Again, the goal is to know what zone in which you are operating and stay in the comfort zone of high confidence without unnecessary risk or sacrifice.

Unfortunately, many or most practitioners calculate confidence levels using unreliable data and unreliable methods. First, nearly all of them calculate “probability of success,” which is misleading at best. Those results include many trial runs that are overfunded. Second, they require nearly 100% successful trial runs to be fully funded. Third, they are using capital market assumptions that are conservative projections. If so, all of these will force investors to sacrifice their lifestyle goals or their risk capacity.

But most importantly, are you willing to invest your values inventory, assign dollars of future wealth to those that require money, and measure success according to your funding status and risk capacity?

Wise

Naturally, wisdom is an abstract concept that does not lend itself to concrete measurement like your physical endurance or financial status can do. Having said that, there are activities that will improve your mental focus, understanding of important subjects, awareness of the world around you, and the emotional well being derived from contradictions eliminated from your thinking.

Obvious to nearly everyone, reading is the most effective way to acquire knowledge, hopefully understanding — and literacy itself was the greatest tool for mankind to achieve independence and prosperity. The material can be great literature for stylized examples of how things could and should be, or nonfiction related to the natural world, the humanities, biographies, self-help, etc. In all cases, if the authors present a benevolent view of human nature and you read with focus on conceptual meaning, your awareness will expand by a greater value.

Another proven way to gain wisdom is to write. Whether it is short articles like a letter to the editor, or long-form essays for Substack, or professional writing for your career, the mental focus needed for research and creating an outline will teach you much more than facts. You will learn structure. With effort, you will identify contradictions in your thinking, focus on principles and fundamentals, and improve your communication skills.

And like fitness goals or financial objectives, you can create an accountability program for yourself – ideally with an accountability partner who is not your best friend — and develop an easy to use method for keeping track of progress and success.

One way to do this is to track the time you dedicate to the high level of concentrated mental effort. This is full immersion on the important task, like I have been doing since I began writing this piece. Moderate focus is to pay attention to what is important while navigating the environment and reacting to necessary distractions. Minimal focus is relaxation of many varieties. All of these are good in the proper context and sufficient quantity, but full immersion is the activity to manage and track.

First, identify the long-term goal for knowledge, understanding, or awareness. Maybe it is to become a trusted advisor in your favorite academic or professional discipline. Or learn a system of philosophical, historical, psychological, economic, or artistic endeavor. It could be great literature — and learning to write great fiction is a challenge that can develop many cognitive skills.

But eating an elephant is done one bite at a time. What are the activities to which you will commit? How much time are you willing to invest? Who will help you measure your progress toward these goals? When will you know that you are succeeding?

Where is the best place to start? At the beginning. “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” A strong metabolism and lean body composition will buy you time. Defined values and fully funded cash flow expectations will buy you time. And both of them contribute to your ever growing awareness of the world around you. Time and awareness are the intangible dividends of a sound investment strategy.

It is summer in America and election season is ramping up. On the national level we have the midterms – two before the next Presidential election – and on the state level, there are 39 governorships to be decided.

One of those is the State of Ohio, where I live, and there are three candidates to be considered, but only two to be taken seriously. Among the two consequential candidates, Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, the race is currently polling as a toss-up. Invisible is the Libertarian party whose economic platform is spartan, but stresses affordability, ending property taxes, and restriction on data centers.

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Regarding Dr. Acton, through June 2020, she was the Director of Public Health for Republican governor Mike Dewine and spearheaded his panicked lockdowns during the Wuhan virus. Not only were they among the most aggressive series of actions in America, but Dr. Acton then became his chief health advisor. However, unable to handle the backlash from her destructive policies, she left the Dewine administration in August 2020.

Without going into detail, the economic platform supporting Acton’s run for governor is littered with workforce development, affordability, consumer protection and government “investments.” Of course, this is typical democratic socialism and old as dirt.

What is more interesting are the monetary economic fallacies of the one candidate who claims to be an advocate for individual rights and economic freedom. And for that, we have the Wall Street Journal Opinion section piece that was published under the byline of Vivek Ramaswamy and dated July 5, 2026.

In the first three paragraphs, Ramaswamy gives readers a sample of the nihilistic ideas that are dominating the Democratic party. From the mayors of New York and Los Angeles to the governor of California and Dr. Acton, he correctly assails the billionaire tax schemes and multi billion dollar subsidies while positioning himself as an advocate for free markets and sound money.

Then Ramaswamy unleashes the misinformed economic narratives that are typical of conservative pundits, politicians, and professors. This begins with the fourth paragraph:

“American wealth is concentrated at the top. On this narrow point, the socialists are correct.”

In every country in the history of the world, wealth is concentrated at the top, but to a liberty-minded capitalist (the only kind), the broader points should be the methods for accumulating wealth and the value of wealth concentration.

Ramaswamy concludes the paragraph by saying:

“the greatest driver of inequality over the past five years was exactly what the socialists now demand more of: large-scale government spending.”

First of all, economic inequality is natural and good. To concede that point to the collectivists is to lose the argument. However, he is correct about government spending as the forced extraction of wealth that punishes everyone (except the politicians, bureaucrats and NGO operators that pay indulgences to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions).

Getting to the issue is the lead-in for paragraph five:

“When Washington floods the economy with borrowed and freshly printed dollars, the money flows first into assets owned by the wealthiest Americans—stocks, bonds, real estate.”

This is common wisdom, but there is so much wrong here that it’s hard to know where to start.

The false premise is that the State creates money, that creates the illusion of free money, but the State creates nothing. To correct that nonsense, consider the fact that the money supply in America as measured by M2 (a measure of money in circulation) as published by Macrotrends, has grown to $22.7 trillion from $4.7 trillion since January 2000. That is an increase of 4.8 times during a period when US Gross Domestic Product increased 3 times and the population increased by 60 million, or about 21%. Currency devaluation and price inflation are real, but money in circulation is a self-regulating mechanism that disregards the central bankers.

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With that in mind, “Washington floods the economy” only makes sense if you believe the Cantillon effect is real and persistent. Published in 1755 and named for French economist Richard Cantillon, it claims that newly minted government money affects some prices before others, namely assets owned by those closest to government power, and then sequentially affects other goods.

Compared to the “capital theory” work of his successor, French economist Jacques Turgot, Cantillon’s “money theory” is more primitive. Accordingly, it is favored by the Federal Reserve to justify their quantitative easing (QE) projects that create deposits in America’s banking system through the purchase of Treasury bonds.

Ostensibly, those who acquired wealth by their own industry suddenly became giddy for speculation on equities and real estate and pushed prices higher on the greater fool theory of irrational investors. Back to reality, it is producers and traders who decide what is money. And think about the technological advances, the productivity gains, and the capital that continuously flows into America because that is where it is treated best.

On a roll, Ramaswamy doubles down:

“As big government pumped money into the economy, assets boomed: The stock market has roughly tripled from its March 2020 low.”

Speaking of which, Macrotrends also reports that the valuation of the S&P 500 stock market index has fluctuated between 20 and 40 times trailing earnings since 1990 - and as of February 2026, the price earnings multiple was just under 30.

Of course, the earnings of the previous 12 months compared to the current price is not the only indicator of stock market valuation and multiples are historically high right now, but to say that it is money created by the State that bid up asset prices means that earnings, innovation and capital flows don’t matter.

However, they are all that matter. High valuations reveal confidence in the likelihood of future profits and cash flow - and all of it depends on high risk equity investors - not the low-risk debt in which banks specialize. Consider the fact that Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Tesla are relatively new additions to the top ten largest companies in the S&P 500 index.

These are venture capital success stories that have enriched the lives of countless investors and consumers, yet the WSJ Opinion piece continues:

“The rich got richer because of the socialists’ remedy—government spending.”

If you want to help your political opponent get elected, this is the way to go. Ramaswamy is rationalizing every crony corporatism, political patronage, regulatory capture, government subsidy, whatever you want to call it, scam imaginable.

Naturally, that is a major contradiction, but not the only one. Here, the Ramaswamy campaign delivers four contradictions in one statement:

“The money inflated the assets of the wealthy, widening the gap that now propels Democratic Socialists to power, while inflating the price of everything.”

The monetary policy of the Federal Reserve did not drive asset prices higher. Income and wealth inequality are natural and healthy facts of social reality.

Furthermore, driving the Democratic Socialists to power is the illusion of free money, the denigration of markets, and the demonization of profits that are encapsulated in this WSJ Op-Ed attributed to Vivek Ramaswamy. On top of that, “the price of everything” rose rapidly because of the supply-side disaster known as economic lockdowns that earned Dr. Amy Acton a Profile in Courage award.

If you are not running for office or working for a campaign, you have basically two choices in politics: vote for the best candidate or don’t vote. In this case, the best candidate is either the pretend capitalist whose judgment is suspect or the humanitarian with the guillotine who is what she says she is.

In a larger sense, politics is downstream from ethics. It is the cesspool of ideas for people who would rather tell you how you should live before building their own characters and productive capabilities. Conversely, the rational alternative for your health, wealth and wisdom begins with your own life as your primary value. And that is where The Moneyball Method begins: independence from the monetary economics of the State’s institutions.

Economically, it begins with money as the cornerstone of civilization, prices as the most efficient conduit for information, markets as voluntary trade for mutual profit, and earned profits as poetic justice. Or as Dagny Taggart whispered to John Galt in Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged:

“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”

“No, we never had to.”

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

During the second week of July 2026 in the world of finance, widely repeated headlines announced this bombshell: JP Morgan AI Agents Beat 60/40 Portfolio! What is most remarkable about this news is the number of outlets that picked it up (Bloomberg, Financial Review, Yahoo Finance, msn, AI Chronicle and many others) which correlates perfectly with the story’s insignificance.

First, the headlines are revealing. Every one of these news agencies has confirmed the purpose of all active managers is to beat the market – or beat the market on a risk adjusted basis. The other half of the headline declares that beating a generic, balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds (60/40 strategies) is somehow a standard of excellence.

For the record, JP Morgan Investment Management is one of the premier asset managers in America. And as a pioneer in the development of low cost retail funds and institutional portfolios, they have earned their place as an industry leader. As reported by Financial Review, it makes sense they would experiment with the kind of AI driven innovation that their clients expect:

Researchers at the bank built an array of AI-powered investing agents that shift between stocks and bonds depending on changing market conditions. In back tests spanning the past two decades, the best-performing system topped a traditional 60/40 portfolio – 60 per cent in stocks and 40 per cent in bonds – by 0.7 of a percentage point a year with lower volatility.

Second, for a model to outperform a passive 60/40 strategy by 0.70% per year – one that may increase stock market exposure above 60% in a back-tested environment that avoids weak markets, is not meaningful. Doing it with less volatility does mean something, but how much less? So, to better understand the investment strategy discipline, Yahoo Finance describes it this way:

Using agents powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the JPMorgan team designed a system that classifies the market into four regimes based on growth and inflation: Goldilocks, reflation, stagflation and risk-off.

“Goldilocks” is an economy with decent growth and little price inflation, “reflation” is considered a higher growth and higher inflation economy, “stagflation” is economic stagnation or recession with higher prices, and “risk off” is an equity market that favors defensive, or lower volatility stocks. Again, these are back tested results, as JP Morgan and the reporters made clear - but hindsight is 20/20.

However, consider what is missing: the only growth and price inflation scenario that matters. The secular trend that began in the 1790s - when Treasury Secretary Andrew Hamilton reinstated sound currency in America - is falling real prices and average income that rose geometrically. And as one of millions of examples, consider the 1980 commodities bet between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich. Prices fell sharply. Prosperity and population rose sharply.

Yet, nearly every economist, strategist, and analyst at every major and minor firm is beholden to the role of government as money creator. It is not. So, if this story is such a non-event, why the hype? According to Stock Backgrounder:

The financial industry is undergoing a structural shift towards integrating advanced AI into core investment strategies, moving beyond automation to autonomous decision support. This trend reflects broader efforts to leverage computational power for more dynamic and responsive market engagement.

Essentially, that is MBA-speak for “markets are efficient but don’t tell anyone.” To the objective investor, there is nothing more responsive and engaged than the price mechanism of free markets. And reading between the lines of all these news reports, the immense difficulty for money managers to consistently outperform has not changed:

“The AI agent can be set up with a process to be empowered to make decisions under uncertainty, producing outperformance vs a reasonable benchmark,” the strategists wrote in a note on Thursday, describing the work as the firm’s first attempt to build an AI system for identifying market regimes.

Are not markets always uncertain? What constitutes a reasonable benchmark? And what about periods of time when markets do not have “regimes” of consistent volatility and sentiment? What is sentiment? There is a lot of ambiguity here. Furthermore, the regimes created for the AI Agent testing are similar to the “factor-based” investing models of a decade ago that never gained traction for any firm not named Dimensional Funds, but I digress.

In summary, capital markets are extraordinarily complex, the price mechanism is the information superhighway, and capital flows to talent. And for the vast majority of individual investors, true success is not achieved with market outperformance. Success is achieved with the defined goals and objective data that give our lives meaning and purpose.

And for that, we need to know our risk capacity and funding status. In fact, The Moneyball Method was using the artificial intelligence of statistical analysis long before AI became a household word, but for a rational purpose: to integrate market elegance with human goals and aspirations!

Part I of this series ended with: “Builders, build, beginning with themselves. That is The Moneyball Method.” There is a lot here. What is a builder? Why do they build? Why do builders begin with themselves? How is this relevant to objective investing? To help answer these questions, psychologist Gena Gorlin wrote:

“Our ultimate task as human agents, after all, is to architect our own lives: that is, the whole latticework of interconnected ends and means to which we want our life to add up.”

As human agents, we have the ability to make decisions for ourselves and act independently. But to become builders, we must turn this natural agency into value-driven objectives, match those with defined goals, create a plan of action, and become committed. As Gorlin also said, “it is a demanding love” that begins with reverence for oneself. It begins with self-esteem.

But for nearly everyone, it is easier said than done, even for the most prolific builders. That is because there are social pressures to understand and dismiss before they gain too much influence over our emotional intelligence. As mentioned in Part I, those include faith-based systems that reduce your self worth with scapegoating (victimhood), entropy (blanking out), subjectiveness (avoiding causality), and envy (hating success).

These may be the most expensive forms of taxation, but their effects cannot be measured because the economic term is opportunity cost. It is what could have been.

The Cost of Comfort

Into this mix, we can add a phenomenon of cognitive inversion. For those who experience this irrational emotion, it is the result of living in a culture with the greatest prosperity the world has ever known. And its cause is a greater number of builders than the world has ever produced. As psychology professor John Dennis wrote about personal agency:

People intentionally engage in goal-directed actions, which are fundamental for our understanding of ourselves, others, and events . . . Perceiving oneself as having some degree of control over one’s actions has widespread importance in the development of the human species.

But agency can be subverted in a modern, division of labor economy, as he explained in his talk titled The Comfort Trap at the OCON 2026 conference: “Comfort arrives as a drift, friction starts to look unfair, challenges begin to look like harm.” That is because throughout human history, “comfort was something you had earned.” If you don’t earn it, you may think you are entitled. If you feel entitled, uncomfortable circumstances will seem like an injustice. If these injustices persist, they compound and become threats.

Who is to blame for these imagined discomforts, injustices and threats? The builders. And to further develop the dichotomy of the cost of comfort, Dennis illustrated:

Earned Thought				               Borrowed Thought.         

Identification                                         	Imitation                                                                Judgment                                                	Slogans                                                                   Integration                                              	Contradictions                                                      Understanding                                     	Borrowed Conclusions   

To clarify, identification is the conscious mind observing things in the natural world as distinct entities that behave in certain ways. It is what rational people, including builders, do. Imitators rely on other people to explain the nature of things. Judgment applies the same standard of cause and effect to the behavior of people and groups. Slogans are popular ideas that replace the effort and risks of judgment.

Integration is the combination of many concepts into logical frameworks that obey reality, increase knowledge, expand awareness, and induce serenity. Contradictions are the natural result of avoiding causality and independent judgment. Consequently, borrowed thought leads to stress, anxiety, scapegoating and envy.

Imitation, slogans, contradictions and borrowed conclusions are also like taxes that carry significant opportunity costs — emotionally, educationally, recreationally, or financially.

For non-producers experiencing the stress and anxiety of contradictions, Dennis offered some ideas for introspection. If these emotions are troublesome, ask yourself: “What is it telling me? What value is at stake? What am I avoiding? What am I losing? What standard have I violated?” For the non-producers out there, this is the first step to becoming a builder. Or as Dr. Gorlin stated later in the conference: “Builders recognize emotions are not causes — that emotions must be built.”

Ultimately, the standard will be principles grounded in reality, values will be life-enhancing and integrated with each other, and self-esteem will be reinforced.

The Contractual Thinker

Wrapping up this theme on the last day of OCON was philosophy professor Tara Smith. Her presentation was titled Intellectual Shrinkage And Its Costs — and she mentions several costs of a shallow intellect to your character, happiness, and awareness.

As defined by Dr. Smith: “the conceptual thinker is an active thinker who wants to understand.” And she further explained this by comparing conceptual thinking to its less active cousin: “the contractual thinker reduces to concretes.” In this usage, concretes are the ideas you maintain as isolated facts without their proper context.

As a result, the contractual thinker has little interest in abstract concepts and better ideas — and as Smith maintains, “public education is narrowing the gaze.” Instead of classical education that teaches students about the greatest thinkers and literature of Western civilization, college curricula has littered its course offerings with titles like “The Greatest Movies of Last Year.”

Of course, that is not a news flash to this audience, but what effect can this have on the independence, pride, self-esteem and productiveness of the young people exposed to this kind of cognitive impairment?

“Ignorance is a handicap . . . Conceptual contraction reduces your capacity for happiness . . . It is the loss of an identity to form . . . To be is to be something . . . You are cheating your character . . . The less you know, the less you will value, the less you will feel.”

In summary, “valuing entails awareness,” but Dr. Smith added another interesting observation. To paraphrase, she said that economists talk about the effects of intellectual shrinkage as “invisibles.” As a student of economics, I thought Dr. Smith misspoke; that she may have meant “externalities.” I know of “shrinkage” as an accounting term for theft, the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith for free markets, and the “unseen” of Frederic Bastiat for State malfeasance, but not invisibles.

As it turns out, ‘invisibles’ are related to the concept of the “extraction economy” that describes corporate and government bureaucracies that exist for the maintenance of measurement systems for the sake of measuring stuff. For example, the regulatory State requires corporate compliance officers who need process reports from analysts who identify problems that demand greater compliance costs. As reported by Flagright, this is especially true in the banking industry:

Beneath the surface lie “hidden” costs of AML compliance that often go overlooked on the balance sheet but significantly drag down efficiency and growth. False positives and redundant alerts bog down teams. Siloed tools and manual processes sap productivity. Excessive caution and fragmented tech can slow customer onboarding, driving good customers away.

On top of the $200 billion financial institutions pay outright, these hidden costs are the “invisibles” referenced by Dr. Smith in government education. And that leaves unsaid the grossly outsized administration budgets for diversity quotas and “studies” programs. And in health care, there are third-party medical care payers wrecking the price mechanism with grossly inflated costs and unnecessary testing.

For me, all of this hit home when the president of a successful small town bank told me that he retired because 80% of his time was spent with regulators instead of customers. And again when I got a visit from the HR officer of my much larger bank to tell me my job had been eliminated after scoring near the top of the stack rankings, getting an outstanding performance review, and being part of the team that was held out as the model for every other private banking team in the region.

In other words, there is no value creation, wealth is consumed, productivity is impaired, capital is stagnant, and the self esteem of people doing what they know to be “bullshit jobs” is limited.

The Conceptual Thinker

Fortunately, it is easy to extricate oneself from the extraction economy with sound principles, defined values, and the self-esteem to invest for the long run. That kind of independence is not easy in a society that condemns independence, but rest assured, the promoters of subjectivism and dependence are impotent without your cooperation.

With this kind of confidence, you are ready to define the values in which you would like to invest. Are they educational, entrepreneurial, artistic, or financial? What time and money commitments are needed? Are there family, business, or debt obligations to consider? Of course, assets and income sources are relevant, but the important thing is to know that you are competent to think independently and deserve the happiness your success will deliver.

At the same time, the world of financial investing is riddled with unreliable, expensive, subjective and contradictory slogans and packaged deals. Those include macroeconomic analysis, stock price targets, and technical charts — all for adding alpha (outperformance), plus risk tolerance questionnaires, hyperdiversification techniques, and social responsibility — all for risk-adjusted alpha. Fortunately, it is easy to extricate oneself from the entrenched bureaucracy and make decisions that are objective and reliable.

Objective investors do this by reversing the cognitive inversion of the traditional advice model. Instead of trying to predict the future and measure performance looking backward using percent returns, wealth oriented investors use the most reliable historical data and measure performance with the only benchmark that matters: their statistically high confidence for living with purpose and pride.

That is the entrepreneurial mindset: create the vision, take calculated risks, learn from experience and measure success as dollars of future wealth. Your vision turned into dreams, dollars and deadlines is new found wealth. The remaining step is to create your business plan in the form of the Investment Policy Statement (IPS). With all relevant personal and financial information, the IPS will specify your cash flow and investment strategy, funding status and risk capacity, and the capital market assumptions that were used to gain that level of confidence.

In summary, objective investors control what they can control, balance that with the uncertainty of capital markets, and have a contingency plan — in advance, for extreme events. No one else does that. And when you are able to answer the essential question: “to make money for what,” you learn the true meaning of financial independence.

For further information, please read my book The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing, now out on Kindle.

Screenshot via: TODAY/NBS News

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