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

Original Video: America’s 250 Celebrations Break Records Amid Storms and Heat

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To create and maintain a peaceful and prosperous society, it is necessary for individuals to save and invest freely. Of course, the incentive to save demands a sound form of money and the incentive to invest demands a sound banking system.

However, there is something more fundamental to the accumulation of financial capital. People must have the self-esteem to invest in themselves. When they do, they will soon experience the emotion of pride and develop the virtue for continued rational action. However, there is a paradox — America today is a peaceful and prosperous society that includes a large segment taxing themselves to death with social activism and phony, group pride.

In practice, self-esteem and pride are mutually supporting character traits and the subject of a conversation I had last week at a conference — OCON 2026, attended by people from all over the world. One was from Estonia, and to quote the other from Boston, John Paquette, “Self-esteem is the degree to which you value yourself, fundamentally. Pride, the virtue, is the act of caring for and about your moral character.” But what are the consequences for low self-esteem and not acting with pride?

In my previous article about collectivist cultures and their traditions, kinship taxes, reciprocity and saving face, I focused on social pressures as a form of tax that prevents savings, investment, and economic mobility. While the greatest threat to those collectivist societies may be the virtues of independence and pride, there are also penalties that people impose upon themselves that do even more damage than government and social taxation.

For perspective, the aforementioned conference was hosted marvelously by the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) — and its theme was America: The Nation of the Producer. Naturally, that was in the context of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but I detected a sub=theme, one that is important, and necessary to fully understand the nature of America and producers. Their opposites — the deconstructionists who fail to invest in their productive futures.

Scapegoats

My first hint of this theme came from the opening presentation delivered by ARI’s own Onkar Ghate. In his address, he noted that a religious mentality has replaced reason in 21st century America. Examples include submission to Islam (a redundancy), environmentalism that targets children, the woke racism of DEI and BLM, and MAGA’s fealty to arbitrary pronouncements.

What this created is an Age of Fear. Instead of each American taking ownership of their ideas, characters, decisions and futures, blame is assigned to villains who are not members of their tribes. And this happens regardless of political stripe: white supremacy, immigrants, foreign exporters, billionaires, etc.

As Ghate stressed, there is only one beneficiary to these herd instincts: the power of the State. And the common belief that the government creates money and purifies markets are self-taxing absurdities.

Entropy

During the panel discussion including cognitive psychology professor and best-selling author Steven Pinker, there was this was a fascinating observation: “Progress is not a force of nature. Entropy is a force of nature.” The implication is that human progress is achieved through the application of the mind to the natural world. And equally significant, the failure to apply our minds to the circumstances of our lives must result in a gradual decline into disorder. To me, the subtheme of the conference was becoming clear.

Pinker went on to say that “human agency is the cause of progress,” and “any argument against reason defeats itself.” Together, these three statements are enormous, but more so if we understand the relationships among reason, agency, self-esteem, pride and independence. It is a contradiction to reason against reason - and the application of reason presumes agency.

In turn, agency derives from your ability to think and act independently for your personal objectives. And maximizing your agency implies self-esteem, but the thought itself must be initiated by you. That is free-will, and your skill at reasoning requires an active mind using the tools of logic. In other words, none of this happens without your choice to think or not to think. But if you adopt God’s or the State’s will, thinking becomes optional.

The alternative is entropy: the gradual decline to the malevolent universe premise of chaotic existence without the guidance of State experts. And there are levels of mental focus, each requiring the choice to think, including the creation and disposition of wealth. Choosing not to think and becoming less aware is a self-imposed tax.

Primacy of Consciousness

On the second day of the conference, philosophy professor Alex Silverman discussed something you never hear about, but it is the basis of everything: The Metaphysics of Productiveness. To be clear, metaphysics is the basic structure of reality, meaning the natural world, the universe.

As you may have noticed, the sub header above titled scapegoats mentioned the resurgence of religion, which has metaphysical components, and entropy mentioned the forces of nature. But Silverman attacks the issue head-on: the primacy of existence, “the metaphysically given cannot be changed. It is the nature of nature.” In other words, existence exists whether you know it, think about it, like it or hate it.

In fact, the primary attribute of human nature is our capacity for reason. Without it, there would be no human life, but to think logically is an act of free will. The alternative is to believe the structure and facts of reality are what your perception and emotions say it is.

To adopt that mentality is to replace the primacy of existence with the primacy of consciousness. also known as subjectivity, which is the natural consequence of religious beliefs and passive minds!

Here is where Silverman gets to the point, “The metaphysics of the unproductive is primacy of consciousness.” And to underscore the historical and current significance of this, he told us: “The West languished under the primacy of consciousness Christianity for centuries.” From the fall of Rome to the onset of the Renaissance, life in the West did not improve from desperate, fearful, and short existences. And in that scenario, the afterlife was looking better and better.

Yet, 250 years ago America began growing producers. This happens organically when rights, liberty and justice are free to activate the inactive minds that had been dormant for centuries. “The more you live the primacy of existence the more productive you will be,” asserted Silverman. Naturally, investing in your future should begin with reason applied to reality.

Deconstruction

When the subjectivity of “my reality” takes over a society, it is natural for there to be criticism directed at those who are productive. On Day 3 of the conference, Associate Professor of Psychology, Gena Gorlin, confirmed this by telling the audience there are great misunderstandings of the motivations that drive the great builders of amazing products and profitable companies.

Motivations popularized in today’s decivilizing culture are greed, exploitation, political power, indifference, racism, etc. But she is a cognitive therapist who works closely with energetic builders wrestling with the demands of technology, regulation, consumer demand, and competition. These are people who balance those challenges with their innate desire to create something that will change the world. Gorlin knows the naysayers are dead wrong.

Furthermore, she tells us the success of the builder “is a spiritual achievement and a demanding love.” And for them, money is recognition of competence that builds self-esteem and is hard evidence of value creation. And Gorlin adds, “projects must build on material and spiritual values that will compound over time.” When this happens, it benefits nearly everyone, everywhere, always.

To the collectivist, mystical, entropic, subjective critics out there, remember this: “builders recognize emotions are not causes — that emotions must be built.” Builders build, beginning with themselves. That is The Moneyball Method.

Thank you for reading the first half of this two-part series. Next, I will examine other aspects of producers and the non-productive that were presented at OCON 2026. Ultimately, that will include a summary of the costs that we should consider in relation to the savings, investment and the free flow of capital.

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

Among conservatives, the argument in favor of capitalism is that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other socioeconomic system, but welfare reform is needed for greater access to opportunities. Among progressives, the argument in favor of capitalism is the same, but government investments are needed for greater access to opportunities.

In both cases, they are wrong — and part of the reason is a disconnect between money and liberty in people’s minds. Furthermore, this illusion of free money seems natural after several decades of State monopoly money, trillion dollar government deficits, and endless media reports about money supply and trade deficits.

But is policy reform the best or only way to expand opportunities for a great number of people – especially those living in the poorest regions? It is not. There are even greater impediments than the invasive force of taxation and the covert force of government spending. Given that premise, this brief essay will examine some of the ways savings and the accumulation of capital can be stymied or penalized – to the detriment of everyone.

Specifically, in what other ways are people forced to part with their money — and what is force? For my purposes here, force is the threat of physical violence, and fraud will coerce you to act against your self-interest, but force is also the threat of social isolation. When you are conditioned by family bloodlines, ethnic traditions, religious dogma, cultural indoctrination, nationalist loyalty, etc., to pledge part of your livelihood to the group, you will experience that force.

Social pressure is real, it can be powerful — and is probably most fierce with family. Naturally, we are all born as totally dependent on our parents or their surrogates for many years and for everything — and this demands a collectivist social structure. Furthermore, parents have a moral duty to their children, must share what they produce, and teach them to become productive and self-sufficient. In turn, the young and mature adults are expected to return the favor as the older generation ages and becomes less capable.

In fact, independence is an existential need for human vitality and a virtue for ethical behavior and self-esteem, but independence is also a threat to those who prefer the ease of dependence on collectivist social structures. Of course, those who live in fear of independence have the legacy of tradition, the emotional pull of need and the guilt of duty to invoke against the independence minded.

To help illustrate the power and punitive nature of socially enforced taxation, the Akan tribe of the west-central African country of Ghana has elaborate protocols and rituals for the remains of deceased family members. According to matrilineal bloodlines, members of the extended family are expected to contribute to the costs of a lavish funeral that is deserving of an Akan elder. And this can become a three day event with a custom designed, hand painted coffin, an event center with a large staff to feed hundreds of strangers, photographers, dancing pallbearers, and live music.

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But that is the event. The fundraising can take months, during which the body is refrigerated in mortuaries at hospitals at an escalating rate. As wrote:

families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.

As he notes, this is not unique to Ghana. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, funeral insurance is more popular than health insurance and many families go into debt or poverty because of funeral costs — all because of cultural traditions, reverence for elders, and societal prestige. Tradition, reverence and prestige – keep those in mind.

These are known as kinship societies and the duty imposed on the most productive members of extended families in Africa is known as “the black tax,” as Oks reported:

One experiment found that rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans.

Certainly, the cost of hiding wealth is another layer of tax that could have been invested more productively, but it makes sense for the prime mover of wealth creation — the individual, to protect their earnings. And “the black tax” covers more than just lavish funerals. An informal redistribution system of payments among extended family networks throughout sub-Saharan Africa imposes even greater duties on high income earners.

Not only can this include friends and neighbors, the social pressure extends to wedding ceremonies, elderly pensions, and operates in other cultures in different ways. For example, the practice of “wasta” in Arab societies amounts to influence peddling. This may be for employment opportunities or service and manufacturing contracts, but it circumvents a merit-based selection process that naturally imposes an unseen tax on productive capital.

In other words, the power of pull demands payment. There is reciprocity for the influencer. Profit is diverted to the strongest connections, not the most profitable uses — and this amounts to a system of tribute. If you are successful, you owe a duty to your sponsors and kinship priorities.

And in China, these are called Guanxi networks. Based on Confucianism, there is a social hierarchy for mutual commitments that demand face-saving gestures of reciprocity. As an elaborate scorekeeping system of gifts and favors, when “mianzi” (face) is at stake, it can be a moral or social catastrophe to refuse a guanxi obligation. Not surprisingly, this strict enforcement mechanism extends to awards for government contracts — and political corruption has become a routine force in business transactions.

Another insidious tax that impedes wealth creation is a centuries-long practice in rural India known as the Jajmani system. This is a social caste-based structure in which entire families are obligated to serve their landowning caste families. Everyone from farmers to artisans and service workers to landowners are paid in grain. That is key, for without money, wealth accumulation was not possible. And for those born into this arrangement, you inherit the duty or try to separate yourself from Hindu social pressure.

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A less noxious example of reciprocal economic obligations is the “familisimo” tradition of Latin America collectivism. This includes payments from immigrants to the United States of about 6% of GDP for El Salvador and Honduras, but also obligates godparents (padrinos or madrinos) who assume financial and spiritual obligations for young couples engaged to be married. This may dilute the cost of the fiesta to the immediate family and assure a larger celebration, but declining to contribute has social consequences.

Perhaps the most obvious and one of the most egregious practices is wedding dowry. As reported by the University of Central Florida:

All of these practices share a common, practical heritage — collectivized efforts for survival in harsh environments and primitive societies. And a common theme — the destruction of wealth as the bond for collectivised societies built on traditions, reverence and prestige that has become useless, unearned, and superficial. As experienced by the victims of the African kinship tax, wealth accumulation leads to independence – and that is the greatest threat to the survival of all collectivist systems.

And perhaps the most accurate description of today’s multicultural forced march to primitivism is the Big Man system of ritual wealth destruction in Melanesia’s Papua New Guinea. As Anthropology Review summarizes this:

In America today, those constituents are the political donors who run non-governmental organizations (NGOs) tackling the “existential threats” of free markets, earned profits and contractual obligations. To them, savings, investment and wealth accumulation must be punished — for “the common good.” And the Big Man is people like the Mayor of New York City who are worthless without the wealth of their victims.

And what do modern societies have that primitive cultures and their postmodern promoters in the West not understand? The anonymity of objective law and sound money that is provided by trusted institutions that defend property rights. In other words, no one is born owing a duty to anyone or obligated to duties they did not voluntarily accept.

When your earned wealth and your privacy are no longer a liability, the social forces of wealth destruction will evaporate, personal wealth and pride will compound, societal wealth will expand, capital will further accumulate, and this benefits everyone. Yet, Africa and other impoverished regions will not overcome State corruption until the traditions of altruistic collectivism are rejected.

To conclude, the ultimate measure of any civilized society is privacy — and this can only be achieved when individual rights, political liberty and equal justice become the revered traditions.

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.

As featured in my recent essay, there are multiple stages of development at which companies receive investment from outsiders. The first is at the early stage where angel investors who have confidence in their principals, the efficacy of their ideas, the risk capacity to lose, and a low time preference invest smaller amounts. The next layer are the professional investors who deploy large amounts of pooled risk capital. These are venture capital (VC) firms who take stakes in younger companies and private equity (PE) firms that invest in more profitable enterprises. In both cases, they have aggressive growth targets, take minority (VC) or majority (PE) control, and have relatively short time horizons for a liquidity event (4-7 years).

The free flow of capital for mutual profit is morally defensible and practically constructive for everyone in the long run — even with the obsolescence of creative destruction. In the third stage of a company’s growth, the roles of merchant bankers and investment bankers becomes crucial.

In the case of merchant bankers, they become active in the management of family businesses, medium sized corporations, and may specialize in specific industries. One such private investment firm is Best Merchant Partners of Dallas, Texas, whose mission is affordable higher education for hundreds of thousands of students around the world. Primarily, they leverage technology in a global portfolio of privately managed education businesses through their in-market teams stationed in high-growth regions that include South America, Africa and Europe.

On the other end of the spectrum are investment banking firms. To understand how they work, I will highlight two recent transactions that affect investors either directly or indirectly.

Morgan Stanley recently advised FOX Corporation on their acquisition of Roku and its streaming platform. In a deal that reaches 100 million homes worldwide, Roku shareholders received $160 in cash and stock in a transaction that priced out at $22 billion. More specifically, Morgan Stanley financed $12 billion of the $14.6 billion cash portion and FOX delivered almost 1 share of Class A shares for each share of Roku.

For Roku shareholders, this represents a nearly 34% premium over the unaffected share price. And for FOX, this represents a major shift from content creation to digital distribution. If quality and cost efficiencies are achieved, this also represents more, better and cheaper for consumers. But for politicians, this represents grandstanding opportunities over competitive practices and the campaign contributions they can garner from that.

But most likely and importantly, this is about a lean distribution system for live streaming and targeted advertising capabilities. As the MirrorReview reports, the combined companies will be in third place behind Disney and YouTube for American viewership:

Because Roku and FOX have a smaller footprint in international territories . . . regulators lack the leverage to stall the deal. While it gives the media empire the scale needed to handle the steady decline of traditional cable TV, it leaves rival streaming services worried about the future of platform neutrality.

Yet, “platform neutrality” is not a well-defined concept nor is it easily applied to media companies. In a vain attempt to regulate internet providers as public utilities, contradictions are inevitable. Those include ranking search results that are naturally discriminatory, vertically integrated companies that favor their proprietary product – and social and political content that trigger internal watchdogs to satisfy the whims of regulators and activists.

Fortunately, “platform neutrality” does not apply to investment management firms. Their regulators are not thought and speech police, but they have other regulatory nightmares such as anti-money laundering (AML) rules and diversity (DEI) compliance standards. Ultimately, the goal of the firm is to make money for shareholders. The goal of the firm’s employees is to make money for customers. And for the companies that are owned by the firm’s customers, their goal is to make money for shareholders, etc.

In another deal that is 1/10th the scale of the FOX/Roku transaction, Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) acquired Innovator Capital Management earlier this year for about $2 billion. For GSAM, this increases their exchanged traded fund (ETF) asset base from about $50 billion to about $80 billion and expands their expertise to the defined-outcome ETF market that was pioneered by Innovator.

What is similar is that GSAM has gained greater exposure to the rapidly growing and streamlined delivery system of exchange traded funds (ETFs), diversified its revenue sources, and improved their market share position. According to Forbes, they move from the 45th largest ETF manager to the top 10 — and that came with a price. Buying Innovator at 7% of assets is steep if you consider that other large ETF businesses are priced at less than 1.5% of assets:

Innovator’s success has inspired imitators, and buffer funds now claim more than $75 billion in assets. First Trust, another Wheaton-based asset manager, has emerged as Innovator’s chief competitor, and Allianz and AllianceBernstein have launched similar funds.

That is a far greater premium than what FOX paid for Roku, so what is GSAM getting for their cash besides bragging rights and the efficiencies of scale? They are getting bubble protection and strong profit margins. They are buying insurance for their revenue streams in the event of a major market correction.

After all, Innovator’s defined-outcome strategies are also known as buffer ETFs. Their shareholders are protected from market losses with insurance derived from the purchase and sale of call and put option contracts. In turn, these assure the ETF shareholders a total return within a range (the buffer) that is determined in advance.

And if this is the confidence investors seek without knowing their spending and risk capacity or funding status (as you would know using The Moneyball Method), it is possible with relative ease, low cost and liquidity.

In summary, whether it is Best Merchant Partners investing in technology-driven higher education, Goldman Sachs investing in streamlined risk management, or FOX investing in entertainment streaming services, the benefits that accrue to everyone have one source: the earned wealth that was saved and put at risk before confiscation by government and before any finished product was created or sold.

The sign of the dollar is an arbitrary configuration with a purpose — as is typical of a graphical symbol. Its meaning is defined by language derived from an important concept, but unlike most symbols, the dollar sign has layers of meaning and conflicting opinions about them.

In this brief essay, I will deliver some perspective on the origins of the symbol itself and apply the context to the most interesting and useful meaning and purpose of $. As such, I will not include every theory and opinion, but only those that fit my narrative of an orderly universe of emergent properties.

Emergence

Briefly, emergence is the natural development of complex systems having properties not attributable to any of their parts. The whole is far greater than the sum of the parts - and there is no evidence about those indicating such an effect.

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For example, water molecules are not wet, but billions of them in combination will dissolve minerals and soak you. Also, ants have minuscule brains, but thousands of them build complex colonies by moving dirt. And most incredible of all, neurons are made of cells made of complex molecules. In turn, those are made of atoms and subatomic particles - none of which have consciousness, but billions of them in your skull after billions of years of evolution became your consciousness.

You are aware, identify objects, learn causality, form concepts, choose when to do all of that, or choose to tune out. That is free will. That is volition.

Not only does emergence show itself with matter, simpler life forms, and the human mind, but the ideal society would also emerge if its principles were in tune with natural law and willed by human nature. So far through human history, the symbol for that unknown ideal is $ — and to develop that thesis, let’s begin with the origins of the symbol itself.

Bohemian Etymology

Known at various times as Silesia and Moravia, the Kingdom of Bohemia in central Europe was the home of the Joachim silver mines. As BBC Worklife reported, the monarchy began minting silver coins in 1520 that were known for their unusually fine consistency and gave them a name:

Logically if unimaginatively, the coin was dubbed the joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants.

Also spelled dahler or daalder, the Dutch coin was common in 17th century Holland and its colony of New Netherland in North America. Established in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company, the settlement not only comprised parts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut, but New Amsterdam was the name of the colony on lower Manhattan Island.

It is poetic justice that the future financial capital of the world would be the home of the original dollar — a hard currency used by the foremost influence for Americanism in the New World. After all, this was the Dutch Golden Age because of its traditions for international trade, religious tolerance, civic pride, liberal immigration, and republican governance.

Spanish Pillars

That the word dollar is of Germanic origin is easily provable, but the origin of the symbol $ is still shrouded in mystery - and there are many theories and even conspiracies. Accordingly, a relatively simple explanation is the most likely: the pillars of Hercules that mark the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar helped inspire the vertical lines of $.

Minted in the Spanish empire through the 16th to 18th centuries and worth eight Reales, the Piece of Eight was a coin with over 25 grams of fine silver. And because of its uniform milling standards, this Spanish peso (piece of eight) became the world’s first international currency.

As you can see on the 1739 version of Mexican origin above, there are two pillars wrapped in banners that loosely resemble the letter S wrapping two vertical lines that became the sign of the dollar. Coincidentally, the significance of this was illustrated best by Isabel Paterson - in a passage that begins her signature book, The God of the Machine:

Toward the end of the fourth century of the pre-Christian era, a colonial Greek navigator sailed . . . through the Straits of Gibraltar, and thence up the coast of Spain and France and the British Isles to Ultima Thule, the designated end of the world . . . Pytheas ranks among the notable discoverers, an exemplar of the free mind. He could not know that he was looking toward America.

Two thousand years later, a Jewish immigrant from Poland (near Bohemia), Haym Salomon, negotiated loans from Spain, France and Holland to help finance the American revolution against Great Britain. And there was a natural sequence to the transactions. He sold the Bills of Exchange (borrowing credits) to American merchants and bankers for the Specie (hard coin money) needed by General Washington to pay the American and French soldiers.

Included were the Spanish dollars bearing pillars wrapped in banners because American “continentals” were worthless and the war would have been over and lost. And inscribed on them was the Latin phrase PLVS VLTRA, meaning “further beyond.”

American Independence

However, it was almost two years after the victory at Yorktown, Virginia, that hostilities formally ended with the Treaty of Paris in September, 1783. In the meantime, many urban centers in America, especially New York, were devastated, economic conditions were dire, price inflation was severe, and sound money was scarce. Naturally. War destroys wealth and productivity. Existing goods become dear. Prices soar.

Bear in mind, twenty years earlier, in 1763, the American colonies were possibly the most prosperous in the world and their per capita income was higher than in England.

The settlers’ raw exposure to the laws of nature and the benign neglect of the English ruling authorities had imbued in Americans the virtues of independence, productivity and justice. Brilliantly, John Adams claimed that was the true American Revolution.

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What changed? The French and Indian War - a theater of the Seven Years war all over Europe, had ended in 1762 with a huge debt load for Britain and the end of America’s economic freedom.

But finally, with the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America in 1790, the country had the structure of government, the independence of producers, and the mind of Alexander Hamilton to regain the prosperity of liberty backed by a sound dollar. To more fully appreciate the role of Hamilton, consider this summary from professor of political economy Richard Salsman:

Hamilton was a strong proponent of sound and stable money (a gold-silver standard), a vigorous private banking system, restraint on government spending (what he called “economy”), low and uniform tax and tariff rates, minimal regulation, a diminishing public debt, and solidity in public credit (defined as an adequate capacity to borrow). America has been at her best when these monetary-fiscal elements have been institutionalized, as they were in the 1790s and (to a lesser extent) in the 1920s.

As mentioned at the top, this is about an orderly universe with emergent properties. And for the principles of an ideal economic system, stable money, private banking, minimal regulation, and solid credit are the foundational precepts.

Conversely, the devaluation of money infects and devours this ideal. Specifically, government spending in excess of its original mandate will weaken money, politicize banking, expand regulations and destroy the credit of the State. And the latter is only derived from its taxing authority over the original creators of money and wealth.

Due Credit

Solid credit built on a borrower’s reputation and track record for value creation is critical. Credit must be earned before money is loaned. A reputation for creating value is the foundational principle for credit. States create nothing. A government’s credit is derived from its ability to tax the citizens who produce wealth. And when the power of government is derived from the consent of the governed who demand stable money and minimal regulation, the government’s credit is robust - and that is a big part of Hamilton’s legacy.

To bring that home, a man with credit who helped finance the American Revolution was Oliver Pollack. As reported by the travel company Atlas Obscura, he was an Irish immigrant who operated out of New Orleans and made his fortune as a trader:

After all, Pollock was Irish, and he believed that fighting Britain was his duty. As important as it was to root for the right horse, Pollock was still a businessman; he believed a sizable investment in the Revolution would pay dividends in the long run.

As a highly successful merchant with connections throughout the Caribbean, Pollack naturally traded in the stable currency of Spanish Dollars (aka pieces of eight) - and he had the habit of abbreviating Spanish Peso in his ledgers by combining the letters S and P. Consistent with emergence, this was unintentional to the sign of the dollar, as was the removal of the curve in the letter P - and the columns of Hercules wrapped in banners on the Spanish Peso that were used to pay soldiers that won independence.

Philadelphia Eagles

In 1795, a baker and a printer from Scotland found their way to America and established the Philadelphia Type Foundry Company. For a number of years, theirs was the only type foundry in the United States, and according to The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club published in 1953:

Andrew Binny and James Ronaldson, both natives of Edinburgh, established themselves in Philadelphia in 1796 and, according to the reviewer, the Columbiad Club of America . . . has rendered a valuable service to students of typographical traditions. For the firm of Binny and Ronaldson cut a number of book and jobbing romans and italics including, in 1797, the first dollar mark ever made in type for the American trade.

For his part, Binny was an American patriot who invented the Monticello typeface and Ronaldson was a serial entrepreneur who owned a cotton mill operation, a china dishware manufacturer, an affordable cemetery, a soup kitchen, and led an association for professional mechanics. Not surprisingly, they also became connected with Philadelphia’s first world-renowned printer — Benjamin Franklin, and bought the excellent French type that Franklin had bought in 1786 while serving as ambassador to France.

Hopefully, you can see that emergence for man-made systems depended on a plurality of people choosing values that obey natural law and ban the initiation of force in all human interactions. This emergent socioeconomic system is capitalism. It is organic. It is not planned or contrived. Its symbol is the sign of the dollar — and it evolved from a classical Greek mariner named Pythias who dared to venture past the gates of Gibraltar and record the discoveries of his journey.

Two thousand years later, Binny and Ronaldson concretized the sign of the dollar, sketched by Pollack, secured by Hamilton, brokered by Salomon, won by Washington, discovered by Adams, named by the Dutch, mined in Bohemia, and conceived in Greece. The essence of which are the productive virtues of independence and justice.

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

To understand the nature of capitalism, we must first understand the nature of capital. And I don’t mean capital that is acquired and controlled by force, but capital that is led by free minds operating in free markets. Since capital includes productive land and mines, equipment and buildings, money and securities, knowledge and understanding, I will focus on capital in its most liquid form — that which is most easily converted to material goods and services — money and cash equivalents. And to get to the history of venture capital in its modern form, we must understand the nature and purpose of money.

To begin at the beginning, the Lydian empire’s coinage of the Slater in the 7th century BC set the stage for the development of classical Greek civilization. And in modern times, Bills of Exchange issued by the governments of France, Spain and Holland were brokered by Haym Salomon to American merchants and bankers for the hard currency needed by General Washington to finish the war with the British at Yorktown, Virginia in 1782.

In both cases, the money had earned universal trust because it had been verified for weight and purity and was therefore easily converted into goods and services. Ultimately, money operates for the mutual profit of everyone — including people who are external to the transactions.

The Evolution of Risk Capital

Why is that important? Because risk capital — money dedicated to long-term opportunities with a high likelihood for losses — drives the discovery, invention, innovation and distribution of life-enhancing ideas from creative minds that change the future for the better. Not bank deposits, debt instruments, precious metals, or real estate, but equity. Therefore, risk capital is stock, preferred stock, stock options or any combination that gives investors the potential return that their exceedingly high-risk entails.

But more specifically, and very briefly, there are stages of development for young businesses that may attract different types of equity investors — and that depends on the distance for bringing product to market and the distance for cash flow to profitability.

Initially, founders and inventors will finance their own product development in a stage known as bootstrapping that may be supplemented with capital from friends and family. The next layer are angel investors who have confidence in the principals, the efficacy of their ideas, the risk capacity to lose, and a low time preference.

At the next layer are the professional investors who deploy pooled risk capital. These are venture capital (VC) firms who take stakes in younger companies and private equity (PE) firms that invest in more profitable enterprises. In both cases, they have aggressive growth targets, take minority (VC) or majority (PE) control, and have relatively short time horizons for a liquidity event (4-7 years).

A liquidity event is typically the sale of the company to another corporation or the sale of the company to public shareholders through an initial public offering (IPO). In turn, the IPO transaction is managed by an investment bank that markets and distributes the shares to institutional and retail investors, after which the stock trades on a stock exchange like the NYSE or the NASDAQ.

Nearly all investors, including those who employ The Moneyball Method, buy and sell shares of stock in companies on these secondary markets, but that is not what this article is about. In part, this is about the irrelevance of governing authorities for creating wealth and prosperity for mass populations. Whether it is Sumerian kings and their power over grain producers or the Federal Reserve and their access to technology producers, they produce nothing.

Because money is created by producers, its supply is actually governed by them. And money is not stupid, as journalist John Tamny, author The Money Confusion observes,

And so, I decided to write this tribute to risk takers. To profess my gratitude for the effects of stable, anonymous money invested by the “resource rich” who appeared on the scene — for the first time in history, with the industrial revolution spawned by the Age of Reason.

America’s Gold Standard

Naturally, liberty creates incentives — and with slavery banned in England, and then America, it is poetic justice that America’s return to the gold standard after the Civil War coincided with Thomas Edison’s application for a patent on his electric lamp. The year was 1879 - and the flow of capital and the flow of electrons became two sides of the same coin.

In fact, Edison addressed public lighting as an integrated system of generating stations, distribution networks and powerful investors. But it began with his bootstrapped Quadruplex telegraph system that he sold for $30,000 in an 1874 liquidity event to fund his Menlo Park laboratory.

Ten years after Edison’s patent application and JP Morgan lighting his personal home and office to demonstrate, Morgan advised Edison on the merger of his different business units into Edison General Electric Company. The year was 1889, but three years later Edison was out as a director of the combined enterprise after it’s 1892 merger with Thompson-Houston Electric. The new company was called General Electric, and control was allocated to Thompson’s president with their AC patents and industrial research lab.

Which brings us to George Westinghouse and the formation of Westinghouse Electric in 1886. The man was a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped the invention of his railway air brake system, solicited angel investors to create Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1869, and reinvested his fortune into the gas distribution business. With that experience, he believed there were more efficient ways to distribute electricity, and formed Westinghouse Electric in 1886 by reinvesting again — private equity.

Two years later he bought the alternating current (AC) patents of Nikola Tesla for $1 million, hired Tesla away from Edison, and eventually won the contract to illuminate the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Also known as the current wars, AC and the transformers patented by Tesla in 1890 became crucial for power grid development.

And no discussion about hands-on venture capital in America would be complete without referencing J. P. Morgan’s contributions to power distribution, railroad capitalization, and steel production. By 1900, Morgan controlled over 100,000 miles of track, but many lines were failing and saddled with debt. With the help of other Wall Street bankers, unprofitable lines were consolidated and debt was cut by one-third. Ultimately, the minds of Morgan and banking partner Anthony Drexel could see the value hidden beneath inefficient financial statements — and they were able to streamline the operation of the American railroads and steel manufacturing businesses they controlled.

However, Morgan’s greatest strategic move was his buyout of Andrew Carnegie in 1901. Carnegie named his price, a grossly inflated $500 million, and Morgan accepted without hesitation. He then consolidated that with several smaller steel firms to create US Steel — a feat that is unimaginable for government bureaucrats — and therefore intolerable to them.

The Technology Revolution

It is all too common for statists who only destroy wealth to condemn bankers for being parasites — a label that belongs exclusively with these critics. In fact, it was the communists, socialists and progressives who in condemning money and banking — gave us antitrust regulations, World War I, World War II, the welfare state and the monetary devaluation that made all of that possible.

However, reality always wins, venture capital envisions our future, and in 1946, the American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) was hatched. It was the first American firm to choose companies on behalf of investors - rather than drawing from family wealth. Led by a French immigrant president, Georges Doriot, ARD declared a new approach to entrepreneurial finance:

Also believing in this philosophy were the individuals who comprised 43% of ARD’s original capital, 36% from investment companies, 8% from insurance companies, 7% from brokerage firms, and 6% from higher education. Initially, very few of its portfolio investments were successful, and as a closed-ended mutual fund listed on the NYSE, ARD’s share price fell 29% to $16 by 1954.

But in 1957, everything changed. ARD bought a controlling interest in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC); a company that had developed circuit board modules and would eventually produce high speed computers at a fraction of the cost of rival IBM:

1. The DEC investment showed that a VC firm could build a portfolio of long-tailed investments; the return of the few that hit the long tail would offset the losses and mediocre gains of the others.

2. ARD supplied both capital and governance. It was not only selective about the initial investments it chose to make, but it actively participated in the management of those companies.

3. By creating opportunities for wealth accumulation, ARD created an entrepreneurial demand-side spur to venture capital.

The firm's prized portfolio companies also included Circo Products (automobile tools); High Voltage Engineering Corp (high-powered generators and nuclear particle accelerators); Tracerlab, Inc. (analytical instruments and radiation detectors); Baird Associates (chemical analysis instruments); and Ionics (water purification). Doriot did not believe in turning companies around for an instant profit but rather staying with them for the long term and through challenging periods.

The Enlightenment spawned the American Revolution and the banning of slavery spawned the Industrial Age, but it was reliable money anchored by gold that played an essential role in these developments. And the story just keeps getting better.

Before the creation of American Research and Development Corporation in 1946 and the success of Digital Equipment Corporation after 1957, there was no individual investor demand for VC opportunities. Government spending had crowded it out. But now that there was venture capital with skin in the game, and soon there would be the biggest game changing development — Silicon Valley.

The signature event took place in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. There, Douglas Engelbart took the stage and presented the developments of the Stanford Research Institute. His 90-minute discussion featured a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System.

For the first time, the fundamental elements of modern personal computing were demonstrated: windows, hypertext, graphics, navigation and command input, and video conferencing. It also included the computer mouse, word processing, and a real-time editor.

Known as the Mother of All Demos, Engelbart’s performance influenced the operating systems of the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, and the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface. Everything that Silicon Valley is today can be traced back to the development of venture capital post World War II and especially to ARD and Doriot.

These inventions were brought to market in the 1980s and 1990s — a time when the dollar was being removed from the gold standard and devalued across the world. But capital invested by those with skin in the game is the legacy of stable money backed by gold. The very nature of capital is that it is led by free minds operating in free markets.

There is good reason for the US dollar being the world’s preferred currency: America remains the most productive society and capital finds talent wherever it may be. For now, this is the best version of a stable society and economy that we can build, given that going back to the gold standard seems a distant mirage. But we must remember, that to maintain a civilized culture, stable money and the property rights of private individuals must become precious resources that earn morally protected status.

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

Memorial Day in America was May 25th, so it makes sense that a major film depicting America’s heroic legacy would be premiering in local theaters. This year that movie is titled Pressure starring Brendan Fraser as General Dwight Eisenhower. But this was a pre-screening, the official release date is May 29^th.

For perspective, the war in Europe had been hot since Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. America had been supporting England and her allies with equipment and supplies but didn’t engage directly until December 1941 - and then response to the attacks on Pearl Harbor by Japan.

What makes Pressure a little different is the intense focus on the 3 ½ days that preceded the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, that was supposed to be 2 ½ days. Accordingly, this is not a war epic. In fact, it is not about invasion strategy or deception tactics. What makes this movie unique is the typically pedestrian and esoteric weather reporter as the radical and courageous hero.

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And what makes this movie spectacular are the impressive performances by Fraser, Kerry Condon as Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s personal secretary, and most of all, the stoic and principled Andrew Scott as Captain James Stagg, chief meteorologist. As a film, Pressure stays firmly grounded in the epic uncertainties of the invasion while allowing the principal actors to portray depth of soul that should move any audience.

But what makes Dr. Stagg radical and courageous? The way his rational character guides his temperament in the emotional heat of the moment - on both epic and personal levels. And to me, what was most personal were Stagg’s consistent references to the laws of nature and their relevance to human life on planet earth.

As Scott and director Anthony Maras marvelously dramatize, Stagg was a singularity among the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors awaiting their fate, his weather forecasting colleagues, and the senior command that expected concrete information:

General Eisenhower: “Are you absolutely certain?” Captain Stagg: “I am confident storms will come.” Field Marshall Montgomery: “Not good enough.”

Stagg’s comment is critical. The dialogue is superb. Confidence and certainty are entirely different things. Implied in Stagg’s choice of words is probabilities. His statistical analysis was based on the most reliable data that was humanly possible at the time:

“Get me the latest readings from every single base within 2000 miles of Normandy.”

For a peek inside Stagg’s rational mind, the opening sequence has him reporting to the meteorological offices at Eisenhower’s headquarters. After alienating Kay Summersby with his terse attitude, he asks about the mass of weather maps tacked to walls. When told they were meteorological charts, he replied “I know what they are. What are they doing here?”

As it turns out, Stagg was not interested in the popular data sets. Information that does not address the problem explicitly can be dangerous, as he relates about Krick’s forecast:

“Yes, the weather was as he described in 1904 and 1925, but he fails to mention 1916, June 5^th, the battle for Mount Sorrel. Then as now, there are areas of high pressure above the Azores, but the storms came anyway. Many people here don’t remember that battle. Chaos, absolute chaos, thousands of lives lost. Hell on earth.”

For the rest of us, irrelevant data that merely supports the common wisdom can be dangerous. As you may have guessed, Captain James Stagg was playing Moneyball. And I recognized the same mindset in the accurately depicted movie version of Captain Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger’s landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009.

Sullenberger used a critical 30 seconds to decide on his course of action. But during the subsequent investigation, the only successful simulations to LaGuardia had to omit that crucial factor. No prior simulation experience had prepared him or anyone else for a flock of Canadian geese disabling his two engines.

To summarize, Captains Stagg and Sullenberger relied on two things. Objective data and their exceptional skill for using the most reliable information to anticipate potential outcomes based on the laws of nature and experience. In Stagg’s case, he included the potential effects of the jet stream on the two storm systems that were threatening the English Channel.

Two days prior to the scheduled invasion of June 5^th, General Eisenhower asked the obvious question and Captain Stagg gave the only honest answer:

“Sir, long-term weather forecasts, as you well know, are educated guess work.”

Yet, the greatest conflict for Stagg was within his own weather forecasting team. He was British and had displaced the American on whom Eisenhower relied most. That was Irving Krick, US Air Force, and he was dependent on historical models that had worked during previous military campaigns. However, they fell within the boundaries of normal distribution curves - maybe one standard deviation (68%) of possibilities. Stagg explained this differently, but summarized Krick’s track record as: “he got lucky.”

The same is true for the assumption errors built into economic forecasts, stock market predictions, and fund managers that outperform a broad-market index. More importantly, every event that affects your life happens on the extreme ends of the distribution curve.

But for the original D-Day of June 5th, and because Krick was unaware of the potential for large deviation (two or three standard deviations from the norm) “tail” events, he presented a rosy forecast to Allied Command. In response, Stagg was morally and practically obligated to stress his statistically objective confidence and stand his ground:

“Torrential rain. He’s selecting the data that suits him and ignoring the rest. We must face the facts. The facts, however frightening they may be.”

With the largest amphibious assault in world history on the line, and the uncertainty of Mother Nature a major factor, facts can be frightening. But for objective investors taking ownership of their future with the most reliable data possible, facts become values. That is because facts are values and objective investors pay far more attention to the possibility of extreme markets than we do to small deviation events.

To conclude, let the economists, strategists and Krick’s of the world keep their charts and trends. It is better to learn confidence in the face of certainty with the kind of principles, courage and relevant data of Captain Stagg. Why? Because reality always wins. Go see this movie.

A repeating theme for The Moneyball Method is the concept: money is production, production is money. Naturally, a voluntary transaction is the missing step - and that is like the implied musical note in a melody that is understood and appreciated by listeners. In either case, the principals had the idea, made the decision, committed the act and lived with the effects. And their choice to think, decide and behave were volitional acts - meaning free will is implied.

Certainly, some decisions may be conditioned by heredity or culture, but more complex ideas involve the choice to think and act independently. That is most true for you to override conditioned responses or long-held beliefs that need to be replaced.

On a larger scale, wealth creation and its artistic dividend will compound themselves when a society bans the kind of force that punishes independence. To be specific, the initiation or threat of force by individuals, groups or governments will neutralize wealth and artistic creation - and the historical examples are overwhelming.

Today, Pyongyang, Caracas and Baghdad come to mind, but for centuries Europe’s Dark Ages earned that brand as nearly everyone lived in fear of highwaymen, holy knights, and war. The most creative minds in Europe had gone on strike after the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD and didn’t return to work until Aristotle was rediscovered in the West in the fourteenth century.

The Delegation of Force

The kind of force that defends and stimulates your desire and ability to be prosperous is retaliatory, but a civilized society must delegate as much of that as possible to an objective, professional third party. That is the legitimate role of government and everything you’ve read so far is the amazing achievement of America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

For the purposes of this essay, a dominant military for national defense, police for the protection of individual rights, and courts to adjudicate violations and enforce contracts is a given. Just as importantly, it is money only made possible by free minds and free markets that pays for those essential services, which brings us to the relationship between government and money.

As introduced above, legitimate government is delegated, retaliatory force, but you can easily ignore the voluntary transaction to conclude - correctly, that government is force. That is what makes the balancing act for the extraction of property to protect property rights so fragile.

Trust is the glue that binds free markets, but trust can erode quickly when there is no profit incentive or voluntary trade. And the most invisible and insidious way for the forces of government to tip the scales in their favor is to create the illusion of free money, invent economic crises, and scapegoat the true creators of money.

The Initiation of Force

This activity comes in various forms, not the least of which is the income tax for wealth redistribution, the regulatory state that forces compliance costs that amount to 7% of GDP, and monetary devaluation that punishes the accumulation of capital that could easily solve any economic crisis as it occurs.

But to fully understand the virtues of hard money, the gold standard as stability, the depravity of fiat currency - and their positive or negative effects on each of us, this lengthy introduction was needed to establish currency devaluation as an invisible and destructive force.

What is at stake is your personal sovereignty. And that is the point. The fraud is intentional, the “common good” is the rationalization - and the principle of monetary devaluation is to separate life from value.

Today, the economic debate that dominates the news cycle is “inflation,” yet nearly everyone gets it wrong. It may be framed as the rate of inflation, affordability crisis, consumer price index (CPI) and real rates of return, but those terms address price inflation - which is not inflation. It is rising prices that may or may not be caused by monetary inflation.

To reiterate, inflation is not rising prices. And to essentialize that, I will lean on author and finance journalist John Tamny wrote in his marvelous book The Money Confusion, “Inflation is nothing more than a departure from a standard of value.”

On the monetary side, the debate includes “printing” money, quantitative easing, money supply, and foreign exchange. Regarding the latter, what could be more arbitrary? “Evidence supporting this is the frenzied daily trading of currencies that never took place before money was detached from the yellow metal that is money.”

The Marketing of Force

The point is that these are the commonly accepted terms for all sides of the debate - and they are designed to give credibility to incredible actors. The only money supply that matters is money in circulation because it is self-regulated by people who produce and trade. As a consolation, at least the retail pundits are not talking about the central banking nonsense of structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) or systematic policy analytical frameworks:

The demand channels are summarized by an aggregate demand curve that describes a negative relationship between output and inflation. For instance, as inflation increases above the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target, the public expects the Fed to increase interest rates.

Let’s decipher that:

1. Aggregate demand is a fictitious concept used to justify authoritarian control over the economy.

2. There is no negative relationship between output and inflation. Production creates wealth, wealth creates supply, supply lowers prices.

3. The Fed’s 2% inflation target is a really bad idea - and its purpose is to rationalize the Fed’s existence for limiting the devaluation to a politically acceptable level.

4. Are you the public? Do you want the Fed to raise interest rates when they screw up?

But I digress. Let’s talk about sound money. It must be accepted by producers as a tool that will purchase other goods and services from other producers without delay or expense. If it passes that test among countless traders, it becomes a reliable store of value for future purchases and investment.

To achieve that status, sound money must be stable, meaning new supply enters the market very slowly compared to the existing stock of money. This is the low flow-to-stock ratio of hard money - so it stands to reason that soft money has a high flow-to-stock ratio. Paper fiat money is a perfect example. People who produce nothing - but have the power to make the rules for those who do, are in love with the stuff.

Historical Highlights

Accordingly, the only way for soft money to dominate a complex economic system is through the force of government. That creates the illusion of free money, justifies all sorts of government expansion to help “those in need,” compensates “public servants” for the “greater good,” and restricts the natural flow of capital. But historically, how did hard money versus soft money periods work out?

America’s colonial period is a fascinating study. The intellectual focus on natural law had an ideal incubator - the vast and wild frontier in which settlers from Europe were rebuilding their lives in remote locations. Naturally, agriculture was the primary industry, and paper money was backed by tobacco, rice, sugar or land contracts. And Africa’s age-old slave trade that exists to this day was a significant import for the southern colonies.

As a result, monetary and price inflation were not a major problem - depending on jurisdiction - and unless colonial governments issued bills of credit to finance armed conflict with the French or certain Native tribes. And not only was the coinage (specie - hard money) of European nations being circulated, the wampum (clamshell money) of those indigenous tribes was also used as a medium of exchange.

Clearly, America’s economic power was starting from zero and would have remained there without stable tools for trade and commerce. By the time 1780 rolled around, there were thriving merchants and independent banks who were able to buy Bills of Exchange issued by foreign governments for the American Revolution.

These were brokered by Haym Salomon of the Sons of Liberty and critical for victory because the Continentals issued by Congress were nearly worthless and many soldiers never got paid.

Naturally, high price inflation happened again during the American Civil War with the issuance of the fiat currency known as Greenbacks. To its credit, the US Treasury eventually returned to the gold standard in 1879, but it took that long because Treasury department officials believed they could manipulate post-war deflation by manipulating the contraction of their fiat currency supply. They could not. Governments do not create trusted money.

In addition, the Coinage Act destabilized hard currency by demonetizing silver in 1873 and further Greenback devaluation resumed in the wake of the Panic of 1873. Naturally, that was caused by heavily subsidized railroad industry speculation that backfired. But once the dollar’s stability became healthy, the Gilded Age became the greatest socioeconomic era in world history. Producers create trusted money.

But that ended with the progressivism of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and World War I, the depression of Democrat Franklin Rooselvelt and World War II, the collectivism of Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his War on Poverty, and the devaluation of Republican Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. There seems to be a trend here.

Modern Central Banking

Wilson began the attack on gold with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Twenty years later, Roosevelt banned the private ownership of gold with Executive Order 6102. In the early 1960s, Johnson repudiated the 1944 Gold Exchange Standard for stabilizing currencies with his massive deficit spending, and in 1971 Nixon ended the US dollar’s convertibility into gold because LBJ had effectively done that anyway.

This is the initiation of force. This is precisely what America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution were intended and designed to prevent. And for those who believe we are our brother’s keeper, must go the extra mile, turn the other cheek and render unto Caesar because love of strangers is a virtue, you are complicit. There is no other way for the social safety net, universal health care, State education institutions and green energy scams to get overwhelming public support.

In support of transfer payments for basic living payments, housing and utility programs, food payments and medical reimbursements, it is all justified as spending that supports Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the “greater good.” However, this leaves out the economic facts that matter:

1. This money had to be produced before it could be spent.

2. Owners of that wealth had it legally confiscated, which is the initiation of force.

3. If the money remained with its owners, it would have been spent or invested far more efficiently.

4. Lower prices and new capital would have created living standards we may never know.

5. The State does not create money. Money is production. Production is money.

In other words, all of that is dependent on the illusion of free money that supports the idea that you don’t own your life, chaos is the order of things, and government expertise is the solution. For too many people, that means dependency with the side effect of substance abuse

Take Ownership

But how would a society of sound money affect your choices? As author and finance journalist John Tamny wrote in his marvelous book The Money Confusion, it reverses everything - for the better. Instead of consumption driving economic growth (GDP) as everyone believes:

Consumption is the consequence of growth that is logically a result of savings. Savings are what make possible intrepid leaps of entrepreneurs and businesses to rush a much better future into the present . . . Debase money, as in devalue it or destabilize it, and you slow the natural division of labor so crucial to progress while also slowing the investment in advances that will enable greater specialization among individuals.

Ultimately, in a society of sound money you may save more because your ideas extend further into the future. You may buy goods and services at lower prices, which frees money to save more or enjoy the things that matter. You may become more productive in your job with greater specialization, earn more, save more and spend more. The important thing is to identify the important goals - in context with each other, and establish an objective measure for them. That is the new performance benchmark.

Furthermore, everyone else has the opportunity to become happier, more productive, more prosperous and able to trade with you for mutual profit. And that profit can be financial, material, or spiritual, but in essence, you will be able to acquire more of the quantity that matters most - time. The principle for the objective investor is: life is value pursuit, value pursuit is life.

In the meantime, there are several ways that individual investors can supplement their wealth producing work and wealth producing assets with the existing wealth of hard assets. Besides real estate and physical gold or other precious metals, there are financial instruments that I will not recommend - one way or another, because that is not appropriate.

Suffice it to say there are securities in the form of exchange traded gold funds, bonds denominated in gold and pay interest in gold, and goldbacks which are like bank notes infused with gold. As a general rule, they may be a diversification tool for a traditional portfolio (large deviation events), a hedge against monetary crises (extraordinarily large deviation events), and fun to flash around or discuss with gold bugs

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Thank you to for the inspiring article which I quote in this podcast.

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

As someone who follows economic and financial market news a little more closely than most people, I continue to be impressed by a few statistics that run counter the popular opinion of many major news outlets. The unemployment rate in America hovers near 50 year lows, stock market indexes continue to push record highs, and corporate America is expanding their hiring budgets for young talent.

That last item is according to , CEO of Flex Capital, but it seems to make little sense when you consider the real crisis that pervades America’s universities: corrupt admissions processes, corrupt grading standards, and corrupt curriculum objectives. That last item may apply more heavily to the humanities department and not physical sciences, but it does infect the economic concepts taught to business school students.

In other words, there should be a shortage of young talent graduating from American universities with the cognitive skills, technical knowledge and desire to create value for their employers, customers and colleagues. Why? As Stanford University humanities professor, author and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Victor David Hanson tells it:

1. Lower academic standards at top schools are to accommodate lower admissions standards for biologic and nationality quotas.

2. Politicized coursework by politicized professors who remove empirical knowledge and inductive reasoning skills for a predetermined social agenda.

3. Therapeutic courses to mitigate the weak preparatory skills of students admitted under DEI mandates.

4. Racial essentialism for the even distribution of A and A- grades.

5. Curriculum for non-rigorous social “studies” to help justify grade inflation for weak students

6. Safe spaces, trigger warnings and separate graduations are used to rationalize the 3.8 grade point averages, lower admission standards, politicized coursework, politicized professors, therapeutic courses, racial essentialism, and “studies” programs.

The good news is that employment rates and stock market indexes are at record levels because the American economy continues to create wealth. In turn, there is opportunity and cash flow for a record number of students and their parents to willfully fund these indoctrination camps.

The bad news is that recent graduates who are complaining about the lack of career opportunities do not understand the nature of the problem. It is not the American economy or culture. All of us born here have hit life’s lottery. They have gotten bad advice. Some have adopted bad habits or the wrong attitude. The ones who get it, get it. And get ahead.

The Hiring Manager

During my brief career in management with a major Wall Street firm, my responsibilities included the fulfillment of my firm’s own hiring quotas. We were in growth mode and the hiring and training of retail Financial Advisors was a priority. The romanticism of high finance and fast markets was certainly an attraction, but like any professional who is starting fresh, it’s about new client relationships. It’s about marketing your knowledge and integrity in a competitive industry.

What I was looking for were energetic people with communication skills who understood the power of our premier global brand. One primary source was college Career Fairs for graduating seniors - and the other was newspaper advertising for more mature, career changing professionals. For the latter, we invited them to our bi-monthly Career Night presentation in the branch office.

And whether it was Career Fair or Career Night, each candidate completed a multiple-choice psychological test to help uncover their entrepreneurial talents or lack thereof. Again, it was about marketing in a competitive industry, but none of it was reliable.

To me, career fairs were both tedious and fun. The college seniors had instructions to show up in professional dress and do their homework about the companies to whom they wanted to speak. Naturally, I attracted business school students, but many of those who approached me only asked about information technology job openings. We had big IT departments, but in home office locations for which I was not recruiting.

Inevitably, a few would visit my table and ask, “What do you guys do?” My pat answer was, “We are one of the largest and most famous investment banks in the history of the world.” That was always fun. And I got hundreds of resumes from the classified ads that were interesting. For employment history, one young lady wrote of her current job description: “first point of contact in the customer interface structure.” That was rich. A really good receptionist is of great value and I had to find out.

So, what is the point of all this? Auren Hoffman’s recent comments on Substack about hiring young talent in today’s economy - 25 years later than my narrative above, has not changed. Some things never change:

You have to show you can add value. That is it. That is the only thing. The test the smart hiring manager applies in 2026 is simple. Can you learn something on your own? Can you finish what you started? Can you do what you said you would do? These were always the skills that mattered.

From assistant Branch Manager to Branch Sales Manager to Area Training Manager, I interviewed and hired hundreds of people into our Financial Advisor training program and terminated almost all of them. A few have had marvelous careers. Ultimately, everyone has to become profitable at some point and the metrics for that were objective: revenue. Cash flow is the electrical current of civilized cultures and profitable businesses, but I repeat myself.

Yet, all of us were operating on a flawed system. The advisor training was focused on traditional best practices of the industry - which differentiates no one and is loaded with contradictions. Those were a confusing array of packaged products supported by economic forecasts and arbitrary performance benchmarks - and most candidates were not going to do what they said they would do anyway.

The Builder’s Mindset

At this point you can see there is a wide philosophical gap separating the application, admissions and career development of college students at American universities and the application, admissions and career advancement for college graduates in corporate America.

Of course, there is the profit incentive, but Affirmative Action had been a guiding force for years in the private sector. This divide grew wider with the election of Barry Obama in 2008, but according to Hoffman, being a graduate of one of the top schools used to mean something:

They hired the Penn graduate because the admissions filter at Penn was strong. You went there, so you were probably smart and probably hard-working. The school did the screening for the company.

In the university environment described by Hanson, the effort of mental focus and thinking long-term is inherently bigoted. Furthermore, no one should get ahead if their ideas and actions were determined by genetics and societal forces. Instead, your initiative and low time preference is of no credit to you, but if you are allowed to excel, your effort imposes a duty on you to “give back.” You must sacrifice what you mistakenly believe you have earned. After all, “you didn’t build that.”

Fortunately, the DEI mindset of State funded institutions and corporate HR departments is finally being exposed to the harsh light of reality. But like all worthy progress, it must be replaced in the hearts and minds of the individual looking for a purposeful career and meaningful life, and Hoffman nails it:

The trait that predicts whether someone gets hired and stays hired in 2026 is not pedigree, technical skill, or raw IQ. it is whether you do what you said you would do. Nobody is asking for genius. they are asking for FOLLOW-THROUGH. The rare person who reliably does the thing they committed to is the most valuable employee in any company in any role.

How do I know? In 2008 and with a 20 year career in retail brokerage and investment management, my position was being eliminated and I was pounding the pavement. I had also relocated to a different branch in a new location and did not know anyone outside of my firm and my family.

But I had two things going for me. I had taken leadership roles with the local Chamber of Commerce and I had become certified in the discipline of statistical analysis for objective investing. I then contacted everyone I knew to let them know of my transition before they heard about it from third parties.

One of them told me about an opportunity with the trust department of her employer. I was then introduced to the team leader, who arranged an interview with the regional manager, and then with the senior wealth executive. All of them heard the same story: I was committed to the fiduciary methods that were most valuable to a trust department, and I had been selected for the city’s Men’s 8 crew competing in the Head of the Charles regatta in Boston.

Then the team leader called someone from the Chamber board of directors who worked at the bank and asked if he knew me. The response was “hire Mark, he does what he says he will do.” Bear in mind, this was the fall of 2008 and the worst time imaginable to be looking for a new career opportunity in the investment management industry. But that was me, what does Hoffman suggest for you?

The most valuable thing a 22 year old can do in 2026 is create something. An app. A screenplay. A side business. An internal tool you wrote for a club you were in. The point is that you taught yourself something. You finished it. You can describe what you learned, what broke, what you fixed, why you made the calls you made. That story is the new resume.

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