From the Pen of Cynical Publius
Today’s required reading. The words below are his, reprinted sneakily and without permission, but with great admiration. Original is here.
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Neither Kamala Harris nor Tim Walz has ever spent a single second of their adult lives working in the private sector. Not a second. Not one. Literally every single penny they have ever earned in their adult lives as ordinary income has been provided by sucking at the teat of the value-creating taxpayer. What is worse is that this means they know LITERALLY NOTHING about business or private enterprise.
Now you may be saying, “Oh c’mon CP, they have run organizations, they have been AROUND business, that’s good enough, right?”
No it isn’t. I’ll tell you my own story to explain why.
As many of you know, after I retired from the US Army, I went to law school and became a corporate/business lawyer. I am ashamed to admit that in my 22 years as an Army officer, I always assumed it would be super easy to immediately transform into a stud businessman after military retirement. The way I saw it, I already had better leadership and management skills than most in business, I had already dealt with live-and-death stress, and I was already very familiar with many private enterprise concepts like supply chains and inventory management (as well as the various excruciating military/business fads I endured in my career, like TQM and Lean Six Sigma). The way I imagined it, I already had 95% of what I needed to succeed in the real world, I just needed to go take a one-credit community college class in accounting and I would be Warren Buffett.
Boy oh boy was I wrong. Embarrassingly wrong.
While the Army DID give me those essential skills I listed above (and they are important), I was no better than a 21 year-old recent college grad when it came to things like reading and truly understanding financial statements, managing cash flows, project finance, marketing and customer relations, dealing with HR in a civilian climate, navigating the treacherous waters of regulatory impediments at the federal, state and local levels, business taxation, intellectual property creation and ownership, bet-the-company negotiations and the myriad of other things that business leaders deal with on a daily basis.
As a career member of government, I assumed away all of the challenges entrepreneurs and business owners deal with every day. I assumed away the stress of perhaps not making payroll. I assumed away what it is like to see your hopes, dreams, blood, sweat and tears swept away in an economic downturn. I assumed away what it’s like to wonder how you will feed your family or send your kids to college if customers don’t start showing up. A life in government not only means you don’t understand business, it also means you are ensconced in a mind-numbing, comforting womb of economic security provided by the value-creating taxpayers while at the same time never understanding the economic insecurity and trials of those very same taxpayers affording you such luxury.
I 100% guarantee that Harris and Walz suffer from the same delusions that I did. Anyone who has never read a balance sheet or sweated payroll is manifestly unqualified to lead the United State of America. (And OBTW Trump brought us to such great heights in his first term precisely because he IS a businessman.) The business of America is business, and we cannot afford to be led by business illiterates. The business illiteracy of Harris/Walz is the precise reason why they think insanely destructive policies like taxes on unrealized capital gains and preventing “price gouging” at a 1% profit margin make sense.
Do not let a career government lawyer and a Maoist member of the teacher’s union seize power and drag our economy into the abyss even further. Vote Trump/Vance, the food on your family’s table depends on it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
