PHILOSOPHY VACATION WEEK, AND THOUGHTS ON BUSINESS
Every once in a while I burn out on the formal work for one reason or another. Either I’m just tired, or I lose patience with the social media space, or something internal to the organization makes me question why I concern myself with it at all.
And when that happens, I usually return to my other ‘hobbies’, which are business, economics, technology, and war. And for some reason, I’m interested in the changes in the business world I’ve seen over the past ten years, or maybe just since 2016. And I’ve realized it’s the inclusion of GenZ into the already weak half of the Millennial cohort. And let’s say I’m as afraid of what I see there, as much as I’m afraid of dating, marriage, and reproduction rates, immigration rates, the Marxist-to-woke march through the institutions, and the restoration of american, or at least anglosphere, isolationism.
Talking with a friend who I respect yesterday, and I’m kind of awed at times by what respectably educated and sophisticated people do not comprehend about the hard work of running businesses at scale. Meaning outside the SMB market.
Conversely, at the top of the market with public companies you have such a luxury of available capital and financing that private companies don’t – even if it comes at the cost of regulatory burden, board burden, and shareholder burden – none of which convey the value they purport to any more than an insurance company and an auditor. I mean, some of the largest public companies are really just financial firms managing their investments and distribution channels.
So while small businesses may be hard to start (usually I get to 5m the first year), the hard part of running a business begins as soon as you exit the SMB market and enter the middle market, because if your company is exceptional, profitable, and growing, you are always constrained by a shortage of nothing more than float, developing operational excellence, and building a managment team that lets you focus on the next three years, rather than the present one.
We have been in an era of extraordinary capital avilability. The first money I was a part of raising was 5M in the early 80s. But the time we hit the 90s it was trivial. And even after 2008, at least in my sectors (technology) it’s been a frat party.
But that capital was made possible by the boomer generation coinciding with (a) the postwar advantage of the USA as the only remaining industrial civilization, (b) the reagan era economics of defeating the soviets (c) the windfall from the 30 year tech boom (my lifetime), (d) and the integration of foreign markets, (e) the absurd tolerance for accumulating debt especially consumer debt, (f) altogether allowing the boomers to stick money into every crack and crevice of opportunity in the economy, and then some.
But (a) the boomers are gone, they are now living on those investments, they will not be adding but subracting from capital and expecting hard returns on it (b) present generations have burned the debt of their first home ownership on education that has not and will not produce previous generations of returns. (c) The USA will remain for all predictiable futures, and the dollar will remain, the haven for foreign investment – simply because we’re just the least bad of the major currencies, and have the most stable rule of law – but that investment will be conservative (d) the cheap cost of good created by the American postwar order (and previous british order), that was intended to create federations of peaceful people, isn’t survivalbe with the return of agrarian empires that federalism was designed to replace, in China (if the CCP survives), Iran_vs_Turkey-MENA, Russia (if she survives), and the many south american countries that have a long way to go before they exit the corruption of socialist countries, even if they ever can evolve into advanced rule-of-law economies.
So, I see naivety in the population, ignorance in the population, demographic decline in aggregate IQ forcing us into second world norms traditions values and institutions. I see a broken governmen torn between a failing postwar ambition and the left’s postwar neo-marxist ambitions including the replacement of the founding population, their institutions, history, traditions, values, norms, habits, and metaphysical presumptions.
And I don’t see any way out of it other than the traditional one all civilizations rely upon: the use of the military industrial complex to restore incentives, education, capital organization, and discipline that washes away the old economy and forces a new one.
Now there are alternatives. But that’s the most likely one that I can see – despite the military-state-intel complex’s rather competent understanding of the world context, in competition with a set of leftist institutions of that same postwar era assuming institutional capture is within reach at precisely the time the capital they w ant to redistribute and control is evaporating like a shallow puddle on the DC airport tarmac in July.
We do not have the human capital to do other than suffer the next decade without a re-concentration of human capital away from rent seeking (financialism, government, academy, media, entertainment) into knowledge capital, institutional capital, behavioral capital, and assets that can compensate for the set of declines. Declines made possible because libertarians and conservaties are too full of christian tolerance, forgiveness, and foolish optimism as well as ‘leave me alone’ to have stopped it.
It’s going to take 2M to show up in DC for 90 days to fix this mess, with demand for policy reforms, and thus avoiding either crisis, collapse, or civil war.