In Defense of the Corporation by Robert Hessen shows how corporations are not government-created “fictional entities” and “creatures of the state”, but how the rights of a corporation derive from the principle of individual rights and are formed through voluntary contracts under the principles of freedom of association.
“What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.”
― Sam Walton: Made In America
Sam Walton typifies what it means to be an American. In one of my favorite biographies, Sam Walton candidly tells his story of how turned a single dime store in a small town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world.
“We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.” ― Antigone
When Polynices—a military leader in Thebes’s civil war—dies on the battlefield, Thebes’s ruler, Creon, decrees that Polynices’s body will lie unburied and left as prey for the vultures. Antigone, the late warrior’s sister, answering to a higher authority than the state, follows her conscience and breaks the law to bury her brother with the proper rites. “Antigone’s act of civil disobedience urges great upheaval in this timeless play that explores the conflicts that can arise between worldly and divine law, and the questions raised by the idea of individual freedom.”
“Choose a few stocks that are likely to produce above-average returns over the long haul, concentrate the bulk of your investments in those stocks, and have the fortitude to hold steady during any short-term market gyrations.”
The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategy is recommended by Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger.
“Marxism provides a theoretical and institutional framework through which they can project their own limitations and weaknesses onto ‘the system’ and their ‘oppressors’ rather than take responsibility for their own real or perceived plight.” […]
“Obviously, this theory rejects, among other things, all evidence of economic and social mobility that exists in capitalist societies, and especially the United States. The “rags to riches” and “riches to rags” stories are infinite. Indeed, the extent to which individuals by the millions seek refuge in America, risking their lives and the lives of their families, particularly those fleeing so-called communist paradises throughout the world, for a better life are also limitless.” […]
“Where are the concomitant examples of the opposite—that is, individuals “escaping” the “inequalities of America capitalism” for a better life in communist regimes?” […]
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
American Marxism shows how a post-modern variation on the Marxist framework (much of modern Marxism has little to do with the Marx in detail) pervades American schools, the press, corporations, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the Biden presidency – and how it is cloaked in labels like “progressivism”, “democratic socialism”, “social activism, “critical race theory,” and the “Green New Deal.”