Teddy Roosevelt busted monopolies with pure will, seized mines, saved 194M acres, then burned his career on principle. In 2026 he'd be canceled before lunch. The lost leadership standard that makes the Three Trumps era look gutless. First in the series.
If I was half my age and better-looking and fast-talking and knew even a little bit about video, I'd be doing this stuff half as well. Good thing I'm old and have no ambition and can just watch you do it instead.
About one of my favorite subjects. A dead president who is worth all the living ones combined with a dividend left over. A man born for the time, who seized the time.
Someone you could not mistake for the two-dimensional opportunistic conniving cowardly unprincipled weasels that fill Washington to overflowing today.
You are correct in labeling this as one of your best. Even though I've only seen a few of your videos, I don't recall seeing a short presentation like this that was as jammed with information and genuinely entertaining. I happen to agree with nearly everything you're saying, but, if I didn't, I would have enjoyed this just as much.
In short, you're a hoot. A great writer who happens to be a really good actor. with a unique sense of humor. That probably hasn't happened since Saturday Night Live in the early '70's--and/or since George Carlin died.
And thank you so much for telling me that it's well put together. I really admired what Teddy Roosevelt did and I love to read… I can tell that a lot of his legacy was very purposely crafted by him writing all of those flattering books about himself, which again reminds me of trump but it does seem that there was a huge difference in intention but it's an interesting conversation and I could be wrong
Teddy Roosevelt governed pretty aggressively because he believed the country needed a reset. He pushed past norms, took on monopolies, regulated industry, and tried to rebalance opportunity so it wasn’t just tilted toward the wealthiest.
Trump ignores precedent when he thinks it’s in the way. The difference, at least from my perspective, is where that energy is directed. Roosevelt aimed it at concentrated power and corruption. Trump seems to aim it more broadly, at institutions or the public itself.
So the real question for me is this:
If the goal is restoring fairness and opportunity, would you be open to that kind of forceful leadership today from a man with ethics?
Obviously, the quick answer is well I think my values are the right ones so I'm making a justification, however I really don't see this country is separated with left and right ideas anymore. It seems to be almost entirely separated with a horizontal line now where you have the people, and the Machine.
Interesting piece. You may have a documentary pitch for one of the appropriate cable channels here.
I was pleased to see that you give a balanced perspective on the fact that Theodore Roosevelt probably couldn't get elected dog catcher in this country today, much like JFK, certainly Ronald Reagan, and even Bill Clinton. Today we've got a pretty dysfunctional political scene, as you, of course, have as your foundational promise.
The Gilded Age, or the Robber Baron Age, is a very interesting period to look at. There were trade-offs in the transition. What's interesting is the trustbuster, pièce de résistance, the breakup of Standard Oil, had very little benefit for the customer. Nor did it beggar John D. Rockefeller; in fact, he was richer after they broke Standard Oil up than he was before.
You can argue that the formation of the Federal Reserve, replacing the power of J.P. Morgan, which moved all the financial power to the public sector versus the private sector, actually had a lot of adverse consequences. So it's more nuanced. I recommend reading The House of Morgan, which is not a short book, by Ron Chernow. Today we have people who want to end the Fed because it's too powerful, notably the father-son team of Ron and Rand Paul. There's some nuance there, but a nice Substack nonetheless.
Thanks for the feedback on the voice part.I need to work on slowing down.I think and I get confused with the attention span of people … So many people want me to seriously examine issues in seven minutes. As\nI learn , I think i'm gonna have to start with the big piece and chisel it down to different pieces of content for people that don't like documentaries… Personally , that's pretty much the only thing i watch these days besides sports
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I'm thinking about starting up an economic education foundation. So basically, I have to thank the DSA for one thing, which is that they've been very thought-provoking and inspiring—sort of if you get bedbugs. You won't stop until they're gone, and that's my attitude toward DSA because they're so dangerous. They're an existential threat to civilization, frankly.
So one of the challenges is, how do you get across to the younger people who consume their content in TikTok videos? How do you get that across? And I think, frankly, the way you do it is to use the old Saul Alinsky school that they've embraced against them, which is to ridicule the absurdity of their ideas and their presumptions and posturing, like AOC being on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, where he wasn't even there because he's in the Hamptons—Mr. Man of the People—talking about freezing her eggs like she's the queen bee or something. I mean, you talk about TMI. And then she's talking about, "Gee, wasn't that woke 1.0 stuff just wacky?"
To me, that is the end of DSA. When you dismiss your own catastrophic prescriptions, like defunding the police is—boy, we were really goofy kids back then, weren't we? Now I'm 36 and I gotta freeze my eggs, so I've matured. How are you supposed to trust them about Woke 2.0 or Woke 3.0? So I think maybe there's a method there.
People have been struggling on how to persuade people since at least the ancient Greeks. I don't feel like you're alone.
Not to mention that it's kind of even beyond where any communist country has gone with the whole , not just defund the police but set all of the inmates free... Doesn't communism generally jail anyone that doesn't cooperate if they're lucky enough to live?
The game is pretty simple. Communists always advocate for anarchy, which they can then retrieve from chaos and impose their own dictatorship, which makes whatever autocratic abuses took place under the previous regime look like child's play by comparison. Just study the Bolshevist Revolution. Stalin's prisons made the czar look like a softy.
There's a real trick said talking to the people that support the DSA. And what I usually do is start out by saying listen, I'm a progressive even though I don't know if that's entirely true, because they don't want to really listen to Anyone about anything. And I really think that if they understood history, just a little bit in economics at all, they could see that Teddy Roosevelt would be much better. Hero then chairman mao
I realized what the key is one day. I was watching one of them be interviewed on Fox. Fox uses them. They bring them in to throw red meat at the base. It's like the Christians being brought into the Colosseum to be eaten by the lions for the entertainment of the masses.
But I noticed that goes two ways. The DSA candidate just sat there with her smile on her face while Fox attempted to crucify her, just like Jesus on the cross. Then she chimed in with her talking points, which were, well, what about the exploitation of the masses by the trillionaires or some such simplistic drivel. This was not for the benefit of the Fox audience. It was to get red meat for HER base, showing how she spoke truth to power and made Fox lose their shit. They're the kids in class who used to try to get the teacher to lose their temper.
I realized the way you want to attack them in that kind of an environment is not to get all apologetic and red-faced and angry, but to try to get THEM to get angry at YOU by asking them a question along the lines of, "Well, let me ask you this. You want to overthrow the established order and impose a new order. Have you ever heard the Who song Won't Get Fooled Again?" They won't, because they're all about 12 years old, and then say, "There's a lyric in there that says, 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'" So what would you say people who ask what's to stop you from being just as oppressive if not more so, than the establishment- like Stalin and Mao were?”
There is no good answer to that question, and no matter what verbal diarrhea they spew out, the audience will hopefully discern the truth. At the very least, they won't get a social media video clip out of it.
I really believe that the way to get across to the younger people is to meet them halfway and maybe even doing the thing that I hate and dishonestly pandering to their side until they listen... and then you Build a following off of just restocking things that are they write about... Build the base and then once it's large enough , you write something from the point of view of one of them with the experience and education that you have asking the questions that matter... Like in that post , I wrote when I said, "what happens to the people that say , no?" And "what Do you do with the small business owner that doesn't want to give up his life's work." The fact that they are politically engaged is something to work with.But you need to do is something that I haven't done really well, but I'm seeing how I would have benefited greatly by starting a channel where I shamelessly pander to the left and another one where I shamelessly pandered to the right and once that crowd is established, then. You can be like Bill Maher 2.0 - Call out every side for the crazy... That's why , when you research online , they say things that are so ambiguous , like establish your niche.... When I established my nieces nonpartisan truth , what I didn't understand is that they want outrage... They're angry and they want a bumper sticker to solve it all for them.So I guess that's the way to get through is to play for one team... or both teams... long enough... And grow an audience that actually is big enough , where your voice will persuade people. I'm trying to get this guy, Ken LaCourte, to do a podcast with me, but I need to get myself organized first. He was a Fox News executive for like 20 years, and you can research it. He started two sites like I am explaining basically combined all the users from both of them one day onto a new youtube channel called, "elephants in the room."
He read one of my posts , comparing obama and Trump to each other... And then another one I don't remember it was something else that you won't really see from anyone on the left , because it just sounds crazy to them... But he told me that the brand i'm inventing , is very similar to what he invented , and I took a look. He's right. That's when I researched how he got such a huge following.
Now he's like me ... but he will lean right more and I'll lean left more... But I\nDon't know if you can say centrist... I'd say just interested and not loyal to a team... but for the most part , he's called a pretty fair... I mean... you can definitely see the bias in him like you can see it in me... Everyone has it and he definitely spins things to go away from concluding anything that really resembles the left narratives that he also doesn't spin it.So it ultimately , that's the right on the back.... so i like it... it's not to the level of fox news or MSNow: they do bias on purpose for views...they're You're a d j's playing the greatest hits than they are journalists.
What he did was he took that recipe and builded on both sides and then appealed to the common sense coalition of both , and I admire that plan more than anything.
I like this video that he made because I never heard anyone talk about it.And he will go to those uncomfortable places , and that's not necessarily my thing , but I enjoy it , because I like anything that's brave. If you sort his videos by most popular , you'll see the ones that really have gotten some big time views:
I'm writing an article about the "abolition project" - Freeing the inmates getting rid of law enforcement , I think it's like seven million bodies would be on the streets tomorrow ...unemployed... half cops and half criminals.... I don't really know what they think is going to happen.Besides possibly the purge
See, communists would love that, because you would have an unprecedented crime wave, which would create a crisis that they could step in and solve. What better way to bring down the status quo, the establishment, the empire? DSA types come right out and say that they are here to bring down what they consider to be the American empire from within, what they call the belly of the beast. These people are absolutely a fifth column of enemies within. And yet, half of the Democrats are voting for them in the primaries. Houston, we have a huge problem.
So I went to school at the university of Delaware and in Business School, about half of my classmates ended up working at JPMorgan, so I actually know a lot about the history of this man . . . They recruited me for a very important position , but of course , when a corporation gives me a test , i'm problematic because they see an inherent instinct to lead instead of follow... but It led me to research in a lot about why that was the case.And what you said is actually the exact same recommendation.One of my best friends gave me with the exact same book! Crazy.. I do think it's a bit more nuanced , but like I said... The man wasn't perfect , but he knew something needed to be done. I'm sure that we can boast agree that if things were kept fair the entire way , the extreme act wouldn't have been necessary in the first place. It's a tricky thing with capitalism, successful people and monopolies because it almost never the intention, and I don't think people understand how hard it is until difficult it is to give that up.Once you've actually worked to get it... That's why , when I wrote that common republic declaration , I said that every corporation Let's become very successful carries with it a very large responsibility to the society that made its success possible.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot lately. The idea of enlightened self-interest comes to mind. I'm a big free market and free people kind of guy, but when you get imbalances, you tend to brew extremism. Which is why I'm a big believer of informing everything we do with a system of values that tempers the soulless logic of profit maximization. If you look back at when America was great, as far as Trump was concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, there was a lot more corporate paternalism than there is now, at least in bigger companies. But a lot of that was swept away by progressivism, frankly. In a world of globalization, you're basically competing with 8 billion other people for every job. That's a big part of what's called the inshitification of particularly the digital world. When you try to get a job nowadays, you have to go through a lot of identity checking because you've got people in North Korea who are impersonating Americans and taking jobs as slaves to the state. So again, the issue goes back to human nature and how we govern it so that the better angels of our nature can triumph over the lesser angels. In other words, the thing is such as good and evil. You look at Marxism and Deconstructionism. They basically say that whoever has power is allowed to determine what is good and what is evil. I don't believe that. It's just the flip side of what people characterize as robber baronage. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that's when this country was built—the modern country we know today. It was a triumph of Hamilton's vision versus Jefferson's vision for what it should be. Through free markets and free people, unfettered by regulation, by and large. Perhaps it was just appropriate for that time. But today, we can't build anything as you have pointed out. Even after TR’s reforms we were able to build the biggest military force in the history of the world in four years?under FDR. We couldn't do that today. Today we get into a conflict and we run out of bullets six months into a conflict with a fourth-rate military power, and it takes three years to replace them. Go figure.
Yeah, that's why I call my— Substant common sense. I categorize myself as a discerner of truth. I believe there is objective truth, and it's a function of the behavioral science of human nature, more than anything else, at least in political science. Then, of course, there are laws of physics. Behavioral economics is just a reflection of—or insight into—human beings behave as economic animals. The problem with Marxism and the DSA version of it is it's inconsistent with behavioral economics. Homo economicus just doesn't play that way.
Yes! I watched this amazing 4 hour documentary on the History Channel a couple of years ago.. It was two parts.
The overcoming of Asthma to be a boxer at Harvard was extremely impressive regardless of how good he was.
I\nLove that he came from the silver spoon family.But wanted to fight in wars , and even the playing field ended exercised such remarkable , empathy and real values
Dude as in “Dude Ranch.” Someone who wasn’t a real cowhand. By the way, Cowboy was a word that real cattlemen hated. It was a “Dude” phrase. They were Drivers, Drovers. Ranch hands, Trail Hands. Never Cow Boys.
Also, most people totally misunderstand what a
“Bully Pulpit” is.
The T Man meant Great or Good Pulpit.
His Smelliness defines the common meaning of “Bully” pulpit.
Revolution is the solution.
Kickass.
If I was half my age and better-looking and fast-talking and knew even a little bit about video, I'd be doing this stuff half as well. Good thing I'm old and have no ambition and can just watch you do it instead.
About one of my favorite subjects. A dead president who is worth all the living ones combined with a dividend left over. A man born for the time, who seized the time.
Someone you could not mistake for the two-dimensional opportunistic conniving cowardly unprincipled weasels that fill Washington to overflowing today.
You are correct in labeling this as one of your best. Even though I've only seen a few of your videos, I don't recall seeing a short presentation like this that was as jammed with information and genuinely entertaining. I happen to agree with nearly everything you're saying, but, if I didn't, I would have enjoyed this just as much.
In short, you're a hoot. A great writer who happens to be a really good actor. with a unique sense of humor. That probably hasn't happened since Saturday Night Live in the early '70's--and/or since George Carlin died.
Excellent and well put together. You put your finger on exactly the problem. Lack of political will.
Paypal cheated me years ago, and I have avoided it since.
And thank you so much for telling me that it's well put together. I really admired what Teddy Roosevelt did and I love to read… I can tell that a lot of his legacy was very purposely crafted by him writing all of those flattering books about himself, which again reminds me of trump but it does seem that there was a huge difference in intention but it's an interesting conversation and I could be wrong
Teddy Roosevelt governed pretty aggressively because he believed the country needed a reset. He pushed past norms, took on monopolies, regulated industry, and tried to rebalance opportunity so it wasn’t just tilted toward the wealthiest.
Trump ignores precedent when he thinks it’s in the way. The difference, at least from my perspective, is where that energy is directed. Roosevelt aimed it at concentrated power and corruption. Trump seems to aim it more broadly, at institutions or the public itself.
So the real question for me is this:
If the goal is restoring fairness and opportunity, would you be open to that kind of forceful leadership today from a man with ethics?
Obviously, the quick answer is well I think my values are the right ones so I'm making a justification, however I really don't see this country is separated with left and right ideas anymore. It seems to be almost entirely separated with a horizontal line now where you have the people, and the Machine.
Interesting piece. You may have a documentary pitch for one of the appropriate cable channels here.
I was pleased to see that you give a balanced perspective on the fact that Theodore Roosevelt probably couldn't get elected dog catcher in this country today, much like JFK, certainly Ronald Reagan, and even Bill Clinton. Today we've got a pretty dysfunctional political scene, as you, of course, have as your foundational promise.
The Gilded Age, or the Robber Baron Age, is a very interesting period to look at. There were trade-offs in the transition. What's interesting is the trustbuster, pièce de résistance, the breakup of Standard Oil, had very little benefit for the customer. Nor did it beggar John D. Rockefeller; in fact, he was richer after they broke Standard Oil up than he was before.
You can argue that the formation of the Federal Reserve, replacing the power of J.P. Morgan, which moved all the financial power to the public sector versus the private sector, actually had a lot of adverse consequences. So it's more nuanced. I recommend reading The House of Morgan, which is not a short book, by Ron Chernow. Today we have people who want to end the Fed because it's too powerful, notably the father-son team of Ron and Rand Paul. There's some nuance there, but a nice Substack nonetheless.
Thanks for the feedback on the voice part.I need to work on slowing down.I think and I get confused with the attention span of people … So many people want me to seriously examine issues in seven minutes. As\nI learn , I think i'm gonna have to start with the big piece and chisel it down to different pieces of content for people that don't like documentaries… Personally , that's pretty much the only thing i watch these days besides sports
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I'm thinking about starting up an economic education foundation. So basically, I have to thank the DSA for one thing, which is that they've been very thought-provoking and inspiring—sort of if you get bedbugs. You won't stop until they're gone, and that's my attitude toward DSA because they're so dangerous. They're an existential threat to civilization, frankly.
So one of the challenges is, how do you get across to the younger people who consume their content in TikTok videos? How do you get that across? And I think, frankly, the way you do it is to use the old Saul Alinsky school that they've embraced against them, which is to ridicule the absurdity of their ideas and their presumptions and posturing, like AOC being on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, where he wasn't even there because he's in the Hamptons—Mr. Man of the People—talking about freezing her eggs like she's the queen bee or something. I mean, you talk about TMI. And then she's talking about, "Gee, wasn't that woke 1.0 stuff just wacky?"
To me, that is the end of DSA. When you dismiss your own catastrophic prescriptions, like defunding the police is—boy, we were really goofy kids back then, weren't we? Now I'm 36 and I gotta freeze my eggs, so I've matured. How are you supposed to trust them about Woke 2.0 or Woke 3.0? So I think maybe there's a method there.
People have been struggling on how to persuade people since at least the ancient Greeks. I don't feel like you're alone.
Not to mention that it's kind of even beyond where any communist country has gone with the whole , not just defund the police but set all of the inmates free... Doesn't communism generally jail anyone that doesn't cooperate if they're lucky enough to live?
The game is pretty simple. Communists always advocate for anarchy, which they can then retrieve from chaos and impose their own dictatorship, which makes whatever autocratic abuses took place under the previous regime look like child's play by comparison. Just study the Bolshevist Revolution. Stalin's prisons made the czar look like a softy.
There's a real trick said talking to the people that support the DSA. And what I usually do is start out by saying listen, I'm a progressive even though I don't know if that's entirely true, because they don't want to really listen to Anyone about anything. And I really think that if they understood history, just a little bit in economics at all, they could see that Teddy Roosevelt would be much better. Hero then chairman mao
I realized what the key is one day. I was watching one of them be interviewed on Fox. Fox uses them. They bring them in to throw red meat at the base. It's like the Christians being brought into the Colosseum to be eaten by the lions for the entertainment of the masses.
But I noticed that goes two ways. The DSA candidate just sat there with her smile on her face while Fox attempted to crucify her, just like Jesus on the cross. Then she chimed in with her talking points, which were, well, what about the exploitation of the masses by the trillionaires or some such simplistic drivel. This was not for the benefit of the Fox audience. It was to get red meat for HER base, showing how she spoke truth to power and made Fox lose their shit. They're the kids in class who used to try to get the teacher to lose their temper.
I realized the way you want to attack them in that kind of an environment is not to get all apologetic and red-faced and angry, but to try to get THEM to get angry at YOU by asking them a question along the lines of, "Well, let me ask you this. You want to overthrow the established order and impose a new order. Have you ever heard the Who song Won't Get Fooled Again?" They won't, because they're all about 12 years old, and then say, "There's a lyric in there that says, 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'" So what would you say people who ask what's to stop you from being just as oppressive if not more so, than the establishment- like Stalin and Mao were?”
There is no good answer to that question, and no matter what verbal diarrhea they spew out, the audience will hopefully discern the truth. At the very least, they won't get a social media video clip out of it.
I really believe that the way to get across to the younger people is to meet them halfway and maybe even doing the thing that I hate and dishonestly pandering to their side until they listen... and then you Build a following off of just restocking things that are they write about... Build the base and then once it's large enough , you write something from the point of view of one of them with the experience and education that you have asking the questions that matter... Like in that post , I wrote when I said, "what happens to the people that say , no?" And "what Do you do with the small business owner that doesn't want to give up his life's work." The fact that they are politically engaged is something to work with.But you need to do is something that I haven't done really well, but I'm seeing how I would have benefited greatly by starting a channel where I shamelessly pander to the left and another one where I shamelessly pandered to the right and once that crowd is established, then. You can be like Bill Maher 2.0 - Call out every side for the crazy... That's why , when you research online , they say things that are so ambiguous , like establish your niche.... When I established my nieces nonpartisan truth , what I didn't understand is that they want outrage... They're angry and they want a bumper sticker to solve it all for them.So I guess that's the way to get through is to play for one team... or both teams... long enough... And grow an audience that actually is big enough , where your voice will persuade people. I'm trying to get this guy, Ken LaCourte, to do a podcast with me, but I need to get myself organized first. He was a Fox News executive for like 20 years, and you can research it. He started two sites like I am explaining basically combined all the users from both of them one day onto a new youtube channel called, "elephants in the room."
He read one of my posts , comparing obama and Trump to each other... And then another one I don't remember it was something else that you won't really see from anyone on the left , because it just sounds crazy to them... But he told me that the brand i'm inventing , is very similar to what he invented , and I took a look. He's right. That's when I researched how he got such a huge following.
Now he's like me ... but he will lean right more and I'll lean left more... But I\nDon't know if you can say centrist... I'd say just interested and not loyal to a team... but for the most part , he's called a pretty fair... I mean... you can definitely see the bias in him like you can see it in me... Everyone has it and he definitely spins things to go away from concluding anything that really resembles the left narratives that he also doesn't spin it.So it ultimately , that's the right on the back.... so i like it... it's not to the level of fox news or MSNow: they do bias on purpose for views...they're You're a d j's playing the greatest hits than they are journalists.
What he did was he took that recipe and builded on both sides and then appealed to the common sense coalition of both , and I admire that plan more than anything.
I like this video that he made because I never heard anyone talk about it.And he will go to those uncomfortable places , and that's not necessarily my thing , but I enjoy it , because I like anything that's brave. If you sort his videos by most popular , you'll see the ones that really have gotten some big time views:
https://youtu.be/LNElOHOGviI?is=ClNmHmLi4Jynu_Pp
I'm writing an article about the "abolition project" - Freeing the inmates getting rid of law enforcement , I think it's like seven million bodies would be on the streets tomorrow ...unemployed... half cops and half criminals.... I don't really know what they think is going to happen.Besides possibly the purge
See, communists would love that, because you would have an unprecedented crime wave, which would create a crisis that they could step in and solve. What better way to bring down the status quo, the establishment, the empire? DSA types come right out and say that they are here to bring down what they consider to be the American empire from within, what they call the belly of the beast. These people are absolutely a fifth column of enemies within. And yet, half of the Democrats are voting for them in the primaries. Houston, we have a huge problem.
So I went to school at the university of Delaware and in Business School, about half of my classmates ended up working at JPMorgan, so I actually know a lot about the history of this man . . . They recruited me for a very important position , but of course , when a corporation gives me a test , i'm problematic because they see an inherent instinct to lead instead of follow... but It led me to research in a lot about why that was the case.And what you said is actually the exact same recommendation.One of my best friends gave me with the exact same book! Crazy.. I do think it's a bit more nuanced , but like I said... The man wasn't perfect , but he knew something needed to be done. I'm sure that we can boast agree that if things were kept fair the entire way , the extreme act wouldn't have been necessary in the first place. It's a tricky thing with capitalism, successful people and monopolies because it almost never the intention, and I don't think people understand how hard it is until difficult it is to give that up.Once you've actually worked to get it... That's why , when I wrote that common republic declaration , I said that every corporation Let's become very successful carries with it a very large responsibility to the society that made its success possible.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot lately. The idea of enlightened self-interest comes to mind. I'm a big free market and free people kind of guy, but when you get imbalances, you tend to brew extremism. Which is why I'm a big believer of informing everything we do with a system of values that tempers the soulless logic of profit maximization. If you look back at when America was great, as far as Trump was concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, there was a lot more corporate paternalism than there is now, at least in bigger companies. But a lot of that was swept away by progressivism, frankly. In a world of globalization, you're basically competing with 8 billion other people for every job. That's a big part of what's called the inshitification of particularly the digital world. When you try to get a job nowadays, you have to go through a lot of identity checking because you've got people in North Korea who are impersonating Americans and taking jobs as slaves to the state. So again, the issue goes back to human nature and how we govern it so that the better angels of our nature can triumph over the lesser angels. In other words, the thing is such as good and evil. You look at Marxism and Deconstructionism. They basically say that whoever has power is allowed to determine what is good and what is evil. I don't believe that. It's just the flip side of what people characterize as robber baronage. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that's when this country was built—the modern country we know today. It was a triumph of Hamilton's vision versus Jefferson's vision for what it should be. Through free markets and free people, unfettered by regulation, by and large. Perhaps it was just appropriate for that time. But today, we can't build anything as you have pointed out. Even after TR’s reforms we were able to build the biggest military force in the history of the world in four years?under FDR. We couldn't do that today. Today we get into a conflict and we run out of bullets six months into a conflict with a fourth-rate military power, and it takes three years to replace them. Go figure.
Yeah, that's why I call my— Substant common sense. I categorize myself as a discerner of truth. I believe there is objective truth, and it's a function of the behavioral science of human nature, more than anything else, at least in political science. Then, of course, there are laws of physics. Behavioral economics is just a reflection of—or insight into—human beings behave as economic animals. The problem with Marxism and the DSA version of it is it's inconsistent with behavioral economics. Homo economicus just doesn't play that way.
Well, the T Man was, pretty much a self-made man.
Yes he was born W a silver spoon in his porridge, but he was also short, asthmatic, extremely myopic, & weak.
He overcame all those deficits with extreme personal effort & along the way developed an empathy for others w/o power.
Cowboying out on the N Dakota plains the year of the Big Die-Off was a substantial part of his education.
The “Colonel” (his favorite honorific) was always ready for a few rounds of pugilistic exercise W one of the boys.
& he hated the abuse of power by the wealthy “Robber Barons” of his day.
He woulda punched Elon, Jeffy, Marky & both Ellisons, father & son till they cried for mercy.
“Bully!” He’d a shouted.
& a damned good man.
Yes! I watched this amazing 4 hour documentary on the History Channel a couple of years ago.. It was two parts.
The overcoming of Asthma to be a boxer at Harvard was extremely impressive regardless of how good he was.
I\nLove that he came from the silver spoon family.But wanted to fight in wars , and even the playing field ended exercised such remarkable , empathy and real values
Bully!
Bully for you! He said golf was a "dude's game" - I don't really know what that meant , but I could tell that it was disapproval
Dude as in “Dude Ranch.” Someone who wasn’t a real cowhand. By the way, Cowboy was a word that real cattlemen hated. It was a “Dude” phrase. They were Drivers, Drovers. Ranch hands, Trail Hands. Never Cow Boys.
Also, most people totally misunderstand what a
“Bully Pulpit” is.
The T Man meant Great or Good Pulpit.
His Smelliness defines the common meaning of “Bully” pulpit.