The American Dream, though dimmed by bad laws and bad news, is still alive.

I know this because Queen Karina and I discovered Shark Tank, an enthralling TV show for entrepreneurs and investors.

After watching the first season, I found myself overwhelmed to the point of tears with a deep respect and even reverence for the American Dream and those who dare dream it.

So today I honor you, the Dreamers, Risk-Takers, Pioneers, Innovators, Entrepreneurs, and Producers, upon whose intrepid backs has been built the greatest country in the history of the world.

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Why can’t the freedom movement seem to get any traction?

Why have we lost battle after battle for at least the past century?

It’s because we tend to make the good the enemy of the perfect, the pragmatic the enemy of the ideal.

To be clear, it’s because the most passionate among us have adopted a rigid, dogmatic, uncompromising “either-or” stance in the fight.

Rather than winning hearts and minds in the trenches inch-by-inch, we drop rhetorical nuclear bombs and make enemies of potential supporters.

There’s one critical distinction that explains this tendency and, if understood, can overcome it and make all the difference to our success:

Do we view the fight for freedom as an election-cycle battle, or as a 100-year war?

These vastly different mindsets generate completely different strategies and tactics and produce completely different results.

If we view the fight as an election-cycle battle, the battlegrounds are primarily political and governmental.

The tactics include:

• Public, energetic, and angry marches and demonstrations
• Passionate, vitriolic, and partisan commentary that preaches to the crowd and riles the base but fails to win new supporters
• Literal, logical, and personal argumentation
• Directing energy primarily at getting individual political candidates elected

But in a 100-year war, the battlegrounds are cultural and educational, and the short-term tactics above shift to the following long-term strategies:

• Personal, lifelong, classical education in the quiet of our homes
• Respectful, thoughtful, open-minded discussion with people across the whole spectrum of belief, with the intention of winning hearts and minds, rather than simply spewing passion or proving how smart and “right” we are
• Symbolic, metaphorical, and artful story-telling and persuasion
• Directing energy toward reforming education, building families and communities, and becoming successful entrepreneurs (see the three choices in FreedomShift by Oliver DeMille)

In a 100-year war, we moderate our passion and smarten our strategy.

We heal the roots of our demise, rather than hacking at the symptomatic leaves.

We work from love, rather than anger.

We reform from the outside-in and bottom-up, rather than the top-down. In other words, we focus on fixing ourselves, rather than Washington.

We understand that studying Montesquieu in our homes is far more effective than waving banners in the streets.

We spend our time and energy teaching the rising generation the depths of freedom and political philosophy, rather than debating opponents in chat rooms and on radio and TV shows.

We build successful small businesses, rather than complaining about losing jobs overseas.

In a 100-year war, idealism and pragmatism aren’t mutually exclusive. We’re more concerned with direction than destination.

In other words, we don’t reject particular policies because they’re not ultimate, black-and-white ideals.

Rather, we judge them based on whether or not they take us closer to the ideal, however slight the progress.

In a 100-year war, we learn and teach principles, rather than fight candidates.

To be perfectly clear, we don’t waste time forwarding mass emails about the status of Obama’s birth certificate.

Most importantly, in a 100-year war, independent freedom lovers create an inclusive tent, rather than an exclusive club.

For example, many conservatives denigrate environmentalists, or as they’re disdainfully labeled, “tree-huggers.”

But many of these environment-conscious, thoughtful people are also highly-conscious and passionate about local, organic food production and sustainable agriculture — which is a primary battleground for freedom.

So rather than building on common beliefs and bringing these people into the tent of freedom, many conservatives banish them with narrow-minded labels.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is also a favorite target of many conservative commentators.

But wise freedom-lovers would do well to harness their energy.

The truth is that they raise a critical point that most conservatives fail to see: Vast inequities in wealth distribution and power are, in fact, killing America — every bit as much, if not more so, than governmental wealth redistribution from rich to poor.

The government does favor those with capital over those with little or none, big businesses over small businesses, which creates these unfair and unsustainable inequities.

We don’t have to occupy Wall Street with them, but we can at least be wise enough to recognize where we agree in order to work together toward a more free, just, and sustainable society.

We can start winning more friends and creating fewer enemies. We can be pragmatic coalition-builders, rather than dogmatic clique-builders.

I’m as passionate about freedom as anyone — freedom is my mission.

But passion alone isn’t going to win the fight for freedom.

The war will be won through wisdom.

Two days ago I published Monte and Laura Bledsoe’s letter, which detailed the infuriating inspection and threats by bureaucrats on their Quail Hollow Farm CSA on October 21, 2011.

They’ve now posted these four disturbing videos documenting the events.

I urge you to watch them.

The Bledsoes and people like them are my heroes.

It’s these types of people — entrepreneurial “mini-factory” owners, as Oliver DeMille puts it in The Coming Aristocracy — who will restore America.

As Oliver writes,

“…Others wonder how effective mini-factories can be in light of stifling regulation. That’s the whole point.

“By creating mini-factories, we both produce individuals with a pro-innovation, pro-free enterprise mindset who will ease regulation through voting, as well as organizations that by nature fight misguided regulation.

“It creates a drip system as an antithesis to bureaucracy and faulty regulation — drop by drop, on individual and organization at a time, the aristocratic system will be overwhelmed and deconstructed.

“In our current model of government and corporate dependence, aristocratic institutions, laws, and policies encounter only nominal resistance.

“More to the point, relatively few people are even aware of how burdensome our current regulatory environment is. Employees are largely shielded from red tape. Ironically, they feel its effect indirectly in almost every aspect of their lives, but few make the connection.

“Create a multitude of mini-factory owners and it’s a different story. Suddenly, freedom issues are brought to the forefront as more and more people clash with bureaucracy, and mass consciousness is awakened.”

Thank you Bledsoes, for having the courage to clash with bureaucracy and helping to awaken mass consciousness.

Watch these four videos now.

Delve into this week’s must-read articles:

“An Unconstitutional Killing: Obama’s Killing of Awlaki Violates American Principles” by Ron Paul

“Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Under our Constitution, American citizens, even those living abroad, must be charged with a crime before being sentenced.”

Makes you wonder how, exactly, Obama’s foreign policy differs from Bush’s and how in the world he ever won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers warned of this precise thing:

“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”

“The Forever Recession (and the Coming Revolution)” by Seth Godin

“Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.”

“The Lost Decade?” by David Brooks

“…the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.”

You have three brains competing in your head.

All three are valuable. But only one of them holds the keys to thriving in tough economies.

If you let the other two dominate, be prepared to struggle.

The visionary Entrepreneur asks, “How can we make/do this better? What is the market demanding?”

The pragmatic Manager asks, “How can we systemize this? How can we control the chaos?”

The hard-working Technician asks, “How can I get the Entrepreneur and the Manager to leave me alone so I can just do it how I want to?”

During recessions, cash isn’t king; innovation is king. The companies who adapt and shift resources the quickest crush slower but more capitalized companies.

“But trying new and different things is risky.”

Not nearly as risky as maintaining the status quo, crossing your fingers, and hoping the economy will turn around.

“Think of risky undertakings as ‘experiments.’ Regardless of whether your experiment succeeds or fails, you’re going to learn something useful.” -Roy H. Williams

Change is Your Friend

The Entrepreneur faces reality and acts boldly. He’s never content with stagnation or mediocrity. He thrives on growth and creation.

But growth requires change, and Managers and Technicians detest change.

You’ve heard it before: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

Are you content with your current results? If so, stop reading this and get back to work.

If not, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wait for the stars to align? Are you going to let external circumstances dictate your results?

Or will you take charge and keep innovating until you figure out what works? What other option do you have?

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” -Winston Churchill

What Do You Have to Lose?

If your business is declining or simply maintaining, then what you’re doing isn’t working.

So what do you have to lose? Money? You’re losing money already — and you’re only going to lose more the longer you wait.

This doesn’t mean you blindly throw stuff up against the wall and hope something sticks; innovation need not be reckless.

It means you set your box aside and brainstorm long and free to think in ways you’ve never thought before. It means you dig deep and analyze market trends.

It means you execute, watch your data, then shift your strategies based on what the data tells you.

The Manager and Bean Counter in your head will warn, “Now, let’s not be hasty. Those new ideas don’t have a track record. We don’t know if they will actually work.”

Never let your skeptical Manager make strategic decisions when decline is imminent and change is required.

Put your Entrepreneur in charge.

You may get a few scrapes and bruises along the way, but he won’t quit. He’ll pull you out of the wreckage of temporary failure time and time again. And eventually, you’ll succeed. It’s inevitable.

“The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for change. The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present. He’s happiest when left free to construct images of ‘what-if’ and ‘if-when.’” -Michael Gerber

The “Box” is Your Enemy

I was once in brainstorming mode while consulting with a company.

I threw out idea after idea after idea, only to be immediately shot down on each of them by one of the owners.

She was in Manager mode, so she only saw all the reasons why we couldn’t do them.

Whether or not the ideas were feasible isn’t the main problem in this scenario. The problem is the endemic skepticism. The immediate discarding of any idea that’s even remotely outside the box.

My question for the owners was, “Okay, if not all the ideas I’ve presented, then what? How will you grow? What are you willing to do differently than anything else you’ve ever tried? Because everything you’ve tried in the past isn’t working.”

What will make or break your business during recessions is how you make decisions.

Is your Manager making your decisions, or is your Entrepreneur?

By definition, Managers don’t use the thinking processes that instigate rapid, fundamental, and drastic change.

Managers and Number Crunchers are highly creative when it comes to proving why ideas won’t work, yet astoundingly deficient when it comes to generating the ideas themselves.

This isn’t a criticism–it’s simply not their job to innovate. But when innovation is critical, you must learn to defer to your inner Entrepreneur.

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Dr. Linus Pauling

Crush the Box

When the economy is great, you have the luxury of being comfortable. You no longer have that luxury.

If you’re not dedicating people, time, imagination, money, energy, and other resources to a growth strategy, either accept the reality that your results won’t change or start putting resources to innovation.

Managers and Technicians have their place, but to innovate and grow you need to put the Entrepreneur in charge.

“The Entrepreneur is our creative personality–always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony.” -Michael Gerber

Buckle your Manager in the backseat. Put your Entrepreneur at the wheel. Slam on the gas pedal of innovation.

It’s going to be a wild ride.

MSNBC reports:

“Some surveys have found that 87 percent of Americans don’t like their jobs.”

This is unfathomable to me.

But it gets even worse when you realize the lie that supports the statistic.

Jane Boucher, author of How to Love the Job You Hate: Job Satisfaction for the 21st Century, says,

“Most of us can’t just quit our jobs.”

This is language of slaves.

We can’t quit our jobs or else what?

We lose income and benefits? And there’s absolutely NO other way to make a living than at our current jobs?

We can’t quit our jobs because that’s all we know? And we’re utterly incapable of assimilating new knowledge and learning new skills?

We can’t quit because we’re helpless children waiting for our masters to give us something to do?

We’re really this trapped in the freest, strongest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world?

Is this really the America for which patriots have fought, bled, sacrificed, and died?

Free men and women choose.

If they don’t like something, they change it. If they see something that needs improving, they innovate.

If they want a better life, they fight for it. If they want more money, they produce and earn more.

They realize that “job security” is a myth, and that the only true security in life is one’s ability to choose and respond to circumstances.

Political and economic freedom are worthless if you don’t exercise them.

There’s a tendency to see successful business owners and think, “He’s smarter/more talented than me. She had more connections than me. He got lucky.”

That may be true for a tiny percentage of businesses.

But what gets hidden by the flashing light of success is the long, dark hours of failure. Of back-breaking labor in lonely trenches. Of fear-ridden, sleepless lights agonizing over crucial decisions.

“Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.” ~Eric Hoffer

Succeeding in business is more a product of perseverance than intelligence. Those who stick it out until the end learn the most, so they appear smarter.

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” ~Confucius

Consider the case of Marie Curie. Her and her husband, French physicist Pierre, worked

“…in an old abandoned leaky shed without funds and without outside encouragement or help, trying to isolate radium from a low-grade uranium ore called pitchblende.

And after their 487th experiment had failed, Pierre threw up his hands in despair and said, ‘It will never be done. Maybe in a hundred years, but never in my day.’

Marie confronted him with a resolute face and said, ‘If it takes a hundred years, it will be a pity, but I will not cease to work for it as long as I live.’”

She was, of course, eventually successful and countless cancer patients have benefited greatly from her perseverance.

• Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
• Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15th out of 22 students in chemistry.
• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded.
• R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York City caught on.
• F. W. Woolworth was not allowed to wait on customers when he worked in a dry goods store because, his boss said, “he didn’t have enough sense.”
• When Bell telephone was struggling to get started, its owners offered all their rights to Western Union for $100,000. The offer was disdainfully rejected with the pronouncement, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy.”
• Michael Jordan and Bob Cousy were each cut from their high school basketball teams. Jordan once observed, “I’ve failed over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.”
• Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college. He was described as both “unable and unwilling to learn.” No doubt a slow developer.
• 27 publishers rejected Dr. Seuss’s first book, To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
• Jack London received six hundred rejection slips before he sold his first story.

“Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.” ~Washington Irving

I put my money on guts over smarts.

Intelligence can be gained through perseverance, but it can’t compensate for the lack of mental and emotional toughness.

Thanks to Linda Hatcher, I was featured in this month’s edition of “Leadership Guide Magazine” as a “Leader in Action” interview.

Linda asked me for my definition of leadership. I responded:

“I actually have an aversion to most leadership genre material.

“One reason is because it often describes a type of person who is born, not made. It ignores the difference between principles and gifts.

“Some people were born with a charismatic, persuasive personality. They can stand on a stage and, quite naturally and effortlessly, deliver a compelling message that moves people to action.

“Others were born with other gifts that are not quite as easily demonstrated, but that when utilized are very much leadership.

“I also shy away from material that provides silly tips as gospel truth that do not have anything to do with legitimate leadership.

“For example, I once heard a man at a conference spend 30 minutes on the supposed ‘principle’ that ‘leaders walk fast,’ as if a purposeful walk were a major determining factor of leadership. If that were that case, my slow, ponderous demeanor would preclude me from leadership.

“I define leadership as 1) knowing exactly who you are and what your calling is, 2) doing the right things to pursue your unique calling, and 3) serving others using all the talents and resources with which you have been blessed.

“By that definition, great mothers are quintessential leaders, and most leadership definitions do not take those types of essential roles into consideration.

“Calling, mission, Providence, Soul Purpose — whatever you want to call it — is so vital. Too many people think that leadership means front-stage fame and glory—the executive seat where you make all the decisions.

“But ‘backstage’ leadership is every bit as important, although rarely recognized.

“For example, I was born to be a writer. I serve the world best through writing. I will never be a public speaker, and I want nothing to do with that world.

“My gifts mean I can influence society much better by staying at home in my office cranking out words than I can being on stages, running for political office, appearing on TV.

“Who was more important: George Washington, or his mother? Thomas Jefferson, or his obscure and largely-forgotten mentor George Wythe?”

Check out the full interview here.

Linda also published a review of Killing Sacred Cows by Garrett Gunderson and I.

Enjoy!

“Our policies make Houdini look like an amateur.”

I love this video of Congressman Mike Kelly (R, Pennsylvania) talking common sense about the budget, regulation, and taxation.

America was built on the backs of small business owners, and small business owners hold the keys of an American rebirth.

Watch for his particularly piercing insight on the difference between capitalism and free enterprise beginning at 4:07.

*If you’re reading this in an email or RSS reader, you may need to watch the video on my blog.

America faces serious economic challenges. We all know that socialism means to take from the rich to give to the poor.

But our nation is faced with a more complex problem than this customary type of wealth redistribution. Our problem is what I refer to as reverse socialism. If we wish our nation to be free for future generations then We the People must fix this problem.

Free enterprise is, among other things, a legal structure that treats all individuals and business entities equally before the law. The proper role of a free enterprise-promoting government is to simply protect unalienable rights — not to favor one man over another through benefits and entitlements.

Our national political debate has become convoluted between two sides with equally flawed premises and goals.

The liberals want social programs to benefit the poor, while most mainstream conservatives want the government to serve and protect “big” business, even if it means to favor a large corporation over a small start-up.

What neither side seems to recognize is that both are equally as dangerous and detrimental to freedom and prosperity. They both lead to the exact same result, and that is the concentration of too much power in the hands of too few.

Favoring the “Haves”

Most people who believe that wealth redistribution programs are wrong see only the government taking from the “haves” to give to the “have-nots.”

But what has been lost in the shuffle of “progressive” social policy is the fact that our legal structure has also has evolved into favoring those with capital over those with little or none.

Those who recognize the problem of taxing the wealthy to give to the poor seem to be virtually unaware of the dangers of favoring large corporations over small businesses.

Here are two examples of this reverse socialism:

1) In Cedar City, Utah, when Wal-Mart decided that they wanted to open a store here, the city council waived most of the fees and gave them about 5 acres of land. But the individual citizen who wishes to open a small retail store is subject to all of the mandated regulation and fees, and a land grant to them wouldn’t even be considered.

2) A friend of mine is an owner/operator of his own tractor-trailer. He told me that the biggest trucking companies in the country pay almost half as much for fuel as do the small companies or individual truckers because the government gives discounts to the large companies.

Whether you take from the rich to give to the poor, or if you favor the rich over the poor, the effect is the same. In both scenarios you wind up with an unnatural and inequitable economic system with the majority of the wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people.

Here are some statistics to illustrate the state of the American economic system:

1. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2001 the bottom quarter of families in the United States had zero net worth.
2. The bottom 90% of families had less than 20% of the net wealth, and the top 10% owned 80.7% of all the net wealth.
3. Federal Reserve research in 1995 found that the wealth of the top one percent of Americans was greater than that of the bottom 95% and that the net worth of the top one percent was 2.4 times the combined wealth of the poorest 80%.

It hasn’t always been this way. In 1800, census information showed that over 90% of our population were owners of the means of production — mostly small business owners and farmers. In 1900 that statistic was the same — over 90% of us were owners. In 2000, those numbers were exactly reversed — less than 10% of our population are now owners.

Economic power in many cases equates political power. So what we have arrived at is precisely the same thing that has caused all nations throughout history to fall, and that is too much power in the hands of too few.

Aristotle wrote that, “The only stable state is the one in which all men are treated equally before the law.” Our nation is unstable because our forms of law have been corrupted.

The Solutions

The first step to solve the problem of these large discrepancies in wealth distribution is to identify the cause of the inequity. The cause is two-fold, but both aspects of the cause spring from the same root.

One reason is that the majority of our citizens have bought into the dependence model of employeeship and government entitlements.

The other cause is that we have changed the forms of our Constitution to allow for illegitimate wealth redistribution. This redistribution is allowed by our legal structure in two ways: Taxing the rich to give to the poor, and also by favoring those with capital over those with little or none.

Both of these causes spring from the same root, and that is that we as individual citizens have failed to take personal responsibility both in our individual financial lives and in our public duty to maintain a strong and free Democratic Republic.

Identifying the cause of the problem now leads us to the solution. First of all, we as individuals must take the responsibility to start being a “have,” as opposed to a “have-not.”

Taking from the rich and distributing down will simply mean that we all lose, because no wealth is being created; it simply leads to an impoverished mediocrity.

But if the 80% of us that were mentioned in those Census Bureau statistics would simply create wealth from the bottom up, then everyone rises together.

Those of us who have little capital must employ our mental resources to create wealth. The problem of economic inequity can only be solved from the bottom up — not the top down.

There is one other thing that must be fixed in our political structure if we wish America to remain free. We must renovate our Constitutional forms so that our legal structure will again — as it was created by the Founders in the original Constitution — treat all individuals and entities equally before the law.

It is an improper and dangerous use of government to take from one person to give to another, or to favor one business over another.

The proper role of government is to treat everyone equally in the defense of their unalienable rights. When the government steps out of that realm it concentrates too much power in the hands of too few.

Conclusion

We are at a critical point in our nation’s history. History has shown repeatedly that the 200-year mark is where nations must either reinvent and reform themselves, or fall because of their inability to check and balance power.

Our chance for an American renaissance is now or never, and We the People have the inescapable responsibility for that rebirth.

We must all, individually, create our own financial freedom and become owners of the means of production. And we must educate ourselves to gain the power to fix our bent governmental forms.

Our government must treat all individuals and businesses equally before the law and stop all forms of unnatural, forced redistribution.