Saturday, September 18, 2010

Are we really a Center Right Nation? Why there really is no squishy middle

In post on Murkowski and the GOP, I explain why I believe the country is actually must further right than popular opinion asserts.

I use the example of Fox to show that there is a huge silent majority out there that has been ignored.

But there is much evidence to support the idea that free markets have been so misrepresented and maligned for decades, mentioned only in education as an example of what is wrong in society, that a more aware population would find the ideas of markets a very appealing philosophical coat to wear.


Anecdotal evidence abounds. 20+ years in business tells me most people, including upper management, do not understand how free markets work or how to profitably operate in them. They distrust them rather than revel in them. Distrust is first and foremost a consequence of unfamiliarity.

Further, competition as a construct is maligned. Competition is not inherently the cut throat, unhelpful, selfish, unethical exercise the Left and academia has painted. Any successful small business person can tell you that. One does not prevail by bullying, overselling and inveigling oneself into the market.

On the contrary, organizations succeed in free markets because they are innovative, trustworthy and offer honest, ethical service for their price. That is competition. That is first and foremost self-enlightened actualization, not selfish greed.

Most reasonable adults identify with these precepts. They have just been taught the opposite. It doesn't take very long for the light to come on if they are offered the real alternative.

That is why I believe a 24/7 free market TV cable channel would prosper. The perception would be that it was moving the country to the right. It would not be. It would merely uncover what many people suspect was true all along. They have just not heard it in their lifetimes.  Fox for example, misses the articulation of free market responses to the topics of the day virtually every time.  There is no one at the table in any segment on any program.  Not even Beck fully goes there.

Oprah got fabulously rich in part by pushing self-determinant pop psychology and a sense of self-worth to middle class house wives. Thousands of books have been published in the last few decades. Tony Robbins is another example.

Those concepts, albeit in much more detail, form the precepts of free markets. They are antithetical to socialist and progressive agendas. People like Oprah only arrive at Progressivism because they have never been shown what that psychology inevitably implies in economical systems. Marxism intentionally denies those precepts. It is a denigration of personal choice and heroics. It is a class action.

I have wondered for years why a talk show host has not started where Oprah did, and batted the ball right through the stadium once and for all. For viewers, it would be like entering a room, and finally turning on the rest of the lights, only to discover the room is much larger than they had previously imagined.

1 comment:

  1. Amen. I'm a few millions dollars short, or I'd start one up myself. :-)

    The closest we have is John Stossel.

    Could you imagine a classical liberal network?

    I'm thinking of writing a book where each chapter deals with a different spontaneous social order -- demonstrating piecemeal the classical liberal world view, and ending with bringing it all together. I discuss on my blog the fact that spontaneous orders have all the same attributes as beauty.

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