Adam Jones Journal

We live under a system that is not creating jobs - at least it's not creating good jobs for people living in the United States. The jobs that are being created are located in third world countries and fast-food restaraunts.

The effects of coming technology are poised to land on what is left of the economy like a plague of locusts.

Or, to mangle a different metaphor - we are standing on the beach looking at a wall of water that is twenty miles out. Those few who have actually noticed are wondering whether they should go and get their surfboards.

Believe it or not, it's not the job of free enterprise to give you a job. For a long time, it just worked out that way. Free enterprise would really prefer to use trained monkeys - if there were any way to get the job done with monkey-power.

Corporate America never liked paying a living wage, but the battles fought by
unions and politicians in the 1930s and 1940s resulted in an affluent middle class.

For years, we were able to work hard getting an education and wait for that job to materialize. Most of the time it worked out reasonably well. Go to school, follow the rules, obey the laws and everything will be fine.

It's not fine anymore because the "elite" have declared class warfare. The workers of the thirties and forties fought the good fight and built a middle class. The children of those workers had their union membership or their college educations and they took their position in society for granted.

The "elite" have long memories. They remember a time when they had it all. And they want those times to come back again - because they are entitled to it all.

There's an old quotation, ascribed to one of the "Big Four" who had built the western half of the transcontinental railroad.

"I just want what is mine. Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down."

Fortunately, all of the failed solutions have already been tried. Communism and socialism have been tried and found wanting.

The solution is free enterprise. Free enterprise is based on competition. The most staunch conservative can hardly disagree with that proposition. It's part of the gospel and it is written on stone tablets: 'Competition is Good'

So where do you start? You start by competing. You go where the money is. Fifty years ago, starting a new bank would have been a major undertaking. Just the cost of advertising and postage - and the time lag in communicating with a potential customer base - would have made the idea impossible.

Similarly, starting an insurance company or an HMO would have been a major problem, for the same reasons. It was too expensive to communicate. Interestingly enough, some of the most profitable areas of endeavor are part of the US financial industry.

And the people running these companies are experts - at selling themselves and their products. Their own compensation isn't based on real-world results, it's based on taking a percentage of every dollar that passes through their hands.

Getting your money into their hands is their business. Yes, analysis is done, conclusions are debated, plausible reasons are generated by the bucket-full. And an entire industry exists just to communicate with the average investor and to generate the excitement that motivates investment decisions. And, of course, it takes some expert acting to communicate financial news with a straight face.

Leaving out the sarcasm, there is some knowledge needed to run most financial institutions. But it takes a lot less knowledge than they would like you to believe.

And a large part of financial analysis and business planning consists of fitting business decisions into an arcane tax code. Making a dollar is relatively easy, compared to the problem of making a dollar and avoiding taxation.

These are the industries that shipped our jobs to Bangalore. Those jobs are not coming back, and maybe that's ok because they were crappy jobs anyway. They didn't really pay that well.

The decision to ship those jobs overseas was made by some guy who convinced himself that it was necessary to dump American workers because of the laws of "free enterprise".

I don't want the old jobs back -- I want his job. It pays a lot better and it has really good benefits. And if I can't personally have his job, I still want him out and someone in there who gives a damn about people.

Out of twenty or thirty million people who are currently out of work, there are a lot of people who know how to run a bank, an HMO, or a brokerage firm.

Creating new institutions is definitely possible. No, it's not too likely that you personally can go out and start a bank - or any other kind of major institution. But progressives managed to come up with 200 million dollars in contributions for a candidate whose major attraction was that he was not George W. Bush.

Capital is like any other commodity - it can be rented. If a few million people want an insurance company or a bank and are prepared to do business with that newly created entity, the deal is done. The rest is just bookkeeping and boilerplate.

When you have a client base that has signed on the dotted line, capital will follow. The real question is why would you want to bother?

The short answer is: To build a different kind of corporation - one whose customers are stockholders and one whose stockholders actually control what the corporation does - a corporation that operates under a different set of rules.

Our imaginary corporation does not have to take over the United States economy. A customer owned bank announces to the world that it's no longer necessary to deal with predatory lending institutions. It acts as a check on corporations that regard their customers as sheep to be shorn. They get away with it because every other bank plays by the same rules.

We need a better set of choices than which predator to do business with.

Corporate America is very flexible. If honesty and fair dealing become popular, Corporate America will pretend to be honest and fair. If faking it doesn't work, they will even try the real thing.

There was a time when the Quakers became very prosperous.

Because they were not members of the Church of England they were banned from education and the professions. They turned to trade. And they were very successful - largely because they could be trusted.

"Their produce was sound, their prices fair, their services honest, their word good and their agreements honorable" -- Wavin, James: The Quakers Money and Morals (1997)

Quakers were offering sick pay, subsidized housing and pensions long before anyone thought of providing these things through state intervention. They knew the kind of world they wanted to live in, and they worked to create that kind of world.