"The Free Market isn't Greed, Its Service."

 

I saw this when I went into East Germany, the state economy couldn't provide for its citizens and they stood in line for everything, unless you were associated with the party, then you shopped in the special stores where you had access to everything.  It was the same in every communist country.  The elites had plenty, the proles had the leftovers....Funny that, there is a quote" Socialism/Communism is for the people, not the socialist/communist.  Basically the rules are for you not them, you will ride the bus...if it run...you will pick through the store looking for something to feed your family, not them...you will wear nondescript clothing...not them because you are the unnamed masses....not the communist/socialist who pushed the system on you.  They will live well, on your labor...not you.   But hey ain't socialism/communism grand?   It steals your soul, it steals your hope until you became the walking automaton hoping for death to take you, hoping for something better on the other side because you are living in misery here, but hey ain't the party slogans great! "The great Utopia will soon be here, keep working comrades"...but the slogans don't change over generations but the people do...and hope fades away as the older generation sees the slavery that they live under and that their kids are born under and that there is no hope for them.   Until the wall suddenly falls away.......in 1989 when the people finally had enough and the government was powerless to stop the rage and the people realized that the government was toothless even when the apparatus of security, the Army supported the citizens....not the government.   And November 1989 became a reality.

  I blogged a lot about "Berlin" and "East Germany", I was stationed in West Germany from 1986 to 1991, I was there when President Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987 telling Mr Gorbechov" To tear down This Wall".  I was there in 1989 when the wall came down and the "Trabbi's" crossed over.   It was kinda surreal, I almost expected Ron Sterling to appear.

    I clipped this from "The Templar Mind"

        

The Free Market Isn't Greed. It's Service.

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Capitalism is built on greed. Socialism is built on need.

You've heard this. You've probably repeated it. It sounds right.

It isn't though. It's actually the opposite.

Walk into any small town in America. Count the businesses on Main Street. The diner. The hardware store. The mechanic. The dentist. Every one of them exists because somebody bet their livelihood on solving your problem.

The owner of the diner doesn't cook for himself. He cooks for you. The mechanic doesn't fix his own truck all day. He fixes yours. If they serve you well, they prosper. If they don't, the place closes and something better takes its spot.

That's the free market. Not greed. Service.

Nobody starts a business for themselves. They start a business for you.

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St. John Chrysostom understood this fifteen centuries before Adam Smith.

In his homilies on 1 Corinthians and Ephesians, he taught that the skill of the craftsman is given not for himself alone but for the sake of others.

God distributes gifts unevenly so that we depend on one another. The cobbler needs the farmer. The farmer needs the blacksmith.

Each serves the other.

Each receives in return.

---

This isn't a theory. I've watched it happen in real time. I spent a decade running a residential construction company in Colorado and Texas. When a contractor in Dallas bids on a kitchen remodel and quotes it too high or cuts corners, the homeowner leaves a one-star review and his phone stops ringing.

Meanwhile, the contractor across town who shows up on time, stays on budget, and does clean work? That guy gets referral after referral.

Nobody forces this outcome. No agency intervenes. The market punishes laziness and rewards excellence all on its own.

Every small business owner in America lives under this discipline. Serve the customer or lose the customer. Adapt or die. The consumer doesn't have to ask for permission. He just goes somewhere else.

The consumer holds all the power. You vote with every dollar. Every transaction is a verdict.

---

In a socialist economy, the government holds the power. A handful of planners decide what you need, how much of it should exist, and what you'll pay. Millions of individual decisions get replaced by a committee. And committees always get it wrong.

No central planner possesses the knowledge that millions of free actors generate through daily exchange. Hayek called it the knowledge problem. The Fathers called it something older.

Pride.

The belief that a few minds can substitute for the wisdom distributed across an entire people.

Have you noticed that late-stage socialist states always run out of the basics? The shelves go empty. They always do.

Not because of sanctions or bad luck. Because the system is structurally incapable of responding to human need. It can only respond to power. And power concentrates.

Those with connections get what they want.

Everyone else gets a line to stand in.

Venezuela is the most recent example of this. Once among the wealthiest countries in South America. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, oil revenue made it the continent's economic powerhouse.

But the prosperity was already eroding before Chávez. By 1998, per capita GDP had fallen to its 1963 level, down a third from its 1978 peak.

Half the country lived in poverty. The foundation was cracking before the socialists ever took the stage.

Then they finished the job.

Hugo Chávez nationalized industries, imposed price controls, and gutted the institutions that kept the economy running. His successor Maduro accelerated the collapse. Leftist activists in the West celebrated Venezuela as the new model of modern socialism.

Right up until people started eating zoo animals.

---

But what about Western Europe? Aren't those socialist countries? Free healthcare. Free college. Strong unions.

No. There are no socialist countries in Western Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Norway. They're capitalist economies with large welfare states. There's a difference. A big one.

In 2015, Denmark's prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen corrected this directly at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy, he said. Denmark is a market economy.

Not a planned socialist economy.

When you point to Scandinavia as proof that socialism works, you're actually proving that capitalism works. Because only a free market generates the wealth necessary to fund the programs those countries offer.

Without the engine of free enterprise, there's nothing to redistribute. Without capitalism, you don't get Scandinavia. You get Caracas.

St. Basil the Great taught that wealth itself is not the evil. The evil is hoarding it. "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry," he preached. But notice the order. First you bake the bread. Then you share it. Socialism skips the first step and wonders why the cupboard is bare.

More capitalism means less dependency. Look at the American economy from 2010 to 2019. Over nearly a decade of sustained job growth, unemployment fell steadily across every demographic. By 2019, unemployment had reached historic lows.

Lower taxes and reduced regulation after 2017 contributed significantly, but the broader trajectory was driven by a labor market that kept expanding because the underlying engine was free enterprise.

People moved off welfare and into work. Not because one president or another planned it.

Because the market rewarded it.

---

I grew up in the '90s, and back then this didn't require an economics degree to understand. It was just common sense. Yet today, young people praise socialism and condemn the system that creates their jobs, their wages, and their freedom.

They're working against their own interests. Worse, they're working against the interests of the poor they claim to champion.

Capitalism isn't perfect. No human system is. But it aligns self-interest with service. It channels the craftsman's skill toward the neighbor's need. It does what Chrysostom described. It makes human interdependence productive rather than coercive.

Every Marxist-Leninist state that has attempted a command economy has delivered tyranny. The Soviet Union. Maoist China. Cambodia. Cuba. Venezuela.

The pattern holds without exception.

The further a state drifts from free exchange and toward centralized control, the closer it moves toward coercion. The free market isn't just an economic system. It's a moral guardrail. Remove it, and power has no check but itself.

- Marcus Sterling

"The Right To Be Left Alone"

 I got this post from a guy named Shane Vaughn on farcebook, I went ahead and read the caselaw mentioned in his story.  what it involved was the anti-abortion people being overzealous.  But now you have all these far left groups pushing their pet causes, BLM or no ICE, or what have you and they are doing the same thing.  This is something for us to remember if we get pushed into that situation, our first instinct is to..

   But the police and the courts might get pissy, so you use the courts to sue the crap out of the protestors, sure the lice ridden vermin don't have any money, but the NGO that sponsored the protest that disturbed you is flush with Soros or USAID cash...so you sic a shark of a lawyer on them with a contingency clause.    They like lawfare, use their playbook against them, they are the ones that started the dance, they are the ones that disturbed you with their bullhorns, whistles, signs and any property damage they caused.....just a thought.

Folks, let me teach you something today that your civics teacher never told you — and the courts hope you never find out or else their dockets will fill up with lawsuits.....

You have TWO rights that live in direct tension with each other. Both are real. Both are protected. And most Americans only know about one of them.

The first one everybody knows: the right to speak. The First Amendment. Say what you want. Protest. Preach. Picket. Knock on doors. Shout from the rooftops. America was built on it.

But here's the one nobody talks about.

The Supreme Court — in a case called Rowan v. Post Office back in 1970 — said this, and I want you to read it slowly:

"The right to be left alone is one of the most cherished rights known to man."

One of the most cherished rights known to man.

The Court didn't stop there. They said — and this is the part that should shake you — no one has the right to press even a good idea on an unwilling recipient.

Not a bad idea. Not a dangerous idea. A GOOD idea. If you don't want to hear it, you have the right not to be forced to.

Then came Frisby v. Schultz in 1988. The Court said targeted picketing — showing up at someone's home, their unavoidable space — can be restricted. Why? Because a captive audience has rights too. The Court called it the captive audience doctrine. If you cannot leave, you cannot be forced to receive.

And in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, the Court upheld buffer zones — spaces where people trying to enter a location cannot be cornered into confrontation. The reasoning? You should not have to abandon your right to be somewhere just to escape someone else's speech.

Now here is where Professor Toto connects the dots for you.

We live in an age where everybody thinks their right to speak trumps your right to be left alone. Social media mobs. Protesters at private homes. Activists who will follow you to your car. Ideologues who show up where they know you cannot leave.

They'll scream "First Amendment!" at you while violating your most cherished right — the right to simply be left alone.

The First Amendment protects your right to speak.

It does NOT give you the right to force your speech on someone who cannot escape it.

Most Americans do not know the difference.

Now you do.

And Now You Know... THE BEST of the Story.

"Cleaning Up The Parking Lot"

 

This is a good analogy, and yes I shamelessly cribbed it off farcebook.  Yes I do fall into the first group, I will return the shopping cart plus any other on the way to the shopping cart corral.  The shopping cart corralling is a good analogy for the decay of society, way back in the day, people took civic pride in doing the little things that made the greater society function.  Now it is all about "me-me-me".  Iran is a symptom, nobody wanted to deal with the messy situation, and kept pushing it down the road, and hoped the problem would go away, well President Trump doesn't care, he knows this is his second term, and besides he is a fixer, not a kick the can down the road person, so the can is getting handled.

  Samelessly clipped from Michael Smith.

I’ve posted before about the “shopping cart test.” You know the one. It asks whether we are the kind of people who return the cart to the cart corral in the parking lot, or whether we simply set it free to roam the vast asphalt plains as nature intended.

We have one of those Walmart Express stores about three miles from our house. I had to run down there yesterday and either the cart wranglers had just donned their silver spurs, mounted their electric steeds, and rounded up the herd for delivery to the railhead in Abilene, or the shoppers were all passing the test, because there were no carts milling about unsupervised anywhere.

I also post a lot about history—not because I claim to know everything about it, but because historical patterns reveal something important about human behavior. Humans tend to believe their age is unique, that the problems of their time are unprecedented, and that human nature itself has evolved—but it really hasn’t. The basic impulses that drive human conduct—ambition, fear, pride, self-interest, responsibility—are remarkably constant across centuries. What changes are the tools. Each generation simply invents new and more dangerous toys while repeating the same old mistakes. I just posted about the connection between Botticelli’s final painting, completed more than five hundred years ago, and the strange moment we are living through in America today.

As I was driving home from what we call “Baby Walmart,” I was catching up on some podcasts and thinking about President Trump’s posture toward Iran. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the shopping cart test provides a useful analog for how nations approach persistent global problems. For those in Rio Linda, that means I’m about to use examples to explain a larger point—that’s what an analogy is.

Imagine the world as a parking lot. In that global parking lot there appear to be four general schools of thought when it comes to the carts.

The first group believes the carts should be returned to the cart corrals by the people who used them. It is the simplest model of responsibility: if you took it out, you put it back. Order exists because individuals accept small obligations that keep the broader system functioning.

The second group believes the carts are entirely the responsibility of the store employees. After all, someone is paid to deal with it, so why bother? Just unload the groceries, leave the cart wherever it stops rolling, and drive away. From this perspective, maintaining order is always someone else’s job.

The third group sits somewhere between the first two. They intellectually agree that the carts should be organized and returned, but they quietly assume someone else will probably handle it. They support the idea of responsibility in the abstract, just not necessarily the practice of it.

Then there is the fourth group. These are the people who don’t really think about the carts at all. They leave the trolley wherever it happens to land—sometimes squarely in the middle of a parking space—and go on about their day without giving the matter another thought.

When it comes to Iran, much of the world seems to fall into the latter three groups.

Many believe the United Nations should be dealing with the issue, because international institutions were supposedly created to manage such problems. Others assume it is not really their concern as long as they keep enough distance from the situation. And still others simply avoid thinking about it altogether.

In truth, nearly every American president since Jimmy Carter has treated Iran like the far corner of the parking lot where abandoned carts accumulate. Since 1979, leaders of both parties have tried variations of the same approaches. Some argued it was not truly America’s problem. Some handed off the issue to international bodies in the hope that diplomacy would gradually bring the carts back into order. Others simply tried to stay far enough away that the mess would not affect them directly. None of those approaches solved the problem, at best they managed it temporarily. They nudged a few carts out of the way and bought some time. Yet the underlying disorder remained, and over time the number of loose carts in that corner of the lot simply continued to grow.

Eventually a parking lot full of stray carts produces predictable consequences. Cars get dented by runaway trolleys. Parking spaces disappear beneath clusters of metal. Customers start walking halfway across the lot just to find a cart to use. Even if you personally return your cart every time, if enough people do not, the disorder eventually affects everyone. The probability that your brand-new 2026 GMC Sierra 1500 AT4X gets a nice little ding on the door steadily increases. That is how neglected problems work. They rarely stay politely confined to the corner where we left them.

At some point only one thing restores order: someone deciding the problem has gone on long enough. Someone walks out into the lot, looks around at the mess, gathers a team, and begins pushing carts. The broken ones go to the scrap pile. The usable ones go back to the store. Order is restored not through discussion alone, but through the decision to act.

That, for better or worse, is the role Trump appears to be assuming. After more than four decades of presidents from both parties leaving the carts scattered across the Iran section of the parking lot, he has essentially looked at the situation and said the mess is no longer sustainable.

He has told Pete Hegseth to get a crew together and start cleaning up the lot. The rusty fifty-year-old carts that cannot be fixed go into the scrap bin. The serviceable carts get pushed back where they belong.

Reasonable people can debate whether that approach will succeed. Foreign policy is rarely simple, and history has a habit of surprising those who think they have solved it.

One thing is clear: leaving the carts scattered across the parking lot forever was never a solution. Eventually a functioning system requires someone willing to walk into the mess, grab the handle, and start pushing things back into order—because if nobody does, the parking lot eventually belongs to chaos.

Monday Music "Cats in the Cradle" by Harry Chafin

 

This song I heard back in the 70's and it was on one of my "Ronco Records" (I still have it)I had in the late 70's and I remembered it because of the story it told of a father that was always "too busy".  I saw similarities between this and the relationship between me and my Dad.  I know it was a different time and my dad had to work.  he was a CID agent with the U.S Army and his job kept him hopping so he wasn't around much.  My dad did try to play catch with me and my brother a few times and do other things like go fishing as "the guys" but he wasn't around much as I would have hoped.  We took a back burner to his career and I don't hate him for it,  It was the way it was.  His devotion to duty is where I got mine and my brother got his so we did learn a lot from our Dad, and even though he reported to Fiddlers Green, I still miss him  But also because this song I make sure that I am available for my son and his activities and I spend a lot of time with my son because he is my son and he is a good kid and he turned into a good man.  I take pride in that, funny that people say that certain songs make a real impression on them and it follows them through their life.  This song reminded me of that time can move quickly and before you know it, you will be attending graduation and wondering "what the hell happened".  I try to balance my work and home life as the best I can.  My son is my legacy and I tried to "do right" by him.       I will play another "Cats" song for next week...y'all can guess on it, LOL


"Cat's in the Cradle" is a 1974 folk rock song by Harry Chapin from the album Verities & Balderdash. The single topped the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1974. As Chapin's only No. 1 hit song, it became the best known of his work and a staple for folk rock music. Chapin's recording of the song was nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.

The song's lyrics began as a poem written by Harry's wife, Sandra "Sandy" Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as Brooklyn Borough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio.  Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, "Frankly, this song scares me to death."

The song is told in the first-person by a father who is too busy with work to spend time with his son. Each time the son asks him to join in childhood activities, the father issues vague promises of spending time together in the future. While disappointed, the son accepts his excuses and yearns to "be like you, Dad." The first verse tells of his absence at his son's birth and walking, as "there were planes to catch and bills to pay"; the second verse relates the father buying the son a baseball as a birthday present but likewise declining to play catch.
The final two verses reverse the roles. In the third verse, the son returns home from college and his father finally has some time to spend with him. Instead, the son just wants to go out and asks the father for the car keys. The fourth verse advances the story quite some time, when the father is long retired and his son has started his own family some distance away. The father makes a phone call to his son and invites him for a visit, but the son has his own issues with his job and his children are sick with the flu. He tells his father he will visit him if he "can find the time" and says "it's been sure nice talking to you" before he says goodbye. The final two lines of the song reflect the father's observation of what has happened:

“

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.

”

The song's chorus references several childhood things: The Cat's in the Cradle string game, silver spoons that are given to babies as christening gifts, and the nursery rhymes Little Boy Blue and Man in the Moon.

Really quick rant

 I had posted this on a couple of farcebook post, the drama about the surf and turf from people that never deployed really irritated me, and they are also screeching that "you MAGAts need to enlist to fight in tRumps war with Iran" my response was " you retards screamed har, har, Ukraine for 4 years, and none of yall beta, cuck males signed up for the Ukrainian Foreign legion, so shut your pie holes while the adults are talking".  Needless to say, yall can see that I'm slightly irritated. 

Funny that, the same people screeching about weekly surf and turf that has been going on for years just because they don't like the administration are perfectly fine seeing the same being purchased by a sponge with an EBT card. And before anyone tries to gaslight me, Yes I deployed to the middle east,  but I was Army, we didn't get the good stuff. The navy traditionally had better food, with the exception of the air force.

   Posted off my kinda smart phone