Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  This suspicion should be nourished, and used to challenge the ideas which you were taught in formal school, which was free from the restrictions of dissent. The web is a remarkably democratizing influence on ideas. This resource is so empowering for the individual against despots of any stripe that I am surprised it hasn't yet been legislated out of existence. Give them time, but in the meantime take advantage of this powerful resource.

  As the book proceeds, I will assign other topics of study for the technologically challenged. Some of these involve working through tutorials for doing things like writing web pages. If you have never touched a computer in your life, don't fear, it is much easier than you think once you do it a while. For the oppressed among you, developing these skills will make your enemies tremble.

  You are suspended within a web of lies. Each day you are bombarded with information, much of it flawed. Yet, if you weren't handicapped by a public education or having been ejected from same, you would be better prepared to detect and deflect bad information before it causes you harm. Instead, the spiders which inhabit this web crawl up to you and suck out an imperceptible amount of your life's work and energy on a daily basis.

  The best way to protect yourself from these lies and their ill effects is to educate yourself. In particular, educate yourself with information which may not seem at first to be particularly applicable to your current situation. This is fine, as I intend to dramatically change your current situation for the better. Humor me.

  Your first video assignment may seem a little hokey. Rent and watch:

  Video Assignment

  The Matrix This film is often seen as an anthem for conspiracy theorists. As you will learn later in the book, I am not a big believer in conspiracies. That doesn't mean that you aren't suspended in a web of misinformation, though. The allegory of a human battery is pretty apt, as you will see in the remainder of this book.

  We will see how the theme of this movie applies to the web of lies within which we are all entangled. You will also see how, in a figurative sense, all of us are batteries in a system which is beginning to rattle apart. We will also see exactly why this is the case, and the inevitable result of the path which we are on. As it turns out, our modern situation was equally inevitable, and should not be the subject of anger, just awareness.

  Some of these lies around us are so intricately crafted that they are impossible to unravel without explaining an equally intricate web of truth. This situation, which protects the web of lies like a mother hen, would not be possible without first crippling the intellectual powers of a vast section of our populace. A hundred and fifty years ago decision-makers, meaning people like you and I, were relatively better educated. Back then, political or business arguments which today pass by without question would have never seen the light of day.

  Decision-makers of modern times have more raw information at their disposal, but understand the physical and ethical world far less than their analogues in the 1800s. You and I also have to deal with a set of arbitrary constraints which has almost become overwhelming.

  Take for example a modern farmer, who operates perhaps one of the most complex industrial systems, on a per-capita basis, of our modern world. And yet, should his combine break, he must typically rely on a mechanic to fix it. If the computer on his combine breaks, he has no choice but to at least go buy another computer for it. If that computer is out of production, he probably has a pile of junk on his hands now.

  But he doesn't just have his equipment to worry about. Should farm workers decide to unionize and strike, there is little he can do about that. He can't negotiate a maze of tax laws without hiring an accountant. He must cope with a nest of environmental regulations and workplace safety regulations. These insane regulations were written and enforced by people far-off who seem to forget that they themselves need to eat.

  Let a fuel shortage hit during a critical planting, crop maintenance or harvesting window and the entire year is shot. Find an endangered worm on his property and the entire works is in jeopardy. A worker stumbles and gets a boo boo? I don't even want to think about that one. By comparison, a drought or an insect infestation is far less disruptive than any number of self-imposed disasters which might befall him.

  What if one day the modern farmer were to decide that his personal quality of life would be dramatically improved if he just grew his own food and sold enough of it to pay for property taxes? Or clothing or a nice meal out from time to time? He would then bypass the entire swath of regulatory burden which weighs him down. And in the process starve thousands. By the way, each of us, in some way or another, is that farmer. We just operate different equipment.

  Now contrast our modern farmer to a farmer in the mid 1800s. He was far more of a master of his universe than we give credit. Droughts were mitigated by irrigation ponds, which now require environmental permits to build in some jurisdictions. Insect infestations were fought with biological weapons, such as crows or chickens. These biological weapons also provided meat and eggs for the table. Rabbits gnawing the bark of your young fruit trees? Paint them with blood and offal and problem solved. Energy was provided by mules, horses and oxen, which required removing some productive land to grow their fuel. But even that allocation of fuel was under the control of the farmer, not the EPA or a far-off hurricane.

  It was a hard life, no doubt, and burned a man and his wife into old age by their 40s. Had it not been so painfully hard, we would not have seen the urbanization of the late 1800s. The advent of steam automation in the mid-1800s only eased the pain somewhat, but even then the fuel depot was only as far as the wood-lot across the pasture. On the other hand, he was not yet subjected to the soul tearing weight of crushing debt. Debt which was required to pay for the contrivances which would become a necessity for maintaining profitability in the face of ever-increasing productivity. It was that same productivity which also drove urbanization, allowing fewer people to feed more.

  But the farmer of that day was also a rock unto himself. Walk up his drive and tell him that he can't use a certain fertilizer, and his response would probably be to answer with a load of buckshot. Shot from a gun he was still allowed to own, of course, because he wasn't yet perceived as an enemy of the state. Or of the collective. You might get a similar response if you told him he must not drain that swamp or plow that hillside.

  When he changed his techniques or materials, it was because the change was beneficial to him, not because failure to change would criminalize him. He knew his world in detail, and was immune to lies about his world. The brightest of them absorbed all the information they could find about the best techniques which could improve his life. Some refused to learn, and so when farms began to fail, but not all of them, we heard tales of how tough farm life could be. And yet, others thrived. How could this be? The answer is simple, but hidden from your modern view.

  That long-ago farmer was also a master of many subjects, including mathematics, physics, geometry, genetics, and meteorology. Don't believe me? Ask any school child today how many pecks are in bushel, or what a furlong is, and you'll see what I mean. Or what varieties of wild flowers are helpful to ward off various pests, or how many posts and how much wire is needed to enclose a pasture. Read letters from the Civil War era from the common soldier, particularly the Southern soldier, and you will be amazed at how articulate these supposedly primitive people were. Children today, even those of Northern elites, can hardly compose a written sentence.

  His understanding of advanced subjects, such as physics, may have been limited by the state of the art of the day. Even so, all then-existing knowledge of subjects such as physics was available to the common man on a more or less global basis.

  As proof, consider how Ernest Rutherford started his scientific career on his father's farm in New Zealand. There, he conducted his first experiments regarding turbulence in water as a boy. This farm boy grew into the father of nuclear physics.

  Internet Research

  Ernest Rutherford biograp
hy. Wikipedia has a good starting point from which to branch to other sources. Today in this country any farm child can enter the educational system and land anywhere. But, it is highly unlikely that he performs his seminal work among the cattle, or even if he does, to receive anything but disdain for that effort.

  The same progression we see with the small farmer is true for the industrialist. In the mid-1800s, cottage industries supplied goods and services for their communities surrounded by friends and family. Competitive forces drove the establishment of factories on a grand scale, and these necessarily led to dehumanizing conditions which begat government regulations to deal with the excesses.

  These same regulations, in turn, only ensured that the cottage industry could never return. These were replaced forever with unionized shops which can barely feed themselves while pitting capital against labor in a downward spiral to destruction. Had those regulations not rendered the cottage industry obsolete, this situation could have been reversed through market forces alone. Modern regulations require the modern farmer to be an environmental paralegal, which produces not one more kernel of corn. Similarly, the small shop and the small farm, armed with modern technology, would have eventually overtaken the factory or the agriglot in the long haul of time.

  The regulations themselves kept the small innovator and hard worker off of the playing field forever. Much of this book deals with that topic, and the cures to those external forces you can apply to your life today. But, these discussions require that you prepare your intellectual soil with background information to help you understand my perspective.

  Then, did you read an Ernest Rutherford biography as I asked? If not, go find one now and read it. Then read between the lines of his early life and imagine yourself in his position and what you might have accomplished in that simple unregulated time. If you are currently trying to run your own business today, you will feel a longing for that regulatory simplicity. Just think of what you could achieve with your skills and ability.

  So it is my assertion that people of today, in general, are growing increasingly less educated and capable than those of only a few generations past. It is that trend which creates unlimited opportunities for those of us who are willing to learn and excel. But to do so, we have to recognize where we are and from whence we came.

  Our modern experience is a consequence of agricultural and industrial productivity of yesterday, not a cause of it. We get to live in nice homes in manicured suburbs because of the productivity of elsewhere and another time. But, this is an unstable situation which must eventually wobble and collapse, and in so doing witness the birth of better things to come. We are seeing these stirrings already in the world around us.

  Classical economists assert that market forces produce all value in the world. I agree with this assertion, but we have to recognize that we do not live in the world in which the classical economic models operate. I found this out by surprise after I read "The Wealth of Nations" and then began hiring employees. The market forces work, but now the economic environment has been skewed by regulations and what I call throughout this book the "forces of niceness". As a result, you have to adjust your decision-making somewhat to accommodate these realities.

  Consider an analogy. Imagine that you build houses for a living, and all of your plans and techniques assume that you will get lumber dimensioned in eight-foot lengths. Now assume that the regulatory environment changes. Perhaps because of some far-off legislation regarding some beetle somewhere, you can only get lumber in six-foot lengths. Can you still build houses? Of course you can. They will be more expensive, and require that you change your plans, but you can still build houses, odd as they may now appear. In our analogy, the techniques are the market forces, the lumber is the regulatory environment and labor pool upon which you can draw, while your plans are still your plans.

  To understand how our modern world perverts classical economics, you have to first understand classical economics itself. The seminal work in that field is a book written in the mid-1700s, entitled "The Wealth of Nations", written by Adam Smith.

  Reading Assignment

  The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith Sadly, that book has fallen by the wayside in modern education. In fact, if you ask a hundred graduates with a Master of Business Administration degree, woefully few will have ever read this book, if they even know what it is. And yet, it is chock full of goodness.

  Most references to that book in formal education are limited to attempts to discredit it. Most of the attempted discrediting references a socialist named John Maynard Keynes (pronounced "Canes") and his book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". Interesting, isn't it, that modern business and economics curricula teach the socialist discrediting of this book, but not the book itself? More on that later, but you should start feeling swirlings of that healthy suspicion of formal education I discussed earlier.

  "The Wealth of Nations" is a huge book, many hundreds of pages long. It is best read as a text instead of online since it is tough to read in a few sittings. Read the first third of it right now, and give yourself assignments to read thirty to forty pages a day until complete. As you read that book, imagine yourself a mid-1800s farmer or proprietor of a cottage industry. In his day, that book was already a hundred years old. But it was written from the perspective of someone who wasn't that far removed from his everyday experience.

  While reading it, you have to insulate yourself from the pre-conceived notions of slavery in that era. Assume that for all intents and purposes slavery doesn't even exist, because those thoughts have been used as a tool to cloud economic thought for a century and a half.

  When done with that book, you can reward yourself with the knowledge that in this one important respect you are far ahead of most MBAs you will ever meet. It is fun at parties to ask one if they've ever read this book. Do this a few times and you won't be troubled by having to attend very many parties where MBAs are in attendance.

  There is a reason that MBAs get uncomfortable when you discuss that book with them. And why so few of them were able to finish it, even if, with a probability approaching zero, it had been assigned during their studies. By the end of this book, you will understand why. And then smile at your own understanding of their discomfiture.

  Here are some important consequences of your reading of that book, and important topics you should glean from it. Page number references are of little help since different printings will give different page numbers. I'm also going to avoid giving you specific sections as references, as I want you to read the entire thing and not cheat by just reading the portions I reference. That book is, no kidding, the foundation for everything else I will say for the rest of this text, and must be read from cover to cover for fullest understanding.

  Imagine yourself a peasant in Smith's time, and free to work for whomever you choose. You want to scratch together a little extra coin, for purposes to be named later, and so you start working out a plan. There are many things you can do to raise extra money, such as ask your boss if you can work an extra hour or day. Or maybe find a broken fence and offer a farmer your services to fix it. Or, let a chicken run around out behind your shack and save money on eggs.

  Or you might ask the farmer if you can lease a corner of some scrub land to grow more chickens. To pay the rent you offer to keep his paths clear or deliver a cleaned chicken to his wife every Sunday, saving her the trouble. Regardless, you wind up with a source of meat under your control, saving you the cost. Maybe you'll even give another peasant a chicken in exchange for his helping you clear the farmer's paths. The list goes on but there is a common thread among them which we'll discuss in later chapters.

  Contrast this to your modern situation. You can ask your boss to work an extra hour or day, but he won't be willing to allow it, in most cases. Why? Not because he is mean, but because if he says yes, then, by law, he is required to pay you overtime rates for that work. Under those conditions, it is simply cheaper for him to hire someone else for tha
t task.

  This regulatory influence means that instead of working more at a job at which you are effective and capable, you have to take on a second job. For this second job you are probably doing something at which you are less capable. Thus, you are less valuable and earn less for your time. So much less that if your value to the second boss falls below the minimum wage, you don't get the job. Everyone loses, and the bottom line is that you don't own your hours. The state owns them, and you only get to sell them, and your boss only gets to buy them, in whatever quantity the state allows.

  Mend the broken fence? Forget it. The farmer can't afford to hire you. He is subject to the same wage regulations as your boss. In addition, for that job he would have to report you not only as a wage-earning employee, but also as a laborer qualifying for workmen's compensation. Worse, he can not distinguish you from a scam artist looking for a "slip and fall" lawsuit. Regardless, the sheer volume of paperwork for logging you as an employee and filling out the workmen's compensation insurance rolls makes that broken fence just wait a little longer. And the potential increase in value for everyone vanishes.

  Maybe you could help the farmer out by incorporating, and thus take upon yourself the responsibilities of handling taxes and workmen's compensation. Chances are, if you are destitute enough to need to take on that fence job to get that extra coin you aren't in any position to start wading through those waters. At least until you read this book.

  Chicken? Manicured subdivision? I think not. Or, in many jurisdictions health regulations prevent housing livestock within an area containing so many persons per acre, and so on. Better take that minimum wage coin to the grocer instead.