Writing a book is one of the hardest things you can do and if anyone tells you otherwise they've never done it. But it is most definitely worth the journey. Here is my labor of love.
https://t.co/weYT5fx16n
To the Americans:
I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.
And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:
You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.
This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.
Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.
This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.
But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.
This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.
And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:
Thank God for the United States.
Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.
Long may your admirable country dominate the world.
Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.
May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.
Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.
Thank God for the USA.
Happy 250th.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Ayn Rand's most important lesson: Production comes before distribution. You cannot divide a pie nobody baked.
Every politician inverts that order. They argue over who gets what slice, how to tax the baker, how to redistribute the flour, as if the loaf simply materialized like manna. Rand called this out for what it is. Wealth is created by specific people doing specific things: Hank Rearden smelting metal, John Galt building a motor. Take those people away and you're left with committees drafting memos about fairness while the lights go dark.
The entrepreneur is not a parasite skimming off labor. He directs scarce resources toward their most urgent uses, and he eats the loss when he guesses wrong. No bureaucrat carries that risk. This is what Ludwig von Mises spent his career proving in denser prose.
Rand's villains aren't cartoon capitalists. They're the moochers who demand the moral sanction of their victims: the industrialist who lobbies for a subsidy, the intellectual who calls envy "social justice." She hated the crony as much as the commissar.
@NYCMayor The only truth in your statement is that you increased taxes on the rich - which will come back to bite you when many of them leave NY reducing your tax base forcing you to tax those making far less money. Economics 101.
@adammocklerr I am 10000% convinced that our education system is failing our students based on your comments. Being naive is not a quality that gets you far in life.