Long story short: Paul Keigan started out as a Canadian immigrant 48 years ago, with $96 and the American dream. He got into sales at a car dealership, and immediately he started making friends and repeat customers. Then, 20 years ago, he bought a failing dealership in Franklin, which was to become Keigan Chevrolet.

This year, however, GM, in the midst of its own baptism of fire, has pulled the plug.

“Nobody wants to go out this way,” he explained. “And I’m just one of thousands going through it. Honestly, I’m not bitter for me; where else could a guy like me have gotten a shot like this? I’m bitter about the good people this is hurting, like the people on my staff who performed so well.

“They had nothing to do with GM’s bankruptcy, yet they’re the ones paying for the greed that caused it.

“If we had run our business into the ground, fine. But to have done the job the way we did, only to have someone tell you, ‘Hey, buddy, you’re all done,’ it’s awful.

“Who’d have thought that could have happened in America?”

Now, my very old friend tells me, from personal knowledge, that Paul Keigan is the nicest man you’d ever want to meet. And I believe it, because if he’s as good a salesman as they make him out to be, catching the American dream using nothing more than his personality and wits, then he’s gotta be a nice guy. We picture the salesman as a sleazy type, hair slicked back, hand out ready to shake and pickpocket at the same time. But in reality, the best salesmen are personable and downright likable, because they have to be, because in the real world, that’s how you get people to like you enough for them to buy stuff from you.

So if Paul Keigan is the nicest man you’d ever want to meet, that’s going to make me the asshole, because I am definitely not feeling like a salesman right now.

Because if Keigan really cared about his employees, and if he’s really that great a salesman, he’d start a business selling something else. It’s not like there’s nothing to sell. Hell! He could probably even still sell cars. (I understand people are still driving them.) He started Keigan Chevrolet in the middle of a recession 20 years ago, and he could do the same thing again, if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t want to, and I can respect that, too. He’s 68, and he wants to retire. I can understand that… except for one thing… he’s “bitter”—his word, not mine. That sticks in my gut, makes me feel uneasy, like I’ve been emotionally violated.

I have a real hard time working up sympathy for a man who complains instead of doing something to fix what’s bothering him. Now, maybe it was just the reporter who made him seem like a bitter, old man, because playing the victim goes over really big nowadays politically. Or maybe the reporter did not misrepresent him; maybe he needs to be bitter so that he can blame someone else, rather than just admitting that he could do something for his employees, but he just doesn’t want to, because he wants to retire.

However the rhetoric falls out, one fact is clear. We have all had to adjust. I am looking for work again, even though I don’t really want to. Many people are looking for new jobs or starting new businesses. Many businesses need to find new industries or new markets—and not just during a recession, either. Every time Google changes their policy, thousands of online businesses need to adjust or go under. When Amazon some months ago seemed to be discriminating against print-on-demand books, many indie authors freaked out, because they depended on Amazon for almost all their revenue.

And you know something else? I couldn’t work up any sympathy for them, either. Because if you build your business on someone else’s, you accept that you’ll go down with them. You accept their risks. If you depend on Google, you should expect to fail as soon as your business is no longer useful to Google, because that’s the risk you accepted by depending 100% on Google. If you don’t want to accept that risk, you must diversify, only depending a little on Google, and a little each on many other sources of web traffic. That’s the smart thing to do, anyway. And I have a real hard time working up sympathy for these online businesses who don’t do the smart thing and then complain and get bitter when Google changes their policy. See this? It’s the world’s smallest violin…

So their chosen ski rope broke, or maybe their boat ran out of gas, and they sank into the water. So get up and try again already! Because that’s what the American dream is all about! What makes Paul Keigan, his industry, his business, his employees so special that they deserve a pity party instead?

What makes any of us so special that we deserve a pity party?

Remember Will Smith’s character in The Pursuit of Happyness? Even at the lowest of lows, he was still a sympathetic character. With all the mistakes he seemingly had made, we still sympathized with him. Because he never asked us to pity him. Rather, he took his destiny into his own hands and pursued his American dream.

Likewise, the American dream is only dead if we stop pursuing it.

-TimK

Imagine this happening to you…

One Sunday morning service, a 2,000 member congregation was surprised to see two men enter, both covered from head to toe in black and carrying submachine guns.

One of the men proclaimed, “Anyone willing to take a bullet for Christ, remain where you are!”

Immediately, the choir fled.

The deacons fled.

And most of the congregation fled.

Out of the 2,000, there only remained 20.

The man who had spoken took off his hood. He then looked at the preacher and said, “Okay, Pastor. I got rid of all the hypocrites. Now you may begin your service. Have a nice day!” And the two men turned and walked out.

So, would I have run?

Hell, yeah!

Look, just because some guy in riot gear carrying a gun tells you to stay put so he can shoot you for your faith, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to him! If you have the chance to escape, then you escape, with you friends and family if possible, and you never look back.

Do you think all the Jews who escaped from the Nazis were traitors to their faith? What about all the Christians who helped them escape, at great personal risk? (The penalty for harboring a Jew was summary execution.)

There is no triumph in dying for Christ, if you could choose to live for Him instead.

-TimK

Why? Because she was involved in setting up a fake MySpace account, posing as a teenage boy, in order to mess with the emotions of a psychologically fragile teenage girl who had been nasty to her daughter. The teenage girl ended up committing suicide, and now people want to blame someone. And technically, Lori might have run afoul of federal computer fraud laws, even though those laws were supposedly never intended to address this situation.

The bad part about this case is that it only reinforces that federal prosecutors can convict almost anybody they want to, because we almost everybody has done something that is technically against federal criminal law. And most of us have also done at least one stupid thing online that might have pissed off someone else.

You see, the federal code is full of over-harsh laws. (Years in the federal pen for violating MySpace’s terms of service?! Get some perspective.) And this law wasn’t even applied correctly, because federal computer crime laws were intended (supposedly) to protect peoples’ credit card numbers and other sensitive information stored on computer. And rooting for a misapplication of an unfair law just to get even hurts us all, because it makes it more likely that the next victim who wants to get even will want to get even with you or me.

OK. Rant over. (For now.)

-TimK

What caught my eye about Long’s article was his claim that in a genuinely free market, businesses would be significantly smaller than they are today. He points out that large, hierarchical businesses are subject to many of the same inefficiencies that plague government bureaucracies. The executives of the largest corporations cannot possibly have enough knowledge to make good decisions about the thousands of different projects various parts of their companies are undertaking, and so it’s inevitable that large companies will suffer from inefficiencies greater than those that afflict smaller firms.

For example… the Internet’s success depends on the fact that it isn’t owned or managed by any single entity. Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was competing with proprietary online services like AOL and Compuserve, the Internet’s lack of centralized control turned out to be its most important strength. The hierarchical decision-making processes of the AOL and Compuserve companies simply couldn’t keep up with the spontaneous order of millions of Internet users acting without central direction.

Lee goes on to partly agree and partly disagree. On the one hand, you have Microsoft, who started as a small, entrepreneurial, innovatively disruptive company and has grown up into a struggling, bumbling behemoth. (My words, not his.) On the other hand, you have Google: “The reason Google is so profitable, in a nutshell, is network effects. Google sits at the center of a vast network of users, website operators, and advertisers who are locked in a virtuous circle.”

Fascinating topic, and one that I haven’t yet thought much about in those terms.

-TimK

-TimK

P.S. Ellen is also a member of the “Impeach George W. Bush” group. And she created the “Impeach John McCain” group, just in case he were to have won the presidency.

Marshall founded the Advocates in 1985 to help libertarians become successful communicators of the ideas of liberty.

In 1987, Marshall invented the now world-famous World’s Smallest Political Quiz. The Quiz expanded on a chart created by Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan. Marshall refined Nolan’s chart and added ten simple questions on political issues. In doing so, he created a Quiz that almost instantly tells takers which political group they are most aligned with, while also introducing them to a far more diverse, and accurate, multi-spectrum portrait of American politics.

The Quiz was an overnight sensation.

“Marshall’s remarkable little Quiz won so many millions of readers over the years that I used to tell him that he really was one of America’s most widely-read writers,” said Advocates for Self-Government President Sharon Harris. “Twenty million plus readers – that’s up there with Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy!”

Marshall remained active with the Advocates until his death, serving on its Board of Directors.

In 1994 Marshall founded the Alliance for the Separation of School & State, and was chairman of its Board at the time of his death. For 12 years, he was a leading spokesman for the idea that ending state, federal, and local government involvement in schooling can strengthen the family and improve education for all children.

He was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the phrase “separation of school and state” into the vernacular.

More information is available at the website of The Advocates for Self-Government.

As I tell my kids, don’t believe a single thing a politician says during the campaign, because–unlike the way things work out here in the real world–you can’t sue a politician for not making good on his promises.

David Boaz, at the Cato Institute’s blog, makes a short list of executive orders Obama could rescind, in order to show that he was actually sincere, and not just pulling BS out of his butt.

-TimK

-TimK

Some interesting, angering, and inspiring tidbits I ran across this weekend:

Do you think that Sunni and Shi’a fight, have fought since forever, can do nothing except fight? Think again! Guest blogger at Informed Comment, Sumbul Ali-Karamali, author of The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing, posts an eye-opening article: Sunni and Shi’a have not historically fought; in fact, they have more respect for each other than some Christians and Jews.

Video! I’m a huge fan of Penn and Teller. Half-ashamedly love their show Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, especially the political episodes. (Even the one on Mount Rushmore.) Penn Jillette posted a “Penn Says” video talking about Bob Barr and Wayne Root, and why he probably would not be formally supporting them, and someone called him on his cell phone right in the middle of filming. And if that doesn’t convince you to watch, he also has no shirt on.

More video! I remember when Harry Browne made the Great Libertarian Offer, which was: Would you be willing to give up your favorite federal government program, if it meant you could have a much, much smaller federal government? At the time, I couldn’t think what my “favorite” program was, because I really disliked them all. I eventually settled on a favorite, however. As an author, my favorite federal “program,” as it were, are the copyright laws. Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, posted the video of a talk he gave at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo Japan, a talk on the history and issues of copyright and Creative Commons, something I would entitle, “The Why, How, and When of Creative Commons.” It reminded me so vividly why copyright, for all its good and necessary points, is just like any other federal government program.

Did you know that gas is more affordable than it was in the free-wheeling, gas-guzzling 1960’s? Indur Goklany and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute have the actual data to prove it.

Meanwhile, the people of Zimbabwe are using gasoline as currency, because the inflation rate on the Zimbabwe dollar is at something like 2,200,000%. (Hah! And you thought I made up that number, I bet.) In other words, someone keeps printing way too much Zimbabwe dollars, and the people have responded by adopting another standard, even though it’s illegal. (Well, duh!) Boy, they must have some counterfeiter problem there, huh?

This had me gnashing my teeth and rolling on the floor in stitches. According to this AP article, Bush says the violence is unacceptable and Russia’s response is disproportionate. Yeah, well, I guess he’s the expert on disproportionate and unacceptable violence.

-TimK