Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

“We’ll just double time it to your house, and grab the tickets before heading to the train station for the 3:45 to DETROIT!  ROCK!  CITY!” – Detroit Rock City

When they filmed one of the battle scenes for a Transformers movie in Detroit, they had to use half of the CGI budget to repair buildings.

Wealth.

It’s the golden goose that societies have all chased, but most forget where the eggs come from.  I assure you it’s no longer Detroit, but we’ll get to that.

Spoiler: it’s not just the land, the trees, or the shiny rocks or sticky fluids underground.  Sure, Saudi Arabia’s sitting on enough oil to lube up Oprah with enough left over for a dozen Kardashians, but without the brainpower to drill, refine, and ship it, they’d still be herding camels and wondering what a Ferrari is.

The same goes for North America.  For millennia the fertile plains forests were untouched.  It was a backwater until European misfits turned it into the world’s breadbasket and factory floor.

Wealth isn’t just stuff; it’s the ingenuity, sweat, and sheer cussedness of people making things happen.  The dirt’s nice, don’t get me wrong, and someone, somewhere has to have it or else things would get mighty hungry might fast.  Iowa’s black soil grows corn like it’s auditioning for a role in a Monsanto® ad as a glyphosate-absorbing sponge.  Canada?  Canada’s got enough timber so it could stack it up and reach the Moon.  They also have nearly that many Indians.

Two peanuts walked into a bar.  And that’s why Monsanto™ has to be stopped.

But Japan?  Japan is a rocky island with zero oil, barely any farmland, and a tendency to shake like a wet dog every few years.  Yet it’s a global powerhouse, punching well above the weight of its country’s size or population.

Why?  The people.

Same with England, Singapore, Taiwan.  No natural resources to speak of, but their folks figured out how to turn ideas into skyscrapers, cars, and microchips.  Even Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth wasn’t something the Saudis turned into wealth.  It was a group of Western engineers and wildcatters that turned that black liquid into gold.

Without them, the Saudis might still be sitting on a lake of useless sludge, arguing over whose camel was the best hump.

North America is the same story, minus the camel arguments.  For thousands of years, the continent had everything: buffalo, forests, rivers teeming with fish.  Yet, outside of some Mesoamerican skull-stacking enthusiasts in Mexico, it was dangerous and dirt-poor.  Why?

Is a monk with wings an air friar?

That’s a big question, because just a few years later the Europeans showed up.  They brought the tools, the technology, and most importantly the mindset to make the place a source of plenty.  By the 19th century, the U.S. was feeding and arming half the world, not because the land changed, but because people did.

They built railroads, factories, and a culture that rewarded hard work over siestas and skull collecting.  Wealth exploded.

For a while.

The GloboLeft thinks wealth comes from a magical printing press.  Since the Soviet Union keeled over in 1991, the world has belonged to the U.S. dollar:  print it, spend it, everybody loves it.  But cash is most definitely not wealth:  at best, it’s just a scorecard. Real wealth comes from production:  making stuff, growing stuff, inventing stuff and developing a moral and trustworthy people.

But now we’re spending our wealth on things that actively destroy the system.

I did once get a three-foot ruler at a yard sale.

Take immigration.  Please.

Unchecked waves of illegals, incentivized to cross borders with freebies?  Not good.  Legal immigrants who think that Western values are an outmoded suggestion that only naïve people would follow?

That’s not a workforce; it’s a drain.

Then there’s the family fiasco.  Single-parent households are mostly moms with no dads.  These mom-led houses represent 65% of black kids and 24% of white kids growing up fatherless in 2020.

The GloboLeft cheers this like it’s fEmALe EmPOwErmENt, but kids without dads are far more likely to drop out, do drugs, or end up in jail.  That’s not building a trustworthy people:  it’s building chaos.  A stable family is like a factory for productive citizens:  break it, and you’re churning out liabilities, not assets.  This is yet another reason I keep banging on the “the family is the base unit of society, not the individual” drum.

In Oklahoma cowboys don’t roll joints – they tumble weed.

We actively pay people to not work.  The Social Security Administration reports disability claims have spiked 20% since 2000, with over 8 million Americans on the rolls by 2023.  Some are legitimate.  Nobody’s knocking the guy who lost a leg in a mill accident (his name is Skip, by the way), but when “anxiety” qualifies you for a lifetime of checks, we’re paying people to sit on the couch instead of building bridges.  That’s wealth destruction, plain and simple.

Healthcare?  That’s another black hole.  The U.S. spends 18% of GDP on it.  $4.5 trillion in 2022.  That’s more than any other nation.

Yet, we get crap for it.  Life expectancy is flat, and obesity is up 40% since 1990. We’re not paying to make people healthier:  we’re bankrolling a system that patches symptoms while folks chug Mountain Dew® and avoid treadmills.  A healthy population works harder, lives longer, creates more, and is happier.  A sick one?  It’s a money pit.

All this anti-wealth nonsense is sold as compassion.  Free money, open borders, no-fault welfare?  It sounds warm and fuzzy until you realize it’s starving the engine that makes societies thrive.  Wealth isn’t the goal.  Wealth is the fuel for a happy, healthy, productive life.  Without it, you get decay, both literal and figurative.  Look at Detroit: once a manufacturing titan, now a ghost town because the focus shifted from making to taking, complete with a demoralized population.

Feel like no one gives a hoot about you?  Try not filing your tax returns.

So how do we get back on track?

Stop pretending money equals wealth.  Reward production.  Cut the incentives for idleness; if you can work, you should.  Fix families by making it easier for dads to stick around and reducing the incentives for women to break up a family for fun and prizes.  Make being a whore shameful again.

Streamline healthcare to focus on prevention, not endless treatments – 30% or so of what will be spent on a human for healthcare during their entire lifetime is in the last year – wouldn’t it be better if their last decade was better?

And secure the borders—nations that can’t control their edges can’t control their economies.  Almost every economic problem this country has is downstream of immigration.

Wealth isn’t in the dirt or the printing press; it’s in the people who turned dirt into crops, ideas into empires.

Let’s stop subsidizing sloth and start hammering out real wealth again. Otherwise, we’re just paving our roads with good intentions.

And we all know where that leads.

Hell, it leads to Hell.

Or Detroit.