Fighting Fire With Fire

People like to consider America a free country.  We live in the Land of Opportunity(tm).  Indeed, many individuals have accumulated vast personal fortunes starting from nearly nothing.  The last 2 decades and the tech revolution have been proof positive that, yes, there is potential here.

I'm tired of arguing about our freedoms, our personal responsibility for our economic situation, and whether or not the enterprise system of capitalism is 'fair'.  I'm ready to start making the system work for me - for us, really, the 99%.

Steve Jobs.  Andrew Carnegie.  Thomas Edison.  Henry Ford.  The list goes on and on.  To claim that, in our society, we all have *equal* opportunity to achieve just what these people and hundreds more have achieved in life, well that's just silly.  But let's not deny that opportunity is there.

The flaw in the system is not that it provides this level of opportunity, via nearly unlimited legal protections, tax advantages, and subsidies for large corporations, with very little regulation and no personal responsibility.  The flaw in the system is that those who have taken advantage of the system have done so for personal gain, and the accumulation of private wealth.

The system can be used for other purposes.

The success stories of the most prominent capitalist heroes all have one common starting point.  They all began with an idea.  A vision for the future.  For the most part, these visions involved the accumulation of vast empires.  No loss of human dignity, no amount of suffering, seems to be a price too high to pay for success.

A more humane vision of social justice can be made reality using the same methods, the same principles, that were used to create the cruel reality of corporate capitalism.  Principles that have been proven time and time again to work.

I've read from the best of the worst describing these 'secret' principles, as they are espoused by the most prominent capitalists themselves.  These authors read worse than a self help book for gambling written by a compulsive gambler, but you have to look past that to understand.  Unfortunately the crap that they spout out in platitudes, ad-hoc theories, and pseudo-intellectual psycho babel actually works.  It has worked for the wealthiest 1% over and over again throughout history.

These little tips and tricks can definitely be transformed from methods for accumulating private fortunes into programs for accumulating social wealth and creating the societal change one might desire.  It can work for us, if we focus our attention towards the accumulation of social wealth instead of personal wealth.  I can't imagine anything more satisfying than being the world's first social trillionaire.

What would that look like?  Well, not-for-profit corporations are looking in the right direction.  But the community of social entrepreneurs, people invested in creating real change and improvement, have not found a way yet.  There are ways to accumulate an enormous amount of wealth and resources in the hands of those who would invest strategically for the betterment of society.

That is the connection between vision and execution.  Money.  And money can be had, in any amount desired, as a way of making the goal a reality.  If you doubt this, read no further.  But do not ignore history.  Do not put up a mental wall between you and the thousands of successful capitalists who accumulated immense personal fortunes by refusing to 'play that game'.  The game can be played, and the game has been won.  It has happened so many times before, and it will happen many times again.

I don't know what goals we should be setting.  I don't know how we will accumulate the wealth and resources.  But what I am telling you with deadly seriousness and utmost sincerity is that, if we follow the right steps, whatever goal we set for yourself will be achieved.