THE IMPROBABLE EXPERIMENT of 1776

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

I was asked recently why, as a cultural economist, an entrepreneur, and humanitarian, I would be so interested in researching and writing on the brief history of the free enterprise system in America. My answer was pretty close to the surface. Over the past nearly forty years I have been privileged to travel around the world a lot of times. I have returned numerous times to many of the over 150 countries where I have worked.

As I observed and studied the cultures and economies, I became curious as to why some of those countries were wealthy, and why some were devastated by poverty. I began to perceive a pattern. The poverty had placed many of the residents in positions of sickness and helplessness. Poverty always develops dependence. It seemed logical that a country cannot build a strong economy on sick people, so helping the people get well should be a great starting point for a healthy economy in the future. That was when we began shipping donated medical goods into those countries. In the past nearly thirty years Project C.U.R.E. has carefully donated over one billion dollars’ worth of medical goods into more than 130 countries. The results have been spectacular.

I have observed, however, that even with the improvement in the health care delivery systems of those countries it is almost impossible for them to alter the reasons why they had gotten bogged down in the poverty in the beginning. It is extremely difficult to change the traditions, institutions, family structures, and the individual thinking of a citizenry when it comes to the basic economic components of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurs.

I then began to do a little comparative research on the differences between the ways their countries’ economies worked and the basis of our U.S. economic system. After a lot of years of observation and research, I must admit that I still don’t have the mystery totally solved or the success formula perfected. But I have come to some conclusions of which I am rock-solid confident. If we were just dealing with a sterile set of graphs, charts, and matrices, we could pretty easily come up with what ought to be. But when we are dealing with human nature, traditions, ancient institutions, greed, the desires to control and manipulate one another, things get muddied quite quickly.

I learned early on that the economic and cultural difference between countries does not pivot on the tattered and benign phrase democracy. We have somehow allowed that word to be mercilessly mugged and relegated to the list of descriptors to cover nearly anything. As an example, “we will stay here in your country and support you until you are able to establish a democracy as evidenced by your first one-over-fifty-percent vote.” That is not the old criterion of a democracy.

My eight trips into North Korea (DPRK) resulted in friendships that allowed for robust discussions regarding economics and the free market. The North Korean government officials would inquire as to ways to get their people incentivized to work harder and produce more. They would joke with me and remind me that they were far more democratic than the United States: “We have more elections in our country than you do, and even our name declares that we are a democracy . . . DPRK is Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” I have discovered that many countries include the word Democratic in their name, but remain far from agreeing to anything that would resemble a Magna Carta or Bill of Rights, where the leadership agreed to be limited by the powers of a constitution of the people, by the people, and for the people!

Most of the developing countries in which I have worked were state-run, centralized, and with economies controlled by redistribution politics. Ambitious leaders will form followings or factions. Throughout the pages of history insecure people have cried out for a king or a dictator to protect them and take care of them from cradle to grave. That power is then given over to a leader and his government. From that point on, the leader and appointed government have legitimate power to compel obedience. Sometimes we forget the fact that every law and regulation enacted ultimately has a gun behind it to enforce it. Punishment becomes the final incentivizing method to bring work habits up to envisioned expectations.

Also, throughout history we can observe that the power held by a leader and his appointed government has so much potential force and authority for advancing that leader’s own interests and ambitions that he will do practically anything to achieve and retain that power. It dawned on me while working in Cambodia and trying to learn about the history of Pol Pot that people living their own private lives have a propensity to be industrious, gentle, and civil. But people bent on factions and politics have a propensity to be equally industrious, but agitated, uncivil and dangerous. History is the recordation of all those individual events and personalities and stories of leaders and governments throughout the ages.

So, what happened in the case of North America and, specifically, that which became the United States of America? What made its economic and cultural history start out differently? What happened? I think I have faithfully done my due diligence in research, and admit that I have found no other setting in history that would have spawned such an economic and cultural experiment. The experiment was improbable and has no guarantee of perpetuity. There is no insurance policy protecting against the same historic demise brought on by dealing with tainted human nature, traditions, ancient institutions, greed, the desires to control and manipulate one another, and the feeling of being entitled to live comfortably off the efforts and labors of others.

But historical research also bears out that the improbable experiment was able to produce and achieve the most outstanding environment for enabling human achievement, creativity and productivity that the world has yet provided.

That is my answer to those who inquire why it is I would be so interested in researching and writing on the brief history of the free enterprise system in America. I was born before the U.S. began to fight in World War II. All of my life has been positively influenced by the improbable experiment of 1776. As I traveled to so many other countries, I became more conscious of the importance of freedom of economic and cultural choice. As I now research and write, I discover and more fully understand what a grand and anomalous experiment it was. I don’t want it to slip either by default or skullduggery into the cracks of time and be forgotten, swept over by tainted human nature, traditions, ancient institutions, greed, the desires to control and manipulate one another, or the feeling of being entitled to live comfortably off the efforts and labors of others.

Next Week: Uncommon Denominators of 1776

             (Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

 

© Dr. James W. Jackson   

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

  

www.jameswjackson.com  

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

SYSTEMS MATTER Part 5: Investigation into Free Enterprise

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

In the year 1776, a unique serendipity occurred that eventually affected the cultural economics of the world. The unusual occasion, however, could never have taken place had King John not signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, England, in 1215. That proclamation of emancipation for the first time established a constitutional underpinning that the power of the king could be limited by a written document. Historically, that agreement became the cornerstone of freedom and the main line of liberty against arbitrary and unjust treatment of the citizens of a nation state.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson articulated the Declaration of Independence expressing the general thinking and desires of his countrymen. There would be a new nation formed upon the vision of the Magna Carta, established on the principle that every person is entitled to pursue his or her own values.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”(1)

The other component of that 1776 serendipity was the economic masterpiece that was published in Great Britain March 9 of that same year. Adam Smith was a brilliant and energetic professor well trained in the early concepts of economics. Smith was intrigued as he pragmatically viewed the cultures and economics of the different nations of the world. I like to think of Adam Smith as the first ever cultural economist. He was not only concerned about the charts and matrices of the discipline of economics, but was also concerned about people, jobs, human desires, motivations, factories, and systems.

Adam Smith’s intellectual curiosity drove him to seek the answer to a fascinating cultural economic question, Why are some countries rich and other countries poor? He was willing to travel and simply observe and research and then compile and report. He did not just sit back and conjecture or speculate. He did not simply rely on the jaded propaganda of the politicians. He was not trying to figure out an economic and political scheme to control the world.

Smith was not coming from a position, as was Karl Marx, where he felt his true calling in life was to debunk, destroy, and overturn the world as he had found it. Neither was he coming from a position like that of Vladimir Lenin, where he was driven to follow a different path. That path had led Lenin on a sick and vindictive payback scheme for the Czar’s hanging of his brother for the attempted assassination plot. Lenin had vowed to totally destroy, through a Marxist-style uprising, every vestige of Russia’s culture and economic system through total revolution. Adam Smith simply wanted to find out and report the answer as to why some countries were rich and some were poor.

In 1776, Adam Smith’s findings were published in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. That book established the Scotsman, Adam Smith, as the father of modern economics. He felt that “The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.”(2)

From their experiences and observations, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were each aware that concentrated government power could be a great danger to the ordinary man. They saw the protection of the citizen from the tyranny of the government as a necessary and perpetual need. Adam Smith observed that “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”(3)

Based on Smith’s observations regarding the role of government in the affairs of a nation, he concluded that it was “first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; second, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, third, the duty to erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain: because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to the great society.”(4)

So, in the nations that were viewed as better off, the functions of the governments were intentionally more restricted to protecting the civilians from enemies from without, protecting the civilians from each other from within, and establishing and maintaining certain public works that could not be offered by limited individuals.

Other principles that emerged from Smith’s observations and recorded in his book were:

• The basic assumption that the prime psychological drive in man as an economic being is the drive of self-interest
• He assumes the existence of a natural order in the universe which makes all the individual strivings for self-interest add up to the social good
• The best program is to leave the economic process severely alone (non-intervention)

One more helpful insight that is gleaned from Smith’s report in the Wealth of Nations is that his definition of real wealth is the annual produce of the land and labor of the society. In other words, he sees production, or the ability to produce income, or the per capita income of a nation, as the determination of the true wealth of that nation. A nation that can produce high levels of income is wealthy. One that is capable of only low levels of income is poor.

But what is it that allows a nation to create a high level of income? Smith declares that the answer to that question is a simple one. The key to a wealthy nation is a productive nation. A productive nation is based on an economic system of individual freedom. The key lies in a system of free enterprise.

Indeed, the serendipity that came together in the year 1776 initiated a glorious experiment in economic and cultural freedom that has expanded the hopes, dreams, and expectations of the pragmatic and spiritual world of culture and economics. What now should we do with this system . . . with this dream?

Next Week: SYSTEMS MATTER: Part 6: A Productive Nation
 

(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson   

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

  

www.jameswjackson.com

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

SYSTEMS MATTER Part 3: From Theory into History

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

In this intriguing saga of cultural economics and social systems one more player needs to be introduced. Vladimir Lenin was the founder of the Russian Communist Party, the Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, and architect of the first ever Soviet state. Had it not been for Vladimir Lenin, it is very probable that the theoretical writings of Marx and Engles would have remained as interesting conjecture and late night reading material. But it must also be said that without the systemized writings of Marx and Engles, Lenin would not have had the articulated basis for his brash and flawed experiment of organized communism.

The name Lenin was an alias. He was born Vladimir Llyich Ulyanov in 1870, three years after Marx had written Das Kapital. The oppression of the Russian culture had radicalized the entire Ulyanov family, and all eventually became involved in acts of revolution. Vladimir’s oldest brother Alexander was hanged for participation in a terrorist bomb attack in an attempt to assassinate the Czar, Alexander III. His brother’s execution is considered the tipping point for Vladimir’s overwhelming determination to succeed in his lifelong revolutionary exploits.

A picture entitled We Will Follow a Different Path portrays Lenin and his mother grieving over Alexander’s hanging, and for Vladimir that meant absolutely embracing the Marxist approach for total revolution and communism. It was Lenin who translated the writings of Marx and Engles into the Russian language. In 1889 Lenin declared himself a Marxist communist and said, “Give us an organization of revolutionaries and we will overthrow Russia.”(1)

Marx and Engles, as well as Lenin, saw the wealth and opulence of the Czars and the bourgeoisie class in Russia and Europe as an “object” or a thing. They truly believed that if the proletariat would finally become poor enough and hungry enough they would rise up en masse against the wealthy, plunder the riches, grab the golden egg of the Czars, and once and for all eliminate the upper class. Then they would be free to take their newly acquired goods, redistribute them amongst the proletariat, and they would all live happily ever after.

In order to see the plan successfully accomplished, it was absolutely imperative that there be a total revolution, a dismantling of all systems, a declaration of new ownership of all wealth, and the announcement of a fair and equitable plan for redistribution.

In 1905, the Czar Emperor Nicholas II became embroiled in a bitter war with Japan. The Russian rag-tag army lost nearly every battle and suffered debilitating casualties. The Russian people were sick of the war and sick of the costs of the conflict that left the economy in shambles. The famine and starvation that followed drove the people to the streets in protest of the Czar’s failures and a representation formally gathered to submit petitions of protest to the Emperor. The Emperor’s soldiers summarily shot and killed the bearers of the petitions. The stage was set for a rebellion and revolution.

But the Emperor moved quickly and agreed to concessions including the creation of a people’s elected legislation assembly called the Duma. Was it possible that could have been the turning point in history as much as King John of England agreeing to the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede?

The Magna Carta had been in place in England and had proven to be the cornerstone of liberty, and a viable defense against arbitrary and unjust treatment of the citizens, and the framework of liberty and enterprise. Was Czar Nicholas II not moving in the same direction? Would that model not have become Russia’s correction burn and opened the door to the free world and prosperity?

We will never know. Lenin returned to Russia from self-imposed exile. He was driven by the fear that an absolutely good revolution could go to waste. He was consumed by the memory of his hanging brother and his vow of total revolution and the crushing of all existing systems by the Marxist creed.

There might never be another prime opportunity for the violent overthrow of the Russian government to take place and the Marxist/Leninist experiment of communism instituted. What a shame it would be if the Menshevik Party could settle the dispute and receive from the Czar not only a sign of willingness to a movement toward reconciliation and representative government, but openness to ideas of democracy and free market.

There was too much historic potential to lose. Marx had propounded that the total overthrow of the Czar and the confiscation and control of everything would set communism in a position to also seize full control of the world by surrounding and isolating the capitalist nations of the west and also bring them to their knees. Resistance to Lenin was from the Menshevik Party. They feared that Lenin’s plans would lead to a one man dictatorship. In response, Lenin organized a separate entity with uncompromising mandates of total revolution and control. He now appealed not only to the peasants and the workers, but especially reached out to Russia’s discouraged and disenfranchised soldiers of the Czar.

Lenin was determined to win at any cost. He implemented tactics of terror and genocide to secure his power base. He initiated Red Terror to violently wipe out all opposition within the civilian population. The unchecked war between the revolutionary Red Army and the loyalist White Army raged for another three years.

The Czar and his family were deposed in 1917. They were whisked away and assassinated without hearing or trial. Lenin then proclaimed that Russia was a Soviet government ruled directly by soldiers, peasants, and workers. The people rejoiced. Lenin had won the revolution and had established the first ever Soviet Communist State.

Vladimir Lenin suffered two strokes in 1922, thought to be the result of the doctors not being able to remove bullets that were lodged in his body following a failed assassination attempt. He died in 1924 following another stroke at the age of 53. Joseph Stalin assumed the leadership of the communist Soviet State. He proved to be even more despotic and violent in his leadership than was Lenin. But he cleverly was able to solidify the population of Russia by encouraging a cult-like atmosphere that glorified the theories and teachings of Lenin that had been based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrick Engles.

Next week: SYSTEMS MATTER Part 4: Marx, Communism, and Cultural Economics 

 

(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson's new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson  

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.drjameswjackson.com

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com