Obama is a Post Turtle

While suturing a cut on the hand of a Texas Rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually, the topic got around to Obama and his bid for the Presidency.

The old rancher said, Well, ya know, Obama is a ‘post turtle’. Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked, What is a post turtle?

The old rancher said, When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he sure as heck doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he is up there and you just wonder what kind of an idiot put him there in the first place.

(I found this on another site and wanted to post it to my site as well. Its a brilliant explanation of the Obama candidacy…)

The Forgotten Right of All Americans

We Americans are proud–and rightly so–of our success, our freedom, our innovation and of our form of government. We hold individual rights as inviolate and to be protected at all costs.

Yet, we seem to have forgotten one of our rights recently: The Right to FAIL.

Among all the clamor of the supposed market crisis, I keep seeing a common thread…the thread of people seeking to evade the responsibility of their actions (or lack thereof).

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just the tip of the iceberg. With investment houses going sour and mega-insurance firms looking unstable, I’m left wondering: “Who hired these idiots?”

The Democrats are racing to every nearby soapbox to scream out their demands for more financial market regulations, more supposed oversight and tighter controls… all in the name of protecting investors. Protect them from what? Bad investments? Isn’t that the right and proper risk of investing– that you may lose EVERYTHING due to a bad choice or two? Those without the stomach for it should not get into volatile markets; they should go buy CDs and count their lucky stars.

Regulation is UNNECESSARY! Want regulation of the market? Here it is: BADLY RUN COMPANIES GO BANKRUPT and thus their incompetence is removed from the marketplace so no more investors will suffer their bad advice. What about the poor little investors who lost their money? Tough noogies! That’s the nature of a market: invest without proper research and oversight and risk losing everything.

Sure, we can all feel sympathy for the folks whose 401k managers made bad choices– but we should hold the managers accountable for bad choices or incompetence, not seek to evade the results. We should be CAREFUL when selecting financial advisors and look at experience, market knowledge… In short, we should take responsibility for our choices, investment and otherwise.

Americans have the right to succeed and prosper, but they also have the right to fail and go bankrupt if they make bad choices–and no political machine can stop the fallout, no matter how much they try. All the Democrats are seeking to do is to spread the pain to ALL of us– but that’s what we get for allowing leftist economic theory into our Congress.

Take responsbility for your investments (and those you hire to manage them for you) and take responsibility for who gets elected. Its NOT enough to say, “Well, I voted for ______, not this guy!”

Take responsibility for yourself–that’s only “change” we need.

Ready! Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim!

Almost daily, I am confronted with folks who have great ideas or just know what needs to be done–yet they procrastinate, evade, or sucumb to laziness. To put it in terms I use with my clients, “Ready? Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim!…”

If you know what needs to be done and how to do it, why not finally pull the trigger and “Fire!”? A book I read recently refers to this as “analysis paralysis.” Cute phrase, but perhaps a little soft on those who are masterful practitioners. Mind you, I’m as guilty of it as some of those to whom I’m referring.

Imagine what would happen if everyone we knew simply did ONE more than usual of the things they “should” be doing… Don’t worry about becoming perfect as a first step. Simply focus on getting one more thing done than usual. I’m reminded of another phrase… “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.”

There are those who are advocates of the idea that entrepreneurs should be of a mindset to “Ready! Fire! Aim!” While I see their point and I can see–pragmatically–how this would work “enough” to keep things moving, but I also think this is the reason people accept inappropriate work/contracts all in the name of “moving forward”.

The solution lies in knowing what you want and actually ACTING to obtain it. For example, when someone claims to want to lose weight, if they are not ACTIVELY doing something about it, they’re LYING about it. This becomes applicable to those who are “acting” on their desire to lose weight… some would simply “eat less” in some hopes of losing weight– all without any plan of action or specific lifestyle goals. I am an advocate of deciding on a path to take, learn it, then do it well.

In my own weight control efforts, I decided a while back that The Atkins Nutritional Approach was the way I wanted to go. My first action was to READ THE ENTIRE BOOK written by Dr. Atkins so as to confirm that this was something I liked and believed do-able. After reading the book, I implemented the plan. Period. Result? I lost 54 pounds in the first 60 days. As I went along, countless folks would tell me how “unhealthy” my plan was or that I should do “something else” instead. Blah. Ignore them. Choose a path and stick to it–until you have evidence that it is not working as desired.

In Buddhism, there is a saying, “There are many paths to the top of a tall mountain,” and this is extremely accurate and applicable to ANY action plan. The key is not so much which path you choose, but that you pick ONE path and stick to it. People who switch paths often do a lot of moving, but never get any closer to the summit and may even go backwards. There will always be “another path” you can take, and many may “look greener” than your current path, but it only makes sense to switch paths when the alternative is clearly and genuinely, significantly better or when your current path dead ends.

Ok, so my point is this… CHOOSE a path, ACT on it, KEEP GOING regardless of naysayers. And stop putting things off because they’re imperfect. Make them perfect later–but keep moving in the meantime.

Your Choice: A Year or A Decade

The chickens are coming home to roost. The bad choices and all the living beyond our means are about to settle in a new reality–one where the market holds us all accountable for those bad choices.

From the people who bought homes far beyond their means to the folks who thought it was ok to keep refinancing over and over again to get every dime of the housing price bubble into their pocket. From the people who saw credit cards as if they were cash to the credit card companies who think its ok to charge ridiculous interest rates and to mislead borrowers.

Alas, both Presidential candidates are on board with ideas that will lead to a DECADE of pain instead of a year or so. If we let all these poorly run companies fail, sure it would be painful–but the pain will pass quickly. By propping up a FAILED system of intervention and Big Government, we will elongate our pain just as FDR did when his supposed New Deal drastically lengthened the Great Depression.

Make no mistake: Depression is caused by GOVERNMENT meddling in the economy. Recessions are part of a normal business cycle and represent market corrections to bad choices. The point is that private companies cannot make enough bad decisions at the same time to cause a Depression. Only through GOVERNMENT regulation can enough companies be FORCED to go down the same wrong path at the same time.

The answer is simple: Tell your elected officials to STAY OUT OF IT and let the market correct itself. Thankfully, the market doesn’t really care about your politics–it cares about value and substance. If a company becomes a useless empty shell with no real value (i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) through government intervention, the market knows better than to go there.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, if you play in the market you’ve agreed to the risk of investing. Don’t whine when your 401k goes down in value because you failed to research the companies you chose for investment. The information is out there: read it. And if its not there, act like an adult and accept the consequences of choosing an investment that went downhill.

Ron Paul: Half Hero, Half Ostrich

After watching yet another televised commentary by Ron Paul about the idiocy of the current bailouts and schemes to protect investors from bad decisions, I am yet again struck with the thought that Ron Paul is a hero for giving voice to sound domestic policy. But then, I remember the lack of effective foreign policy and I am left disappointed.

Ron Paul is often labeled a Libertarian–which may or may not be accurate. But, then again its appropriate for this commentary because I submit that Ron Paul suffers from the same affliction as many other Libertarians: the lack of a core, consistent and accurate philosophy. Despite the claims of many Libertarians, they do NOT hold a complete philosophy. “Political philosophy” is only one-fifth of a complete philosophy.

Complete philosophies consist of five parts:

1. Metaphysics — the nature of reality
2. Epistemology — the nature and validation of knowledge
3. Ethics — the nature of right and wrong (individual morality)
4. Politics — the nature of proper interpersonal ethics (government and culture)
5. Aesthetics — the nature of art

Anyway, back to Ron Paul… He gets his economics right the vast majority of the time. But he fails when it comes to foreign policy. My understanding of his foreign policy philosophy is that he wants to withdraw American troops from the entire world and somehow pretend that “if we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us”.

The cornerstone of my foreign policy is that America, as the freest country in the world, has the right, but NOT the obligation to invade any less free country for the purpose of making it more free.

This nonsense we have of holding diplomatic ties with authoritarian dictatorships is nonsense (Paul and I agree on this). For example, I believe in “one China” — but not the one chosen by Nixon. The Republic of China is legitimate, the “People’s Republic of China” is nothing but impotent little petty dictators who have been enabled and kept in power through the permission of the West. (IF you ask me how to solve this, eject the entire PRC mission in DC and invite Taiwan to take its place as the rightful representative government of ALL of China– Taiwan and the mainland.

Ron Paul thinks we should come home from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. The problem with this stance is that it ignores that if we do, we’ll create a giant and explosive power vacuum in the region– one that Iran is sure to exploit. The government of Iran is arguably the most dangerous to the United States. They sponsor terrorism and acts against Americans and the rest of the free world. (I’m still hoping that Israel will take action where the US will not in this area.)

I realize that I’m going all over the place with this entry, so I hope you’re keeping up.

My point is that Ron Paul has the potential of being one of the greatest statesmen in US history–if he’d pull his head out of the sand and help the US to LEAD the world to freedom.

The System Works

Funny how people are all over television moaning and screaming about the “failures of the American financial markets”. Um, what are these people talking about? They’re just flat wrong.

The very fact that investors are losing money and companies are going bankrupt is PROOF that the system WORKS. The Market does not reward bad decisions. Eventually, the “invisible hand” smacks down people who attempt to thwart the natural workings of the free marketplace.

All the calls for bailouts are just calls to be absolved of their responsibility for making bad decisions.

If those calls continue to be met, it will only hold off the inevitable market corrections for a little while– and make them worse and more painful in the future.

Good decisions = Profit

Bad decisions = Loss

How much more simple can it be?

Stop wishing to be “saved” from what you rightly deserve–either way. You made the choice, you will gain or lose according to the efficacy of those decisions.