Commerce has no pope, no king, no emperor, no constitution, no general and no supreme commander.
Socialism and Communism have their tyrants, despots, Great Leaders, millions of sophisticated professors, tens of millions of wise politicians and hundreds of millions of bureaucrats.
In the great global Pax Americana of the past 70 years, commerce has lifted billions of humans out of starvation and several billions out of poverty.
The essence of commerce lies in the mutual benefit derived from trade and exchange. Adopting a ‘Pro Commerce’ mindset incentivizes businesses to create value in every transaction, enriching both consumer experiences and the economic health of the community. It encourages entrepreneurs to embrace transparent practices, ethical trade, and a consumer-centric approach, which in turn builds trust and loyalty within the market. Economists like Michael Phillips recognize that enduring success stems from understanding and leveraging the mechanisms of commerce. By developing a keen sense of market trends, customer needs, and global trading nuances, businesses can innovate and adapt in a rapidly changing world. Embracing this mindset allows for a tapestry of vibrant marketplaces where commerce is not only an engine for wealth but a bridge to a prosperous, interconnected world.
Commerce, often termed as the backbone of a thriving economy, stands at the forefront of modern society’s progression. Michael Phillips, a renowned economist, once emphasized that ‘Commerce is the greatest of all human institutions,’ elucidating its integral role in fostering growth, enabling innovation, and bridging markets globally. Taking a leaf from his insights, businesses today are adopting cutting-edge technologies, aligning with sustainable practices, and engaging in inclusive trade policies to propel this age-old institution to new heights. As e-commerce platforms revolutionize the shopping experience, brick-and-mortar stores are also innovating their customer engagement tactics to stay competitive. In essence, commerce in its ever-evolving forms continues to be the driving force shaping the economic landscape, proving that embracing its full potential leads to success and advancement.
It is my opinion that humans aren’t very smart, most social improvements are the byproduct of technological change and technology is really math and accidents with increments of change that result from failures.
Let’s begin with the greatest change in human life. It’s what happened in Amsterdam in the first decade of 1600. The whole story of ‘the Enlightenment’ is best told by Jonathan Israel. His name just about says it all. Amsterdam is where the Jews of Spain and Portugal were driven by the Jew hating Catholics of Spain and Portugal. The Dutch were a decent people with a flair for commerce and a weak social hierarchy. The Jews brought education, deep thought, math and respect for erudition. They also had vast networks to spread information.
Several technologists, probably working with eye glasses, put a few pieces of shaped glass together and got a telescope and a microscope. Pairs of glass that humans immediately used to look at the heavens and at living cells. Humans in an environment like Amsterdam, can’t help but look at everything. From a tiny amount of curiosity came the explosion of knowledge we call the ‘Enlightenment’.
When Airbnb was first started in San Francisco, I had three friends who immediately got into the business.
Does that mean anything to you?
One was a game developer, no surprise. He bought three condos and rented them out.
The second was a salaryman who bought five houses in New Orleans with the intention of moving there to rent them out.
The third was a psychotherapist who rented out her city apartment for $5,000 a month and stayed at her country farmhouse.
The interesting thing about this event was that two of these emerging entrepreneurs were not the kind of person one expects to start a business. It says to me that America is a land of millions of potential entrepreneurs who will start a business if they are given the slightest genuine opportunity. This is truly America. Commerce is deeply American.
The first and third were almost immediately put out of business by the rules San Francisco put in place to make Airbnb unworkable. The first soon moved to Los Angeles. The second was soon put out of business by the city government of New Orleans that made Airbnb unworkable.
The CEO of Airbnb is Brian Chesky. He and his founding partner were both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. Neither one had any idea of how politics works. Both immediately conceded to the laws and regulations that the San Francisco government put in place. Terrible laws that destroyed two-thirds of all the operating BnB rentals in operation. The anti-business regulations were copied everywhere Airbnb went. The same horrible regulations nearly destroyed similar vacation rental businesses that had been operating for decades, worldwide.
Three lessons from this:
Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, didn’t start his business until he got a Statewide license to run a limousine business which served as a short-term protection against the politically connected and ferocious taxi cab bastards.
3.Political skills are vital to innovation in business. Otherwise governments will destroy you.
Most people in the world don’t know that Jim Jones, of the famous ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ and Guyana mass suicide of over 900 people, was a communist.
I knew Jim Jones, personally, and interacted with him over the years he was in San Francisco. I heard one or two of his sermons. Jim Jones was a Marxist. He was 100% a Marxist and he preached 100% pure communism. He had a visceral hatred of ‘capitalism’ and he made that clear in every sermon. He also channeled the beauty of communist equality and fairness of government support.
Jim Jones’ community heard him lecture every week about the evils of capitalism and the beauty of communism. His congregation was communist. And disproportionately older black women.
Now the big fact: When Jones, Reverend Jones, decided to move his congregation out of the United States he wrote to people in the USSR (Russia) and the Soviet Embassy in Washington and requested asylum for his congregation and himself in the Soviet Union.
They turned him down.
So then he chose the jungles of Guyana as the new model home for his congregation. He promised a communist paradise.
Jonestown should be remembered as one of the many communist failures.
We may have a very distorted view of our own history. Do we always lose our wars?
Independence
Start with our War of Independence. Did we win? Britain gave up. Really France won. The Treaty of Paris 1783 makes it clear. France as the winner was given Senegal and Tobago by Britain. The Colonies agreed to leave the Crown but share access to the Mississippi with Britain and accepted convivial conditions of trade with Britain. The American Colonies didn’t WIN. They got partial independence with their co-victor, France.
How can you lose a war of independence? You can’t. France won and the colonies took advantage of it.
Twenty years later Britain reminded the Colonies that they gained independence but never defeated the British military.
1812
America lost the War of 1812 decisively. Total loss. Britain with only one war to fight won overwhelmingly. Britain destroyed whatever they wanted to destroy.
Civil War
Did the Union Army win the Civil War? In deed only –The Confederacy signed a peace treaty. Lincoln’s priority—shared by Grant—was “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and unite the country together again as a functioning democracy under the Constitution. Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction of the South and help for the blacks didn’t get very far.
Lincoln was assassinated days after the peace treaty, by a Confederate supporter. Vice President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat supporter of slavery, became president and did little to carry out the reconstruction plans.
Reconstruction only began two years later when Grant became president. The ostensible losing side, the Confederate states resisted Reconstruction and it was defeated within twelve years, totally. From 1877 forward, blacks lost their economic and political rights and the whites from the Confederacy regained nearly all their rights and power.
Seventy years later blacks were still being lynched by the KKK, couldn’t buy homes in white neighborhoods and were rarely employed in white businesses. The Southern Wing of the Democrat Party by 1965 had been in power for thirty-five years.
One hundred years after the end of the Civil War, there was no victory celebration. None. Because the Union didn’t win.
Spain
There were battles in the late 19th century with Spain but no real battles over the four months of active Cuban hostility. The U.S. gained control of Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines by paying Spain $20 million. Nothing resembling a victory occurred from a nearly non existent Spanish military.
WWI
World War I saw America enter the War late, the American president demanded a peaceful settlement at the end of the war. The war ended because of influenza.
The influenza hurt the German side the most because the German soldiers had to ride in trains back to their homeland for food and treatment, while the French went home on weekends during the war. The Germans agreed to the American proposed peace treaty, but the French and British dictated the actual terms without regard to the Americans. President Wilson had many strokes as the Treaty of Versailles was being worked on and was unable to have any influence on the outcome.
WWII
World War II was an absolute military victory for the Allied troops. But the final outcome was determined by the Yalta Conference in February 1945. By the previous Fall president Roosevelt was medically weak, could not stand and by April of 1945 he died. At Yalta, the USSR designated the meeting place, and the USSR demanded control of all of Eastern Europe. Roosevelt conceded and asked for democrat rule of the area the USSR controlled. Didn’t happen. Berlin was divided in half and the USSR demanded that the Allied half be divided among France, Britain and the U.S. The USSR also took all of Siberia and Mongolia in return for a promise to send troops to fight Japan. The USSR never did help.
The American military victory in WWII led to the United Nations. A seventy year failure for the U.S. The United Nations are united 150 to 1 against the U.S. most of the time.
Korea
The war in Korea was a settlement with an armistice much to the favor of North Korea, which is still a belligerent.
Vietnam
The Vietnam War was militarily won by the U.S. and then completely abdicated by the U.S. Democrat Congress which refused to help the South Koreans as the U.S. promised in the peace treaty. U.S. lost entirely.
Iraq and Afghanistan
Iraq and Afghanistan. Not much to say. The first Iraq war was a complete loss, Saddam Hussein remained in power. The second dragged on for more than twenty years with no end, no cessation of hostilities. Afghanistan was another complete loss.
America often wins the major battles but loses the war.
And now the losers of Afghanistan, the Biden Democrats, are advising Israel to lose its war against the Gazan terrorist government.
Term limits and small districts.
I’ve watched California go from a Republican state to a super-majority Democrat one. I was close to politics all that time. I finally figured out what happened.
I watched the change in the legislatures as Assemblyman Jesse Unruh took over the Democrat Party from 1961. In those days I was an Assembly Legislative Analyst running the campaign of a San Francisco Assemblyman. Unruh took contributions from all the lobbyists and used the money to elect loyal Democrat legislators. He was later succeeded by Willie Brown who used the same formula to govern the State. Labor money became the backbone of state campaign finance and there was a direct pipeline from union state employees to the Democrat Party. The system became stronger and embedded over time.
Term limits were introduced statewide in the late 90s and in San Francisco for the second time in 2000.
First we got a deep well of funding for the Democrat aspirants, then we got a ladder to a life in politics.
The term limits meant that winning the first step on the ladder offered a series of steps up the ladder as the term-limit law created all the steps on the ladder upward. In San Francisco that meant the first step was a trivial spot on the school board or the City College Board. Then a spot on the Board of Supervisors, then a position in the Assembly followed by a seat in the Senate followed by election to one of the many Statewide offices.
That is what we have today. A home grown political machine. The tiny districts just make it easier for a political nobody to get their first step in office. Tiny districts are often controlled by one or two fictional neighborhood clubs.
I intended to begin with the story by the Yiddish and Hebrew writer I.L. Peretz that we studied in the upper grades of the Jewish elementary school that I attended in Montreal. When the attack of October 7th gave this conference even greater urgency, I realized that despite the shift of focus I could begin with the very same story. Writing in Warsaw at the beginning of the 20th century, Peretz was greatly troubled by the rise of anti-Semitism in Poland and in the rest of Europe. To rally the anxious Jews of his time, he wrote modern folk tales; this story was one of them.
“The Three Gifts,” Di dray matones, begins “Once long ago,” with the death of a Jew somewhere in this world—anywhere, anytime. When the soul of this average Jew ascends to the heavenly court, it has neither enough good deeds to gain admission to heaven or enough evil deeds to be sent to hell, so this poor soul is condemned to eternal wandering in limbo. But he cries and pleads so bitterly that the gatekeeper suggests he might try to “win” his way into heaven by bringing its saints three gifts. The saints, he is told, “like nothing more than a common soul that’s managed to work its way up.” So the soul begins searching for what might be an appropriate gift.
But the world’s other inhabitants turn out to be as mediocre as he was. For many years he roams unsuccessfully until late one night he is attracted by the light in a window, and he sees masked robbers holding up a wealthy Jew with a knife at his throat, threatening to kill him if he makes a move. The Jew watches them calmly as they load his valuables until in a far corner they find a little bag, and then he lunges forward and they shove the knife into him, certain that they have found the most precious of his jewels. But it is only a bag of earth—the pouch of earth from Eretz Israel that the Jew had prepared to be put under his head at burial. The soul scoops up some of that bloodied earth for the first gift accepted by the heavenly saints.
After many more years the soul finds the second gift in a city in Germany. Peretz adds “of course this happened long ago,” implying that it has remained all too relevant at the start of the 20th century. A Jewish girl is about to be punished for having secretly left the walled ghetto on a Christian holy day. Accused of having polluted the Gentile streets, she is sentenced to be tied by her hair to the tail of a wild horse and dragged through the streets until dead. But she is granted one last wish. What she asks for are pins—to pin her skirt into her thighs, so that her modesty should not be exposed. One of those bloodied pins from her corpse the soul takes as his second gift, and it too is accepted.
The final gift the soul finds, eons later, in a prison yard where a Jew has been sentenced to run a gauntlet. He is beaten savagely as he runs between the two rows of soldiers. Suddenly, one of their whips knocks the skullcap from his head and though he is almost through, he turns back to replace it on his head and collapses, dead. The soul picks up the bloodied kippah for his third gift, and in accepting it, the saints admit the soul into paradise. “What excellent gifts!,” one saint is heard to say, “They are lovely, beautiful—but of no use, impractical.” End of story.
This being our school curriculum, we youngsters in Montreal did not need Harry Potter to catch our attention. In discussion that followed, we concluded that the gifts represented three foundations of our Jewishness (1) the ultimate importance of the land of Israel, (2) the claims of Jewish morality, here represented by modesty (tsni’ut), and (3) knowing that we stand before God: nationhood, moral uprightness, and religious faith. Encompassing them all is the readiness to die for kiddush ha-Shem, in sanctification of God’s name. But we also saw that Peretz himself, even as he respected these values, worried about the nature of these “gifts.” Beautiful, but useless, a voice quips at the end, raising doubt about the very martyrdom the story has dramatized.
This story by Peretz became a staple of the modern Jewish school curriculum. In the Ghetto of Vilna, in May 1943, the Yiddish poet Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever wrote a poem called “Di lererin Mire”—Schoolteacher Mira. The poem begins with the Jews being herded into the ghetto where this beloved teacher, whom Jews in Vilna recognized as the real-life Mira Bernshteyn, defied Nazi orders by setting up a secret underground school. During the roundups in the streets outside, the children laugh as she reads to them from the works of Sholem Aleichem, but the class of 130 keeps dwindling to 60, to 40, . . . until in the final stanzas the hideout is discovered and the remaining children are seized with their teacher—just at the point where she is reading them about the third gift of Peretz’s story. This is how Sutzkever memorializes the struggle for survival in the throes of destruction.
Now this is very moving, isn’t it? What amazing cultural transmission was sustained through a modern educational system. We must be dedicated to passing on this precious part of our inheritance, and this is what we shall continue to do. But if Peretz was already doubtful about placing so much emphasis on martyrdom, we are all the more so today—because this is no longer all that we are as a people.
The creation of Israelin 1948 after Europe’s descent into depravity was, like Noah’s dove, the sign that civilization might continue after all. People have always looked for miracles, but the altogether human marvel of Jewish resurrection should inspire us to transmit to the world the meaning, the significance of our example. The self-transformation of a people from slavery to national independence—does anyone think that this was just an epic story of ancient days? Not at all. Here is the exodus reenacted. Hatikvah indeed—hope that the liberation of the Jews can be a light to the nations. And that was just the beginning:
I could go on and on—and this is what we ought to have been doing—building a curriculum for sharing our know-how with others, and to let them learn from our experience. Israel’s resurrection is a teachable moment for every child and adult in America.
Isaiah declared: “Out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” We who had access to the media and the academy, to Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, Wall Street and Madison Avenue—how well did we get out that word? Most American Jews didn’t try, but instead put out a different message. After what we called the Shoah, the Holocaust, too many of us trusted that the worst was now behind us and that evidence of Germany’s descent into barbarism would inhibit any such future evil.
This was a massive failure of intelligence, for which we continue to pay the price. We, the repeated target of evil regimes, should not have expected the murder of six million Jews to create sympathy for us or revulsion for genocide. We could have guessed from our own history that news of our vulnerability could invite imitation. While Israel built one Yad Vashem and conscripted successive generations into military service, we who continued living among the nations did the opposite. We built 100 Yad Vashems without training our youth to defend and protect our national rights—without training them for a war they would be forced to fight. We did not lose the war of ideas to anti-Zionism: most of American Jewry never entered the war of ideas in the first place.
Everyone agrees that we must learn from history: but what was to be learned? Too many of us let the transformative achievement of Israel speak for itself and expected the story of our genocide to remain the moral Iron Dome that would deflect all further attempts to destroy us. Yet even as the crematoria shut down and one war ended, the Great War against Israel began. Arab and Muslim leaders declared that they would never allow the Jews to recover their homeland. They organized an ideological war against the Jews’ right to Israel, deliberately cultivated generations of Palestinian refugees, and encouraged a campaign of violence that they cannot control even though some of them would now want to, and some of them are trying to. Making that connection between Nazi anti-Semitism and Arab Muslim anti-Zionism was the precise meaning of Never Again.
The likeness of Nazism and Islamism evident in the unspeakable brutalities of the Arabs who invaded southern Israel four weeks ago was already recognizable in 1948. The European and Middle Eastern cultures are very different from each other, and we respect those differences, but the anti-Jewish instrument remains the same. When we taught about Nazism, instead of tracking the connections between the wars against the Jews past and present, we adopted the preposterous notion of “avoiding politics” as though the genocide had been a theological event rather than the political result of a political process with political implications and political clones.
When the Arab-Muslim and Soviet voting blocs combined on November 10, 1975 to pass the Zionism-is-racism resolution at the United Nations, the U.S. ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared: “A great evil has been loosed upon the world. . . . The abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.” Moynihan, channeling his friend Norman Podhoretz, called it a day of infamy, using President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s phrase for Pearl Harbor to call out this “attack on the foundation of the UN and on human progress.” He said that, like in 1941, the entire people of the United States must join to fight this evil, knowing that attacks on the legitimacy of the Jewish people were aimed equally at Americans, and what they stand for.
That resolution was the great turning point in the war of ideas against us. Those who had denied Jews their land were now accusing Jews of expelling Palestinians. The aggressors were recasting themselves as victims of Jewish aggression. Twenty-one nations unwilling to coexist with a tiny Jewish state had the genius to accuse Jews of colonizing and occupying them. But if that was our Pearl Harbor, anti-Zionism’s attack on our national legitimacy, where were our troops, our ammunition, our determination to fight back? Among Arabs and Muslims who came to America in search of a better life came hundreds then thousands prosecuting the big lie of Israel as occupier of Arab land. The call to free Palestine—free it of the Jews—is a civilizational call to bring down our way of life. It was our duty to warn our fellow Americans of how this war was also directed at them. How well do we think we have done?
Israelis themselves let down their guard for a couple of years. Realizing their mistake, they have now undertaken to eliminate Hamas. Since we never sufficiently took up our guard in the first place, we start from further behind. We have to clear minefields upon minefields of disinformation. We must silence the call for Israel’s extinction, which carries overtones of “Death to America.” For decades we have been looking to Israel to be the fighting arm of the Jewish people and the fighting frontline of the democratic West. Israelis will now need time to recover their full strength and we shall have to fight the war of ideas as hard as they prosecute the war against Hamas. The war for Israel cannot be fought in Israel alone: the United Nations is right here in New York.
Let us look at it this way.Back in elementary school, I remember learning about the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of Yavne—how Yohanan Ben Zakkai got smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin so that he could rebuild Judaism on a talmudic foundation. However simplistic that legend, everything that we know of Judaism is an outgrowth of subsequent Jewish adaptation to life in the diaspora. Thankfully, our forebears developed the necessary strategies of survival in order to perpetuate for 2,000 years our nationhood, our moral way of life, and our faith—those precious three gifts that the soul in Peretz’s story managed to gather and that modern Jewish culture helped to preserve.
We are privileged to reenact this transformation in reverse. We have seen the return of Yavne to Jerusalem, the reconstitution of a Jewish state, which calls for recalibration no less creative and no less radical than was once required for Jews to survive without political sovereignty. Now, it is for us to rethink and refashion every aspect of our diaspora lives around the knowledge that we are once again a self-governing people with a restored homeland. Our first task is to secure that homeland politically as well as militarily.
How did I get from a Yiddish story about Jewish martyrdom to the fight for Israel’s legitimacy? We got there through the logic of Jewish history, which, alas, has always been intertwined with anti-Jewish history—those who rise up against us. When we could survive in no other way, we steeped ourselves in our culture—sustained by the study of who we are as a people. The martyrology of the three gifts testifies to the power of that tradition. When we could not fight back, we took pride in dying for what we believed in. Martyrdom, readiness to die for sanctification of the Name, is the ultimate expression of faith of a community that faces extinction. It is not for those with the freedom to defend what is rightfully ours.
On October 7, that itinerant soul hovering over southern Israel could have had its pick of 1,400 bloodied gifts to bring to heaven. That is because the Jews of Israel are no longer living in mediocre times. Israelis have built a great and glorious country. Because they can fight back, they will. The hope of civilization that radiates from Zion cannot be allowed to die.
And we in America can also fight back. First, we shall have to work hard to trade in the Holocaust model of the Jew hiding in Anne Frank’s attic for the ever-victorious, ever-resilient Jews of Israel and America. This is our country, and we will keep it safe from the thugs no matter how they try to intimidate us. Next, we need not and must not keep playing defense as we have been doing by only correcting the New York Times when it promotes a Hamas blood libel as truth; by only protesting and mounting counter rallies against the anti-Jews who threaten and mock us. Important as these actions are, we must redirect the focus to the source of the outrage: the war launched by the Arab League 75 years ago—the most lopsided war in history and by now one of the longest. If the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and other leaders want to change the image of their countries, they can only do it by first undoing that war. We must say to them, “It is true, you have managed to kill many Jews but in doing so, you have degraded your own Arab and Muslim brothers. The longer Iranian ayatollahs promote the slaughter of Jews, the more they contaminate the religion in whose name they kill. We, the ever-living Jewish people, get to write history. So be very careful how you treat us.”
The war against the Jews is always a war against civilization, and those who wage it must be stopped before they destroy our republic. My last point is that the war of ideas needs an army no less trained and no less innovative than that of Israel. The younger generation will have to take the lead in fighting this war in the centers of higher learning and in popular culture. Hard as it is for us who want only to live among the nations to go on the offensive, we are going to have to learn to do it and do it well.
It was once said that Jews are not fighters and yet when forced to defend Israel, Israelis learned to fight like lions. We who believe in the power of ideas have yet to show how we can mobilize to defeat our enemies on that battleground. We shall have to learn to do better.
This essay has been adapted from a speech given on October 29, 2023 at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.
There seems to be one universal reason nearly every Lefty I know says they are a Lefty: ‘the Left cares about poor people.’ I’ve heard this all my life, even from my parents.
I know that the opposite is true.
The Left actually makes life more difficult for poor people in nearly everything the Left does. Regardless of what they say. But I need to present verifiable facts to my friends that will help them see the reality.
The unassailable facts are to look at countries where the national policy is pro-commerce. The test is in the ownership of the major institutions such as power supplies, the oil, steel and the banking businesses. In the pro commerce countries the per capita GDP is dramatically higher than in the socialist countries and poor people are dramatically better off in housing, food and healthcare.
Here are the pro commerce countries where poor people are much better off with the per capita GDP($000):
Singapore $83 A country with no natural resources.
U.S.A $76
Denmark $67 A country with no natural resources
Israel $55 A country with no natural resources when founded in 1948
Japan $33 Japan is much richer but the data is flawed
Here are the socialist countries were the average person has no car, no private home and very little food or clean water:
Venezuela $16 A million people have left this country and income has gone down
Cuba $10 Several million people have risked their lives to leave
Turkmenistan $ 7
Nicaragua $ 2 Much of the population has left
The final fact that poor people benefit from pro-commerce policies and are punished by socialist Lefty governments is China. Terrible poverty under Mao for 25 years, including millions dying from starvation, only relieved by the introduction of pro -commerce policies in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping and rapid economic growth resulting.
That should be unqualified evidence to convince anyone that Lefty policies are not good for poor people. The definition of ‘Lefty’ are policies that are anti-commerce.