Copy of AFF Sentinel V21 #57-The Last of 2024
- Steve Dittmer
- Jul 22, 2025
- 4 min read
Time For A Course Correction, Not Destruction of a Marvelous System
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 12/31/24
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Perhaps the end of a difficult year and the beginning of a hopeful new year is a suitable time to reflect a little on how the American system historically has achieved what it has.
Recently, a finance scholar and financier wrote about data that we would wager to guess none of us had ever heard before. It was a fascinating measure of why our system has been the best in the world and deserves preservation from the big government, socialist types who want to “reform” our system of government and economy.
Edward Conard noted that in the last 50 years Europe has created roughly 14 companies worth more than $10 billion, totaling some $400 billion of market value. Americans -- we should stress Americans, not American governments -- have created 250 such companies, with market value of $30 trillion.
Now, big companies are not the only measure of success but that is one staggering statistic. And market value is a reflection of what people are willing to pay for a product or service, as well as the vision and management expertise of a company.
Those big companies have contributed to the creation and maintenance of a middle class that many countries don’t have or have in a much smaller portion of their population than the U.S. That middle class is what enable us to sell $20 steaks at retail or $45 ones at fine dining restaurants.
Conard, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, former Bain Capital partner and publisher of “Macro Roundup,” points out that the gap between America and Europe would be much bigger if we took into account America’s funding of global defense, of Europe using our innovation and drug inventions, stemming from our system that encourages innovation and research, (“Why the U.S. Is Trouncing Europe,” Wall Street Journal, 12/17/24).
Of course, good ideas can come from many places. Drug companies with gargantuan R&D budgets often end up buying some small startup because the little guy had a better idea first. But a tax system that does not penalize success, that encourages innovation and risk taking is essential to innovation. Tax rates that allow companies at all levels to spend money on R&D are essential. They allow development of successful companies that can pay more tax dollars in the aggregate from lower rates on more volume.
There has been discussion lately about H1B visas. These visa are issued to foreign-born workers with scientific, computer and mathematical skills any country needs to innovate fast enough to dominate critical world industrial and security systems. Conard notes that 40 percent of billion-dollar startups were founded by highly skilled foreign-born people. We always hear that America doesn’t produce enough science and math whizzes. Bringing in people who are those whizzes, as long as they come legally and for the right reasons, are a type of merit-based system America has encouraged in the past.
It would seem that makes a lot more sense than allowing millions of the world’s most poor and most criminal into our country with no vetting or restriction at all.
Meanwhile, the industries like agriculture that need more less-skilled labor aren’t being allowed to bring more of those people into our country.
Sometime, people have to understand that there aren’t enough Americans willing or capable of certain work and we need to rebalance our labor types with the needs of a growing economy and increasing population.
One of the things that affected this presidential election was the realization by the average person that they could not afford the “climate change” mandates that government was trying to ram down their throats.
Not only that, but the many trillions of dollars already spent hasn’t stopped the increase of GHG emissions, people are increasingly skeptical that any “emergency” exists and the average person doesn’t even take into account that we may be measuring and prohibiting the wrong things.
Meanwhile, the developing countries are trying to get some $1.3 trillion a year out of the developed countries for their “green climate fund,” when the developed countries can’t even afford what they are trying to do at home, (“The Right Way to Ditch the Paris Agreement,” Wall Street Journal 12/17/24).
It is widely expected that the second President Trump will get us out of the Paris Agreement. After all, that boondoggle was just another UN mechanism to siphon more money into their redistribution system. The left is very good at selecting things which cannot be reliably measured or outcomes proven as mechanisms to create more government apparatus and suck more money out of the free market economy.
Let’s hope 2025 sees the U.S. trashing more of such ideas in order to reduce our debt, encourage innovation and, as Larry Kudlow, Steve Moore and Art Laffer term it, unleash prosperity in American again.
Our address: Agribusiness Freedom Foundation, P.O. Box 88179, Colorado Springs, CO. 80908.
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