On my son’s first day of school, the teacher asked the class what their fathers did for a living. My son answered, “My Dad is a dancing chicken.” I was an awesome dancing chicken. I was a serial entrepreneur and owned 14 “chicken and biscuit” fast food stores. I was spending tens of thousands in monthly advertising and was not happy with the results. Why not don a feathery 7 foot chicken suit and dance the fool in front of traffic? I even laid down in front of traffic once, forcing cars to go through our driveway or run over me. A self- employed businessman wears many hats. He’s a leader, a manager, a day laborer, a human resource director, a lawyer, an accountant, a financier, an advertising guru and yes, sometimes a dancing chicken. In business, if something is not working, you adapt and change and find something that does work, aka The Dancing Chicken Rule. My experiment worked, and I soon had 14 dancing chickens saving me $25,000/month in advertising costs. My sales jumped 24%.
I have always said the problem with Washington politicians is none of them have ever screamed James Brown lyrics and danced the Camel Walk in a chicken suit in front of ongoing traffic. In other words, they have never applied the Dancing Chicken Rule to themselves. Neither have any of them been in their office on a Friday afternoon with no idea how they were going to make payroll. One Friday afternoon 25 years ago, I had 350 chicken store employees needing to get paid in 2 hours and my major food vendor was demanding immediate cash payment or else no Saturday delivery. I didn’t have the money. If I pay the vendor, the employees don’t get paid and the business closes. If I pay the employees, the business shuts down on Saturday. Miraculously, I got through it. What I did to get through it is another story, and let’s just say they don’t teach these things at Harvard Business School. Those were tough days. For a while, every day was hand to hand combat against the Huns at Verdun, but we made it. I continued to grow the business and add stores and eventually, I sold it all to a New York investment bank.
My point is, having no experience idiots in Washington direct economic policy is akin to having Boy George lead you into combat instead of Audie Murphy.
In the real world, businesses don’t have the option to print money. Hard choices are made, creative solutions inevitably lead to innovation and greater efficiency. Having a meat cleaver about to descend on one’s testicles provides plenty of motivation for change. It also builds character. I’m a better person for the tough scrapes I have been in. Besides, being a eunuch is not very appealing. To politicians, academics and other theorists, money might as well be the stuff that comes in a Parker Brother’s monopoly box. To others, in the practical and productive world, it is real, because it has to be earned. Everything good in the world comes from regular people (who are also afraid of becoming a eunuch) producing goods and services that other people buy voluntarily. The public sector is the polar opposite of the private sector, it produces nothing, deters ingenuity, abhors efficiency and wastes money on a massive scale. Shouldn’t policy be made by those in the real world who produce everything? Shouldn’t those with a PhD in the real world be at the helm?
Getting a Real World Studies PhD begins in adolescence with a job. Ben Franklin started out as a candle maker, Washington a surveyor, and Hamilton was a sales clerk. Our education system is completely backwards. Young people need to work first, and get educated along the way. Never having any practical experience in the real world and then showing up to your first lecture in Gender Studies at Yale is a recipe for becoming a useless idiot for the rest of one’s life. However, having a degree in Useless Idiocy will likely land you a seat in Congress or a cushy job as a Washington apparatchik.
Critical thinking skills are best developed by doing adult work before adulthood. These early experiences made Franklin the keen observer of human nature that he was. The embryo of Hamilton’s financial acumen was his background in trade and commerce clerking in a British West Indies import-export house in his early teens. By the time Washington was 21 years old, he had so much real world practical experience that he was appointed commander of four Virginia militias and was sent as a special envoy to the Ohio Valley to tell the French to pack their bags and leave.
I attended “so called” prestigious universities in the US and England. I have a doctorate. I don’t value any of it, though I did have fun getting drunk and chasing women on bucolic college campuses. The education I value most were those long, hot Virginia summers driving creasote pilings into the Rappahannock River as a 13-year old. Ah, the joy of a lunch time Grape NEHI soda pulled from a country store drink box! At 16, I matriculated to sawmill work. During my first week at the University of Virginia when the liberal professor tried to fill my head with leftist worker oppression nonsense, I wasn’t buying it. I had already experienced the absolute euphoria of being rewarded for hard work and the boundless optimism and hope for the future that America was offering me. I also knew that there were a lot of lazy bastards and complainers who would never amount to anything.
I live near a major urban university. On a daily basis, I see pasty, tattooed, doughy, slovenly dressed kids with nose piercings and dyed green hair. These kids don’t have any muscle tone, indicating they have never done any physical labor. They don’t seem to care that they are 20-30 pounds overweight. They are all woke and mad at the world. I see them drinking their $6 lattes at Starbucks, and I just want to beat them up. Not because I hate them, I just think it would be good for America if I did. They have all been spoon fed the proselytizing pap of the professorial class. Translation, they don’t know jack.
My point? Academics without real world practical experience in business and commerce leads to being ruled by bloviating airheads like AOC and vacuous sanctimonious fools like John Kerry. The poster child of sanctimonious fools, Anthony “Science” Fauci has never practiced medicine and has been a government hack for 52 years, yet he tells actual, real world doctors how to treat patients. He’s been stunningly wrong on everything. One example, doctors who actually treated patients knew that Hydroxychloroquine and Invermectin were remarkably effective at treating Covid 15 months ago, but Fauci told them and the whole country they were wrong!
Perhaps had he ever been a dancing chicken as opposed to playing with his chicken, his performance on the national stage would not have been so fowl.
