Oh, the hubris of man!
Our expert class needs an ass whuppin. Memo to politicians: just because you sleazed your way into office by talking pretty and saying nothing doesn’t make you smarter than everybody else. And for you members of the regulatory state, whose primary mission is to kiss the ass of your political superiors, y’all suck too. And for you academics who have never produced anything of value and know nothing of the real world and feel the need to mouth off about everything, you are the worst of them all. You suck up to the political class by producing “studies” that it needs to extract more money from the productive class. In return you get paid enormous salaries for your apple-polishing brown nosing (see Claudine Gay). You are merely the beneficiaries of a sordid money laundering scheme.
Rachel Levine has (or had) a penis, but thinks he’s a woman. Yet, he’s in charge of our nation’s mental health policies. Dr. Anthony Fauci is/was Washington’s top health expert. His bad advice has likely killed millions of people. John Kerry thinks growing food is dangerous. These are just a small sample of our nation’s most listened to “experts.”
Nothing irks me more than when certain experts, the so-called “economists” take credit for job creation. How many times have we heard a president say “this administration created blah, blah, blah new jobs.” Shut the F up, you didn’t do anything of the sort!
Enter Mark Motley. He’s a buddy of mine and a great guy. Mark grew up in the family auction business. 20 plus years ago, during the “Dot.com Craze,” Mark had an idea for an online auction company, “Thunderbid.” My company, Chartwell Capital Advisors was engaged to do the corporate finance work (raising venture money) for the new enterprise. We had a great team. Nothing is more fun than a “band of brothers” going to war together to get a business deal done. We competed against other Dot.coms, put on dog and pony shows, hustled, laughed, negotiated and finally got the ball over the goal line. We had executed firm commitments from venture funds to place millions into the venture. The day before the funding was scheduled to take place, the Dot.com bubble began to burst. Even though the venture firms were legally committed to fund, they backed out.
Mark put a ton of his own money in the deal. He was tapped out and needed the deal to fund. What did Mark do? Did he raise his voice and jump up and down? Nope. Did he litigate? Nope. He was a complete gentleman. He smiled, took his lumps and went back to running his auction business.
Fast forward to today. My firm is still around. We help our clients with just about everything, investments, legal work, real estate, insurance, etc., and when you die, well we handle that as well. In administering one of our clients’ trusts, we needed to liquidate his collection of rare automobiles. I called Mark and asked what I should do. He said come on by and I’ll show you our operations.
I knew Mark had moved his business some years ago, but I had never seen his new location, which houses the Richmond Auto Auction. It has an auction every Friday. Oh my God! It reminded me of the first time I ever walked into a Walmart, and was amazed with the dozens of cash registers, watching the cashiers ring up thousands of dollars of sales a minute. This is America baby. As corny as it may sound to some, I felt this incredible pride in American capitalism. I felt the same way seeing Mark’s operation, and of course I was very proud of Mark.
Mark’s building had 5 lanes of traffic going through it simultaneously. Hundreds of bidders on site, even more all over the world on the Internet. Anything on wheels was being sold, and I mean sold quickly. There was no monkeying around. Cars, trucks, heavy equipment, you name it. Everything we had hoped Thunderbid would be, Mark was doing and much more, without the help of venture funding. We were “ahead of the technology” years ago. We speculated on whether folks would warm to online bidding and of course at the time did not know exactly how the available technology could be used to make the whole process work smoothly and efficiently. Today, all those things we didn’t know, Mark has figured out. He makes everything easy. Richmond Auto Market will pick up the cars, one can choose to sell “as is” or with a warranty, his folks will even do the DMV work for the client and the money from the sale is wired to the client’s account quickly after a sale. I could not believe how efficient his system is, nor the volume of business.
No politician made this happen. No regulator, no academic. Mark did it. Sure, he had some trials and errors along the way (who doesn’t) but it was his vision, his grit, his work ethic and his money that made it all happen. All the experts do is just get in the way. Imagine if 23 years ago, a group of Washington experts decided it was good industrial policy to create an efficient way to market used cars. We all know they would’ve poured billions of dollars into something that would be a colossal failure. These types of “highly educated” experts are the same geniuses who came up with Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” program where the government (your money) bought people’s cars only to destroy them to solve a non-existent crisis, which of course raised the price of used cars for everyone else. Yes, that made a lot of sense!
Command economies don’t work. It is human nature for those elevated to positions of prominence to think they are enlightened economic deists who are able to put their Midas finger on industry and create magic. But this never works. It is the Mark Motleys of the world who drive the economy forward. They are the ones who are truly educated because they learn every day what works and what doesn’t. Their education is not in theory, but in practical results.
The current climate change/green energy hoax is the biggest (and dopiest) economic boondoggle in modern history. I love fossil fuels. I want to hug fossil fuels, but if and when one day in the far-off future, fossil fuels become scarce, it won’t be some government initiative run by pointy headed experts that discovers an affordable new form of energy, it will be guys like Mark Motley who will make it happen.
The only industrial policy this country should have is one allowing the competitive market place to thrive. Quit penalizing capital and industry with excessive taxation and regulation. The Mark Motleys of the world will do the rest. Markets solve problems and deliver 100% of all our economic benefits. I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly interested in being told what to do by men in dresses or affected blowhards who think growing food Is an existential threat to the planet.
