MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Notes on the Vote

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2024

“For years I’ve watched the networks slant their reporting to straight-up propaganda, and now it has grown to sheer deceit.”

Notes on the Vote

Taki

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the main American media includes many homely, bitter, left-leaning women and numerous bald, left-wing, and equally unattractive men. No wonder, then, that Kamala is the media’s favorite and Trump is referred to as Hitler and, in the words of a Quasimodo type, one Adam Gopnik, “a vile and malignant actor.”

Another universally acknowledged truth is that the main media in America, in lockstep with the entertainment industry, does not object to its left-wing agenda. Network executives, newspaper editors, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not—have decided that everything Trump does or says is vile, and everything Kamala says or does is not. In fact, the media has dedicated itself to destroying Trump, with Anne Applebaum (an old friend) calling the Donald “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Better yet, CBS trimmed and favorably edited Kamala’s answers on 60 Minutes, making her sound and look like a female Demosthenes rather than the inarticulate blowhard that she is in reality. The New York Times, needless to say, has its new Hitler to attack daily, and manages to sling mud at “bombastic billionaires” even in stories that have nothing to do with politics or the Donald. A recent book, a real hatchet job by two drippy Times gasbags about the Donald, was joyously reviewed—surprise, surprise—and an unwatchable movie, ditto.

“For years I’ve watched the networks slant their reporting to straight-up propaganda, and now it has grown to sheer deceit.”

I am writing this column five days before the election, an election that I cannot see Trump winning as long as the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, and even parts of Wall Street are stacked up against him. For years I’ve watched the networks slant their reporting to straight-up propaganda, and now it has grown to sheer deceit. This corrupt media/Democratic Party alliance is a scandal, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. Talk about a biased system. And never have I seen this country more split, with Kamala’s diphthongs that resemble those of a customer complaint robot making headway into Donald’s camp via intelligently placed ads: Pro football is now the American pastime, having replaced baseball, and Kamala’s ads before each quarter reach tens of millions of possible Trump voters announcing the end of any welfare insurances and social security in case of his victory. It’s all lies, of course, but our so-called independent media are not about to denounce it.

The media has clearly chosen to become a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories galore. Just for starters, there are more than 10 million men, women, and children who have illegally made it to these shores since the Biden-Harris duo came into power in 2021, yet Kamala, a border tsar with a broken border, is not held to account, and no Times or Washington Post or network phony has made a fuss about her biggest lies of all. These are people who call themselves journalists but are nothing but activist hypocrites, and I apologize to activists and hypocrites who are not posing as journalists.

There are thousands of migrants from Mauritania flooding into a small Ohio town, with the federal government doing zilch about it, and thousands of illegal Haitians turning an Indiana town into a hellhole, yet it’s Trump the fascist who’s occupying our Fourth Estate at the moment. Almost one million illegal migrants have been given quiet amnesty under Biden-Kamala and can remain in the country without the possibility of deportation. Add to those 10 million illegal migrants in our country since the duo of Joe and Kamala came to power, and you’ll be excused if you reach for your gun.

So, what will happen five days from now? America will go to the polls, and the major networks will do their damnedest to claim irregularities and cheating if the Donald lucks out, and dismiss any irregularities if Kamala wins the top prize. I don’t know why, but this election reminds me so much of the run-up to the Iraq war twenty years ago. William Buckley, who was responsible for my start as a journalist and a very close friend, was pro-war and disappointed in me for not only being against the war in my various columns but also starting a magazine in order to protest it. Yet later on, when I visited Bill in Connecticut, he told me in no uncertain terms that he had been taken in by the neocons and their lies. He was neither the first nor the last to be taken in by what in reality are unpaid Israeli agents.

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The Most Dangerous Democratic Delusion

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2024

Keeping perspective

President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I; then, shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war?

The Most Dangerous Democratic Delusion

by James Bovard

Democracy is a system of government under which the people are automatically liable for whatever the government does to them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people, so there is scant reason to worry about protecting citizens from the government.Freedom consists of more than a mere choice of political masters.
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Throughout western history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have sought to browbeat the citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves — regardless of how much the citizens disagree with the government’s edicts. Thomas Hobbes explained in 1652:

Because every subject is by this institution the author of all the actions, and judgments of the sovereign instituted; it follows, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of injustice. But by this Institution of a commonwealth, every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign, complained of that whereof he himself is author.

Hobbes sought civil peace by imposing an almost unlimited duty of submission via the sham that people are responsible for whatever government does to them: thus, government can never do the people wrong: thus, people never have a right to resist the government. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s canard has become standard equipment in the rhetorical armory of many rulers of democratic states.

A long history of abuses

In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia, petitioned Adams in 1798 complaining of the acts, President Adams responded by denouncing the citizens: “The declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.” Adams’s response to the people of Westmoreland County — few of whom had voted for Adams — was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. Virginia had been unwilling to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights had been added to safeguard free speech, among other rights.

Yet even though Adams openly suppressed free speech, he still claimed a right to not only the citizen’s abject obedience but also a right to be above criticism for suppressing their freedom. Kentucky and Virginia enacted resolutions declaring the sedition act null and void; the Kentucky resolution observed that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 9, 1902, proclaimed: “The government is us; we are the government, you and I.” Yet, at the time, Roosevelt was using the American military to brutally crush a rebellion in the Philippines, which had been conquered by the United States and declared an American territory a few years before. Roosevelt explained that the “constitution does not follow the flag” — the American army therefore had no duty to respect the rights of the Filipino people.

President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I; then, shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced: “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.” How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson’s unexpected racist purge? And how could people have been responsible for Wilson’s pervasive suppression of civil liberties — as well as his pious promises to respect the Constitution? As Harvard professor Irving Babbitt observed in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.”

President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” When Roosevelt first ran for the presidency in 1932, he promised to balance the federal budget — and then later touted his endless deficit spending as a panacea for all the nation’s economic woes. When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation’s highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizens were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them. Likewise, were citizens responsible for FDR’s 1940 reelection campaign boasts about keeping America out of World War Two — or were they to blame of his secret machinations to drag the United States into that war the following year?

President Lyndon Johnson declared on October 28, 1964: “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.” Yet it wasn’t “the people” of Arkansas or Oklahoma who had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to create a pretext to commence bombing a foreign nation.

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Utopians…

Posted by M. C. on November 5, 2024

consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder.

Thomas Molnar-Utopia: The Perennial Heresy

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The revassalization of Europe: The real U.S. war aims in Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on November 5, 2024

Europe is being weakened by this war, even if its elites have enriched themselves through various non-productive schemes.

The empire builders never sleep

The revassalization of Europe: The real U.S. war aims in Ukraine

The United States, in its grand geopolitical maneuvering regarding Ukraine, must have been fully cognizant of the improbability of dismantling Russia’s military strength or eroding its political coherence through conventional warfare or economic sanctions. Such a feat would seem at first to be an exercise in folly, and based on the miscalculations of Western leaders, particularly those surrounding the power vectors of Washington DC, Wall Street, and the City of London. Russia, with its immense territorial expanse, historical resilience, and strategic depth, is so highly unlikely to be brought to heel in such fashion, as evidenced by the results of the conflict, that it raises far more profound questions than one of mere folly. There are few accidents in politics, and by extension, geopolitics.

This nigh impossible task today, however, is in large part publicly justified by a false allusion to past precedent. As a consequence largely of the toll on Russia which was World War I, the Russian Revolution was the product of the intersection of social fatigue and geopolitical intrigue. But the inability of the Russian state at the time to offer much in the way of a viable alternative was the result, from the perspective of today, looking backwards, of the relative economic underdevelopment of the global East and global South.

In other words, the rise of India and China today, as well as Latin America and South-East Asia, and their high significance on the global chessboard, are chiefly among the reasons that Russia cannot be ‘isolated’. Such is the nature of multipolarity. The world of technologically and economically advanced civilizations is much larger today than it was over a century ago.

But since these facts were already the known-knowns in terms of global and situational awareness on the part of the U.S., it raises the question of its true plans and intentions.

Based on a broad and extensive view of the situation, it is clear that the goals of the U.S. were several-fold.

  1. To revassalize the West European economy;
  2. To destroy Ukraine so that its eventual reunion with Russia would be costly in multiple ways;
  3. X factors and the known-unknowns, and the unknown-unknowns could potentially lead to the destabilization of Russia, but this would be a bonus or ‘pleasant surprise’ falling outside of strict contingency planning

This paper will focus on the revassalization aspect, and the last point, 3., requires no further explanation. Point 2., will require its own paper, as a series with this one. But briefly on that question, it will be critical to understand that Russia’s gravitational pull – the combination of its cultural affinity and its economic growth and stabilization trajectory inversely away from the late 20th century collapse period – was naturally leading towards the re-integration of Ukraine with Russia. This means that the U.S. did not view it as likely that they would thwart Russia-Ukraine reintegration, but rather they could manipulate Russia’s red-lines in light of the military aggression of the post-Maidan Kiev Junta, to actually have Russia ‘reset’ much of Ukraine’s infrastructure through the SMO. This makes the cost of reintegration considerably higher than it would have been if not for Western interference.

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The Mainstream Western Worldview Pretends The Global South Does Not Exist

Posted by M. C. on November 5, 2024

Caitlin Johnstone

Whenever you hear western officials talking about how “the international community” views a particular issue, they’re almost always talking about the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few US-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea — while pretending the rest of the world just isn’t there.

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-mainstream-western-worldview

Mainstream western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream western worldview shrinks the earth down to US-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the global south do not share a planet with us.

You really see this illustrated in US presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on “foreign policy” with the remaining two hours dedicated to “domestic policy” and culture war wedge issues despite the the White House’s relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences. Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements. The fact that the next US president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington’s stranglehold on earth’s population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.

Whenever you hear western officials talking about how “the international community” views a particular issue, they’re almost always talking about the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few US-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea — while pretending the rest of the world just isn’t there.

https://twitter.com/TerribleMaps/status/1725185961187741731

You see it in politics, but you see it throughout our culture too. In our movies, our shows, our conversations, our thoughts. We don’t really think about all the exploitative imperialist extraction of resources and labor that makes our lifestyles possible, even though it directly affects damn near every waking moment of our lives. You wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now had not this exact dynamic led to a highly complex electronic device making its way into your field of vision.

We just conduct ourselves from moment to moment like this relationship isn’t happening. It’s as though we’re all walking around with living people strapped to our feet like slippers, but we’re just laughing and talking about the weather and celebrities and how we’re feeling about this and that without ever acknowledging the existence of the human beings we’re standing on top of.

The global south is omitted from our thinking and our conversations in this way all the time, leaving us in this fractured, redacted mental universe where we pretend we’re the only people living in this rapidly shrinking world. Our lives are no less significant or valuable than those of people in Africa or Asia, but we live as though they don’t exist, even when their labor may affect our moment to moment reality far more than the white-skinned person we’re paying attention to in this instant.

This is going to have to change if we’re to become a conscious species and create a healthy world together. Our perception of the world is going to have to reflect the actual world, not just the small cloistered segment which exists within the confines of western civilization. We’re going to have to start thinking about humanity as a whole and stop living the lie that we are not intimately interconnected with the lives on every populated continent.

Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we’re at a dinner party that’s being waited on by slaves. We’re all looking at each other and talking about our lives and our families as the slaves clear our plates and refill our drinks, never acknowledging them or discussing the fact that they’re being kept as material property and forced to do what they’re doing to avoid punishment and torture. Until we demand their freedom and invite them to come and dine with us, we’re going to be in a highly dysfunctional and abusive relationship with them, and nothing will ever feel quite right — because it won’t be.

______________

Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The Election Is About Big Government Getting Bigger

Posted by M. C. on November 3, 2024

Under both Republicans and Democrats, the federal government has become gargantuan over the last 10 decades. This is seen in the promises and proposals the Republicans and Democrats have made in their 2024 party platforms.

Both political parties and their presidential leaders cannot imagine a political landscape in which governments do not “run the country,” which means running our lives.

The Election Is About Big Government Getting Bigger

by Richard M. Ebeling

Shortly after this article is published, we will know the outcome of the 2024 presidential campaign. But whether the winner is one or the other of the two major political party candidates, one thing is certain: the intrusive and heavy hand of government will continue to have sway over our lives after the victor is sworn in as the next president of the United States in January 2025.Both political parties and their presidential leaders cannot imagine a political landscape in which governments do not “run the country,” which means running our lives.
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For a point of comparison, let us look at what the Republican and Democrat Party platforms promised 100 years ago during the 1924 presidential race between Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democratic), along with that of Robert La Follette (Progressive).

The Republican and Democratic Party platforms of 1924

The Republican platform called for continuing a “policy of strict economy” that, under the Warren G. Harding and Coolidge administrations (Harding died in office in 1923, and Coolidge became president), had cut taxes, lowered government spending by 40 percent over the preceding four years, and reduced the national debt by $2.5 billion ($45.5 billion in 2024 dollars), along with running a budget surplus. More of the same was promised if Coolidge was continued in the White House.

In foreign affairs, it was expected that other countries would pay back their wartime debts to the U.S. Treasury. While wishing well to the rest of the world and desirous for global peace through armament-reduction agreements, it was insisted that the United States should not be involved in foreign entanglements that might commit America to military engagements around the globe.

There were some major sore points from a free-market perspective, including the Republican dogmatic insistence on a regime of high American tariff barriers to keep foreign goods out of the United States, in conjunction with other income transfers to agricultural interests. There was a pitch for a strong American-owned merchant marine. In addition, there were proposed government interventions in labor markets for fewer work hours and higher wages. But the platform insisted that American industry should not suffer from government competition or nationalization of public utilities. However, Republicans were very determined to have strongly enforced immigration laws

The Democrat platform of 1924 railed against various instances of high-profile federal government corruption, privilege-giving, and vote buying under Republican rule, especially when Harding was in the White House. The Republicans were said to be concerned with “material things,” while the Democrats, on the other hand, were “concerned chiefly with human rights.” They wanted “honest government,” with more child-labor legislation, stronger antitrust regulation, special farm loan banks, a more “rational” tariff system on imported goods, and greater “tax fairness” through a more progressive income tax to eliminate the “light” tax burden on the “multimillionaires at the expense of other taxpayers.”

While the Republicans called for antilynching laws to protect Black Americans in the South and for a better sense and spirit of respect for equal rights before the law among racial groups in the United States, the Democrats did not make a peep about the southern segregation laws or the violence against southern blacks.

The Democrats also wanted more government control over natural resources in the name of “conservation.” In addition, they wanted to bolster a merchant marine fleet, and, if necessary, through government ownership and operation of such vessels. The Democrats wanted, at the same time, more federal assistance and aid to public schools around the country. They also insisted on vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws, especially against potential migrants from Asia.

Both parties favored the continuation and stricter enforcement of the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution against the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, along with no change with the already existing “war” on narcotics.

The Progressive Party was basically “left” of the Democrats. They wanted tax reductions for everyone except the “multimillionaires,” who were, clearly, not paying their fair share. They wanted federal regulation of railway freight rates to benefit the “distressed” farmers and legislation to guarantee farm incomes. They wanted legal protection and enforcement of labor-union collective bargaining in agriculture and industry and higher pay for postal workers. The Progressives also wanted government ownership of the railways where “necessary,” along with government ownership of the waterways and natural resources.

Growing interventionism, but no massive welfare state

Reading through this brief and abridged summary of the political party platforms of 1924, one can see that all the seeds of increased government control and intervention are already present, with more promised by all three competing parties. The Republicans had cut taxes, reduced government spending, and lowered the national debt. In addition, during the depression of 1920–1921, the Harding administration had basically followed a let-alone policy, allowing markets to correct and rebalance through price-and-wage flexibility and production readjustments to the post–World War I economic circumstances.

But both Republicans and Democrats had their special-interest groups to which they catered and from whom they expected electoral support through campaign contributions and votes on election day.

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Thomas Sowell – Milton Friedman

Posted by M. C. on November 3, 2024

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The BIGGEST Legal Trap For Gun Owners EVER?!

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2024

It is hard to be NOT within 1000 feet of a school.

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No One Is Coming to Get Us

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2024

In a national-security state, fear is the coin of the realm.

Today, it is safe to say that while Americans live under the most powerful government in history, they are also among the most frightened people in the world. That’s not a coincidence. The bigger and more powerful the government, the smaller and more frightened the citizenry.

No One Is Coming to Get Us

by Jacob G. Hornberger

In a national-security state, fear is the coin of the realm. The United States is no exception. In order to justify its continued existence and its ever-growing power and tax-funded largess, the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — must keep the American people afraid, tense, agitated, and nervous. That necessarily means presenting us with a constant array of official “enemies,” “adversaries,” “competitors,” or “opponents” who are coming to get us.

The Cold War racket was a perfect demonstration of this phenomenon. For 44 years, Americans were inculcated with the mindset that the Reds were coming to get us, especially the Russian Reds. As the title of a popular Cold War movie put it, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” Most every American citizen was made to be deathly afraid of the Russians.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

But the Russian Reds were not the only ones who were supposedly coming to get us. There was also the Chinese Reds, the North Korean Reds, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong Reds, the Cuban Reds, the Nicaraguan Reds, the Guatemalan Reds, the Iranian Reds, the Chilean Reds, and other Reds.

There were also the internal Reds who were already here. The civil-rights Reds, including Martin Luther King, the Reds in the Army, the Reds in Congress, and the Reds in Hollywood, including Dalton Trumbo. Some even suggested that President Eisenhower was a Red.

Let’s face it — the Reds were everywhere, even under our beds. And they were all coming to get us.

And then suddenly and unexpectedly, the Cold War ended in 1989. Those dastardly Russians! How dare them to put an end to the fear racket that had proven so lucrative to the U.S. national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors.

No problem. Just come up with a new official enemy who is coming to get us. For the next 11 years, the daily mantra became “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!” Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, who was billed as the “new Hitler,” and who, Ironically, had been a loyal U.S. partner during the 1980s, was now coming to get us. Through the power of indoctrination and propaganda, Americans were made to transfer their fear of the Reds to their fear of Saddam Hussein. Saddam was now coming to get us — and with his supposed weapons of mass destruction.

At the same time, knowing that people in the Middle East would ultimately retaliate, the U.S. national-security state went on a massive killing spree in the Middle East, not only with its war on Iraq but also with its deadly system of economic sanctions against the Iraqi people, which were killing multitudes of children.

The predictable retaliation came in the form of terrorist attacks, such as the bombing of the USS Cole, the bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa, the killings of CIA officials in Virginia, and others. And then the big ones came — the  9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The U.S. national-security state was off to the races again,

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The Left Loves and Hates the Poor

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2024

by Jacob G. Hornberger

So, how did these four men become so wealthy? Well, keep in mind that this was the most unusual period in U.S. history, which is why it’s my favorite period from the standpoint of economic liberty. Imagine: No income tax or IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, national-security state (i.e., Pentagon, CIA, and NSA), (few) economic regulations, public schooling, foreign interventionism (except the Spanish-American War), foreign aid, drug war, immigration controls, and gun control. Like I say, the most unusual society in history, totally different from the type of society in which we live today.

The Left Loves and Hates the Poor

One of the shibboleths of progressives (i.e., “liberals” or leftists) is that they love the poor. However, the truth is more complex. Actually they only love the poor when they remain poor. If the poor get rich, they then hate them.

Consider, for example, four American multimillionaires from the Gilded Age, which is my favorite period of time in U.S. history: John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and Leland Stanford.

The left hates them. All four of them are vilified as “robber barons.” However, leftists also love them.

How is that possible?

Well, they hate them because they were rich. But they weren’t always rich. They started out poor. The left loves them when they were poor because leftists love the poor. It was because they got rich that the left began hating them. If they had remained poor instead of becoming rich, leftists would have continued loving them.

Consider Rockefeller. According to his Wikipedia page, he was “one of the wealthiest Americans of all time.” That why the left hates him and vilifies him. But Rockefeller wasn’t always rich. Wikipedia says that he was born to “con artist” William A. Rockefeller, Sr., who “worked first as a lumberman and then a traveling salesman.” John D. Rockefeller’s first job was as an assistant bookkeeper, during which he “worked long hours.”

Consider Carnegie, another one of the richest Americans ever. But he wasn’t always rich. Wikipedia: He was born in Scotland “in a typical weaver’s cottage with only one room. His father had a “successful weaving business and owned multiple looms…. When Carnegie was 12, his father had fallen on tough times as a handloom weaver. Making matters worse, the country was in starvation. His mother helped support the family by assisting her brother and by selling potted meats at her ‘sweetie shop,’ becoming the primary breadwinner.”

Consider Vanderbilt, also one of the richest people in American history. Wikipedia: “He began working on his father’s ferry in New York Harbor as a boy, quitting school at the age of 11. At the age of 16, Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service. According to one version of events, he borrowed $100 (equivalent to $1,900 in 2023)[7] from his mother to purchase a periauger (a shallow draft, two-masted sailing vessel).”

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