One of the great miracles of our day is that communication is now easy for the world, and global commerce is now an assumption. That is good for people who have lived far away from capitalism for far too long stuck to the old village mentality of communism which has plagued most land masses around the world into poverty. For as much as modern politicians hope to relieve the poor of their misery, by standards compared to the rest of the world, even the dead broke in America are far better off than they are most anywhere else. So it is hard to explain to people generations taught into the follies of collective endeavor why American concepts of good living should be adopted elsewhere in the world.

I am certainly not one to impose my culture on others. I have a generally live and let die attitude toward the rest planet earth except in my writing where it is obvious that I care a great deal for the success of every living human being. So for that success to work certain conditions have to be in place to allow the human race to flourish. The general rule is that the more authoritarian the government whether it be a business or a country—the less creative input that citizens have toward the fulfillment of national GDP. For instance, in America, creative companies like Apple, Pixar, Lego, Microsoft, and the Hollywood studios produce more personal wealth and opportunity than most GDP economic purchasing power in most countries, such as Iraq, Iran, India and everywhere else where theocratic religion and communist philosophy are holding back the intellectual power of the people inhabiting those economies.

There is a reason that creativity and personal freedom are utilized in those flourishing American companies because the intention of that strategy is to allow minds to think without the pretense of authoritarian concerns. The end result is a much more robust workforce that directly contributes to the wealth creation of any given enterprise. The more restrictive that minds find their society—the less innovation and wealth that will be created there. It is a very simple formula really. Even in the United States where freedom of thought is taken for granted, not all companies understand this concept, and many still attempt an old approach to job creation that embodied the top down approach so common when America was much more theocratic.

But with the communication barrier down due to the Internet, people from those far corners of the world are able to read the things I say, and they have been up in arms in anger at me in India recently—because of my articles against Obama’s fundamental third world country upbringing and obvious view of humanity that was shaped in that region. The primary reason that President Obama is so messed up intellectually is that he wants to turn America into the type of people he was raised around in Malaysia which means a theocratic society mixed with Hindu and Muslim influence along with small “C” communism so common in most third world economies.

To measure success, which has only recently been readily available to the world because of social media—web sites like this one for instance—much can be learned by looking at how other cultures live. Their lifestyles are directly applicable to their fundamental beliefs. For instance, take Dallas, Texas as an example. When landing at an airport there vast spans of wealthy homes can be seen from a West to East approach complete with swimming pools and large yards. Oil fields are also seen as well as sprawling industry and much economic activity. The highways below are orderly, and speedy—because people have places to get to quickly and without bringing harm to their vehicles.   The airport itself is a sprawling complex with four basic terminals spread over a great distance. The only way to get around from one to another is with a tram system because the terminals are not connected all together to allow room for all the planes coming and going to maneuver. In Dallas to deal with all the economic activity, the airport is spread out to handle all the business there.

Now do the same in Mumbai, India, the wealthiest city in that theocratic country. For centuries the Indians blamed the English for their imperial grip on the people there and thought their freedom gained in 1947 would cast them onto the world stage, but like China and the city of Hong Kong—also a British territory—the best things economically related to Mumbai were put there by the “invading” country. These days landing in that city involves miles and miles of slum neighborhoods that look like children building forts out of cardboard boxes and the economic activity looks like the blood stream of a patient dying on an operating table—its chaos and dysfunction. The traffic patterns are random and impulsive assuming that nobody is more important than anyone else in the mass collectivism of that ancient civilization still struggling to climb out of the Stone Age intellectually without the capitalism attempted by the British.

The highways have lines on them separating traffic, but nobody follows the rules. Some drivers drive right down the middle of a lane that might be four wide, yet there are six lanes of traffic crammed into it—with everyone going their own way. In the city it is even worse as seen in these accompanied videos. There is no order in their approach to traffic, just like their rudderless economies. Without help from the capitalist West, India would slide back into the pre-deluge days of Biblical apocalypse. However, the Indians reading my statements about their country have become angry and have taken insult blaming Americans for having a third world view of their country by looking down our noses at them. Well, it is a third world country that is currently restricted by collectivist oriented religions and political philosophy. Sure I like Indian food, and I like their history—but as for having a dominating economic force—they are sadly behind the times and are a world liability to growth throughout the planet.

It is not enough to surrender modern life to the gods of theocracy then complain when other cultures out-perform them with sheer economic power. In Mumbai they can pray to Mumbadevi all they want, but it won’t fix their nation. Only by accepting the success of the West and putting their own spin on it can they hope to do that, because to date America is the most successful country on the planet taken as a whole, as to culture, racial dissemination, and raw GDP. And the lesson for Americans is to stop apologizing to the world for being so good. It would be excellent to help India become more American, but it would be bad to ask people in the United States to become more like those in India. That would be morally reprehensible.

The traffic patterns in India tell the whole story. Yes, they ride tricycles, motorcycles, small little cars and even animals that can keep up on the highways of India and they don’t crash into each other as much as you would think. But they don’t get where they need to go in a hurry either. This system works just well enough for the Indians because they are a society functioning from collectivism in their religions and political systems. Thus, they carry the same limits to their businesses. This is the primary flaw in their thinking. They can be angry that somebody points it out to them, but it doesn’t make them better by default if they eliminate a superior culture to their eyes and ears. The fact remains that compared to the West, India does not produce enough GDP on their own to care for their people and that is a major tragedy—which then feeds the theocratic nature of their entire national consciousness. 

The key to any endeavor whether it is a small business, or a massive national economy with one of the world’s largest populations—is that freedom of individual thought provokes positive economic growth. This basic psychological emphasis can be seen in the traffic patterns of any society. In India, its chaos and slow, In America it’s orderly, and quick. It’s quick in America not because we’re all godless heathens, but because we have things to do and buy. Theocratic cultures might state that such consumerism is false material worship, but then again, look at the living conditions between the freedom driven culture and the theocratic one–then declare such a thing to be a sin. American standards are only demonized because the rest of the world can’t compete based on their false ideologies which limit economic activity. And now that the world is so small, and those in India can now see how people think in the West—they of course will feel bad. The question is, what do they plan to do about it? Will they just bow down and pray to the Koli goddess Mumadevi, or to the almighty dollar. They all have value in the eye of the beholder—but which one makes lives better, and which one worse? The answer is easy—but the admission is not for the culture that is failing.

Rich Hoffman

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