Shooting From the Hip: The cost of socialism in any society

While I was working on the themes for my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, one of my most important stops was the British Museum and sitting in the places where Karl Marx had written his books that literally changed the world.  While in London for this investigation, I took my family to the best restaurants and spent some time investigating the areas around parliament to understand the radical swings of their class structure and how anybody could even think that what Marx put down in his books was good.  After sitting in Marx’s same seats in the museum, I confirmed what I already knew; Marx was lazy and worked his ass off to prove it.  Yes, that is a paradox of terms, but that was what the guy was suffering from.  While his family sat at home, broke and hungry, Marx and Engles at the British museum tried to show the world why the capitalists were evil.  And many in British society who enjoyed the nice things in life felt guilty because they either acquired a lot of power from socializing or other methods, and it rotted their minds with unearned doubt.  So they formed political parties like the Labor Party in England and the Democrat Party in America.  Other places around the world, too, adopted Marx not because they thought it would make a better world but because it gave more centralized power to governments. Hence, the idiocy of Karl Marx spread like wildfire in a dry forest, and rage of destruction swept over the world.  But to my thinking, fires are good, and it benefits people to see things for themselves. That’s why what I wrote in my book was necessary.  Without the stupidity of Karl Marx to highlight the benefits of capitalism with a defense of it in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, people may never have seen the differences between the two. 

That’s what has happened with Marxism mixed in with capitalism; people didn’t notice the little things slowing us all down and constraining productivity.  Marxism has embedded itself in almost everything we do, but people did not see it as it was happening because as long as they could buy their cars, get milk at the grocery, and send their kids to school, they didn’t pay much attention.  But I did notice that it has been a source of constant frustration for me during my entire professional life, which started when I was still a teenager.  One thing about me that has always been criticized was that I “shot from the hip” too much.  People would say that I didn’t take careful aim in my life and take my time when shooting at targets.  That, of course, was a metaphor for my thought processes in how I manage things.  To others, I have always been the reckless cowboy who was too impulsive to be trusted.  Yet mysteriously, everything I have always touched succeeded.  I understood it on a conceptual level, but years later, when I would finally write a book about it, I had to understand it.  Like Marx, many people in the world are too lazy to become truly good at anything.  They grow up, they grow lazy, and they are content to be average.  So they bring this attitude to their businesses, and for their lazy minds, Marx was a kindred spirit.  While they wanted to make money in life, they didn’t want to work too hard to get it, so they adopted little bits of socialism along the way to make it so that they wouldn’t have to work too hard.  This point became very obvious to me once I started the sport of professional gunfighting for competitions.  I watched for years how real gunfighters could draw and shoot a gun by drawing from the hip in under a second.  It seemed impossible to me, but I wanted to learn to do it, so I began the learning process, and once I figured it out, all these other elements became very obvious.  Obvious enough to write a book about what I learned.

One of the premises of communism is equality, which we hear about all the time now that Biden has been inserted in the White House to preserve these gains Marxists have made around the world.  But for equality to indeed happen, we must cripple those who are the best and fastest in life at certain things.  I often compare this metaphor to a hay bail truck full of farm animals traveling down the road at 45 miles per hour.  Up behind them, storming down the highway at 120 miles per hour, is a fancy sports car that can take curves on a dime and run all day long at 200 mph.  Socialist society says that the fancy car has to stay behind the truck because that is the constraint, that is the average, and to be fair, everyone needs to build their life off the average.  The speedy car is supposed to slow down to 45 mph and not pass.  Socialist society creates rules like double yellow lines to keep everyone staying in their lane so that socialism and communism can occur.  However, in America, the rules have always been in reverse.  The fast car was encouraged to pass or have a speed lane to travel in to go as fast as possible.  Speed limits aren’t made for the best and most competent; they are made for the average, the slow, and the lazy-minded.  Those who can’t or won’t think too fast to avoid an accident.  Therefore, the speedy car is penalized and encouraged to be less than it is in a democracy where the majority of the people decide what the average behavior should be.  This is how our businesses have been crippled and how the government has enforced converting America from capitalism to socialism over time.  Through rules and regulations intended to force people to stay in their lanes, not shoot from the hip, and ignite Karl Marx while suppressing Adam Smith.

I’ve always been that guy who shot from the hip, and I’m very proud of it.  Even now that I’m later in my life than when many of these things have been said about me, learning to shoot in Cowboy Fast Draw activities has shown me the essence of becoming better each day.  What seems impossible today may be quite possible tomorrow if only you put a little work into it.  That is what America did best in the past and still is better than anyplace else in the world mired in socialism and communism.  This is also how many of our corporations had become so woke, just as the politicians of England did when scrappy old Karl Marx worked himself to death trying to create a philosophy of government that justified his laziness.  I didn’t feel I could say that based on just my opinions of reading his books.  But I could say it after I sat in his seats and saw the world from all of their perspectives.  Marxism and its birthplace there in London intended to be in the world that hey bail truck going 45 miles per hour.  They created rules in life to protect the feelings of the slow and lazy from the speedy and competent.  And when they called me names like “cowboy” and a person who “shoots from the hip” too much, they might as well have been calling me the most derogatory names humans could call each other, hoping to peer pressure me into accepting average behavior.  But I never will.  Instead, I’ll explain the differences to people with a mind to hear it, and I’m not about to ever accept getting stuck behind slow traffic on the highway.  The goal of all of us should always be to get faster, wiser, and better.  Not to accept the lazy and dim-witted who want to rule the world but are too lazy to do it. 

Rich Hoffman