November 6, 2011: It has been almost 4 years since the United States and the entire Western World has been mired in this recessionary state. What has happened should not be a surprise to anyone. After scrambling for an ever higher quality of life, sending labor-intensive industries overseas, and losing more than 2.5 million manufacturing jobs and more than 850,000 professional service and information sector jobs to outsourcing, we foolishly blame our government and the top 1% of our earning population for our hardships. Most Americans lack the skills and motivation to innovate, and are fit to work only in commoditized industries, yet most of our commoditized industries have been sent overseas. The government has unsuccessfully spent trillions on the economy to lessen market volatility, to reassure pensioners, to bolster bank and corporate balance sheets, and to create jobs. Over the past 10 years, spending growth for prisons has risen at a rate 6x the rate of spending on education because this society simply does not value education as much as it should. The truth of the matter is, we are all to blame. After inflating real estate and securities prices through leverage, after fighting senseless wars in pursuit of oil when we have enough natural gas reserves to last 200 years, and after allowing an entire generation of our citizens to lose their values of hard work and integrity, we ALL are to blame.

Instead of pushing our children to embrace globalization, we have allowed them to grow up isolated from the rest of the world. Instead of encouraging them to be productive and to earn their own keep from a young age, we have allowed them to spend hours watching brainless television and to lose themselves in drugs and alcoholism in communities where families aren’t the norm and divorce rates are greater than 70%. Instead of building secure homes, we have a bred a completely confused generation just asking to be taken advantage of by the rest of the world.

We need to OCCUPY MAIN ST.; we need to restructure America, the American lifestyle, and the American mind before it’s too late. We need to instill passion for innovation and entrepreneurship, we need to teach our children practical skills and make sure that they are proficient in math and science, we need to encourage competition, and we need to instill the values of hard work and integrity into our youth so they can grow up to be proud and self-sufficient.  No able bodied person should feel entitled to anything material in life without providing value or giving back to society.

Today, there are 45 million Americans on food stamps.

The number of very poor Americans (those at less than 50% of the official poverty level) has risen to 6.7%, or to 20.5 million.  This is the highest percentage of the population since 1993.  At least 2.2 million more Americans, a 30% rise since 2000, live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 40% or higher. Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty, which was the largest increase since 1959.  In 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty; today 15.1% of Americans are living in poverty. The poverty rate for children living in the U.S. has increased to 22%. There are 314 counties in the U.S. where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity. More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry. In 2010, 42% of all single mothers in the U.S. were on food stamps. More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid. One out of every six Americans is enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program. I agree that we should help the poor and that compassion is a virtue, but shouldn’t these people help themselves as well? What specifically has caused their plight? Is only the government to blame? Are only the rich to blame? No, of course not.

Inflation adjusted wages have not grown since 1999, the S&P 500 is at 1998 levels, and real estate prices are at 2002 levels.  It is up to us to realize what caused the “lost decade” and avoid a “lost century.”

Why has this happened? By the 1970s, the average American was 20x richer than the average Chinese person. Today, it is only 5x. The Western world rose to power because “they had laws and rules invented by reason.” Our institutions, our basic freedoms and property rights, our discipline, and our motivation to work hard created $130 trillion of wealth in the Western World. Unfortunately, we have lost our work ethic and our intellectual drive. The average Korean works 1,000 hours more per year than the average German. The Chinese soon will have filed more intellectual property patents than the Germans. This is the END of the great divergence between the West and the East. There is little that differentiates us from the rest in a world that is being forced to understand the idea of resource scarcity more than ever before.

In 1776, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, explained how the East lagged behind because it lacked capitalism and property laws. Niall Ferguson explains how in addition to this, Competition, Applied Science, Property Rights, Modern Medicine, the Consumer Society, and Work Ethic propelled the West into prosperity:

This video link by Niall Ferguson shows why the Western world may lag behind as emerging market nations continue to gain in global wealth.

I am sick and tired of watching Occupy Wall Street protests. Stupidity should not be tolerated; we should educate the rest and Occupy Main Street. I asked a protester two weeks ago why he was protesting, and he could not give me a straight answer. His parents unfortunately didn’t teach him the values of hard work and self respect. It reminds me of the guy in this video asking for “millionaires & billionaires” to pay for his college tuition:

Contrast that young man with this young Asian immigrant, who hasn’t been able to set up his business properly in 2 weeks because of the protesters blocking access to his food cart:

I can’t believe I would ever say this, but even Ari Gold knows better: