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What Steve Wynn Says About Capitalism, Or, Why We Conservatives Need to Tell a Lot More Business Stories
From a friend who just watched the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Steve Wynn:
Steve Wynn was great — an unexpectedly good story teller. Michael Lewis, George Gilder, Charles Ellis, Walter Isaacson and others have shown that the stories behind American business are fascinating.
He continues:
Our university and intellectual tastemakers are uninterested in these dramas. But the rest of America has an insatiable appetite for it. The “you didn’t build that” story line was overplayed. But telling the positive stories behind American ingenuity and success is a path back to success for the Right and the country.
The message that the American economy is built on dangerous fracking and job abolishing tech billionaires is wrong. Energy is a huge success for us at home and for our foreign policy. Technology is allowing more Americans to access opportunities for leisure and enrichment. Platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Kickstarter, and others are allowing small middle American businesses to compete against larger firms by connecting them directly with customers and investors.
Technology even helps us to enjoy a more “natural” or “organic” life. Two days ago I ordered on my iPhone a box of affordable, fresh, and tasty organic and locally grown produce from FreshDirect. It arrived within 24 hours at my door. My wife orders all the chemical-free baby items she can find through Amazon. She plans our meals with an infinity of mommy-bloggers who share their traditional foods approach to cooking.
Our family’s quality of life is superior in America because of American businesses and the entrepreneurs behind them. In a sane world, this would be the dominant narrative.
Telling the positive stories behind American ingenuity is a path back to success for the Right.
My friend is surely correct about that, don’t you think?
My question: How do we on the right tell such success stories without falling into the Mitt Romney trap — that is, without seeming to glorify tiny numbers of entrepreneurs while alienating the huge numbers of ordinary people who are lot less interested in starting companies than in holding onto their jobs, finding health insurance, and paying their mortgages?
Published in General
We start by only using the word organic to describe the spontaneous order created by unfettered voluntary transaction, and never for fruit.
Tell personal stories of workers moving up the ranks within a company or industry. Tell about persons who live in better circumstances than their parents ever did.
Talk about how companies served customers or aided their own employees without prodding from government.
Share the tales of (legal) immigrants and how different their lives are in America because of freedom rather than handouts.
Talk about the awe-inspiring magnitude of America’s private charity from individual donations and non-political organizations. Talk about goats for families in South America, mosquito nets for families in Africa, private aid for India and Asia in the wake of the tsunami, etc.
Above all, emphasize individual stories over statistics. Affect is effect.
He was very good. However, the audio-only podcast ends — apparently prematurely — at about 25 minutes.
I just watched the video which ends with a card that says the interview concludes in Part II, which I assume is yet to be released.
Part II will be out next week.
Please not mosquito nets. Several governments in Africa are begging for DDT – as well they should.
We can only do what governments allow us to do. That should be the flip side of these stories — how much more we could do if government would only get out of the way. But it would probably be more effective to emphasize heartwarming stories.
What some African nations seem to need even more than DDT is a Western power to depose the warlord/gangster who steals all the food and supplies we send and butchers his own people. Sometimes I wonder if a private military corporation funded by private donations and business interests could solve some of those problems. But, again, Western governments wouldn’t allow it.
I don’t know how old Steve Wynn is, but the black hair isn’t fooling me entirely. Wynn and others ‘got there’ in a different time. It reminds me of my step-father who was class of ’39 at Princeton. He could have never, ever, been accepted into this elite school now, or even in 1978, yet he remained blissfully unaware of what Princeton had become. Many of his friends were Tiger alumni with prestigous jobs in New York, and they too, were oblivious. At one of their many cocktail parties I had an epiphany: few – if any – of these men could get into Princeton, or any Ivy League school, today (and that was 1978). No, they weren’t that smart, and no, they didn’t get that much of an ‘education’ by what I could see. I don’t begrudge and I’m not envious, I just would like to see some realism and humility.
The same is true with people like Steve Wynn, who would be unable to duplicate his success, or anything close to it, in today’s environment. The first thing I’d avoid is using the likes of Steve Wynn as poster-boy success stories. I think the right needs to tell the failure stories of what socialist policies and an ever-expanding government have brought us.
Cheerleading for capitalism (in it’s current incarnation as increasingly cronyist) does not impress, and people see whatever amenities and luxuries from the private sector as their god-given right. It would take a Galtist movement to awaken them.
Despite being presented with all manner of propaganda from the HR department, people do not feel any loyalty from their employers, and they are right to be extremely skeptical of any claims. It is extremely difficult to advance through the ranks of today’s corporations, who often hire managers and execs from outside the company (and country) and those jobs don’t pay what they used to either.
They know they can’t start a small business without being squeezed and hounded by regulators and inspectors, taxed fined and fee’d, sued and harrased by frivolous charges, and even set upon by larger, better-connected and lawyered-up competitors. So, instead of trying to channel Reagan, who had cause to be optimistic in 1980, I’d suggest the GOP get with it in 2014’s reality.
“Telling the positive stories behind American ingenuity is a path back to success for the Right.”
Not really. First, it’s been done. It doesn’t speak to principles, it’s just rah rah free-enterprise. If you have to convince people free enterprise, risk and entrepreneurship is good, you’ve already lost the argument. Nevertheless, Democrats (like Steve Wynn) also claim their ideals honor free enterprise – the acceptable kind, and whichever companies are interested in becoming Dem donors.
Wow, Franco. Tell us how you really feel.
Taking another online forum, imgur, as representative, it seems like many youth blame the prior generations for the current job climate. What they see are out of touch people who fail to recognize the things you pointed out and fail to demonstrate any humility.
Will attempt a transcription in a followup comment.
see also:
Being a successful businessman does not automatically turn someone into a good flag bearer for capitalism. I respect private equity but making millions in private equity, as Romney did, is not the same as being an entrepreneur who risks everything for one great idea. Romney’s risk-taking was relatively modest in comparison and was backstopped by his and his father’s connections.
For the same reason, it irks me when Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers grandstand about capitalism. That is not the game they are in, even though they think it is.
And I don’t think that a casino owner is the best spokesperson for capitalism either. Or a tobacco or alcohol mogul. All of these people offer a desirable product but nonetheless one that preys on the weakness and addiction of others. I respect their success but they are not the right spokesmen.
http://imgur.com/gRggfnl transcribed:
Yes! This is gold!
You can’t. That ship has sailed. I still remember a thread here in which those people more concerned with holding their jobs and paying their mortgages were described as mere dead-eyed janitors, not worthy of inclusion at a Romney campaign event, because they weren’t really Americans.
Americans, we were told, all want to be millionaire business men, or else they aren’t really American.
Mm-hmm.
I am thoroughly, viscerally tired of getting lectured about the hero-entrepreneurs and their glorious ambitions. At this point when I hear such talk I have an intense urge to grab my wallet- not that it matters, because the politically connected can simply order me to hand it over, at gunpoint.
Consider me alienated. To put it mildly.
Maybe we’re focusing on the wrong kind of entrepreneurs. As much value as a skilled hedge-fund manager brings to the economy (and thus to other people), there are stories of smaller-scale success that are far more moving – and easier for the average person to relate to.
Like the stories of former welfare moms who managed, against so many odds, to start successful small businesses. Or perfectly ordinary people who turn a minor cottage industry into a thriving small business. Such stories are easier for regular people to relate to and quite often demonstrate that one of the vicious forces keeping the little many down today is overregulation.
The Institute for Justice tells these people’s stories. If IJ hasn’t yet been on Uncommon Knowledge, maybe they should be.
Hear hear. Get Clark Neily on Uncommon Knowledge.
I heard him interviewed on the Dennis Prager show and thought he was great.
http://www.ij.org/staff/cneily
http://www.amazon.com/Clark-Neily/e/B00E93GZCG
On video, Mr Wynn sometimes seems to be unintentionally revealing that he respects his low level employees about as much as B.F. Skinner respected pigeons. And unless you’re paying a person, or he believes you can hurt him in retaliation for tuning you out, a person who doesn’t believe you respect him, or people like him, will find an excuse to ignore the truth in what you’re saying or tune you out.
A speaker who I almost immediately assumed had stories about businesses that were relevant to my life and anyone else’s is Clayton Christensen. He really does convince people watching his videos that he genuinely believes we’re all entrepreneurs or CEOs who have been put in charge of managing different but equally important companies , and that the good and bad decisions we CEOs make are essentially the same good and the same bad decisions.
Someone like Christensen can radically change for the better the way ordinary people view entrepreneurs, businesses and their own lives.
I see problems. Your statement about those Stakhanovite hedge-fund managers, who risk compression fractures to the spine lugging their vast bonuses to the bank, seems to me an assertion not in evidence. Romney mistake #1. Anyone not immediately interested in starting a business immediately tunes you out, as you aren’t saying anything of interest to them. Romney mistake #2. Third, I lived through the Bush Era, and I remember. He did essentially nothing at all to stop the endless rising tide of red tape. In fact he added more, such as the light bulb ban. That apparently came about because GE lobbyists were unhappy about the low margins for their light bulb business, and wanted to force people to obtain light from a more profitable source. Romney mistake#3.
1. The GOP needs to shut up about the glories of Wall Street. 2. Talk about freedom, instead of business ownership. 3. Practice what the party supposedly preaches, and ditch the crony capitalism.
Of course if the GOP could do that…