Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  But why can't we find homes which aren't in subdivisions? Well, because individual homes will normally be built by independent general contractors. The large tract builders, with economies of scale enforced by regulations and licensing, are much more effective at scooping up land and plunking down cookie-cutter homes. And even the independent general contractor often finds himself only able to build on specific lots within these subdivisions. He just can't compete with the large builders when it comes to snapping up the available land.

  So our low-efficiency thermal collectors are stillborn. And yet, there could be other possible benefits to these. Sadi also tells us that these same thermal power installations, boosted with burning of garbage or wood, would increase their output out of proportion to the heat added. But to do so would be to challenge the planet, we are told. And produce things like icky smoke, which chokes the suited monkeys in their traffic jams, but feeds our plants as the rain washes the smoke from the sky.

  This is but one simple example taken from one area of interest. The collective knows no bounds in constructing limitations on your ability to excel, regardless of your specialty. Each day the productive individual considers questions like these, and knows the answers as his subconscious mind excites him to try. But the conscious, rational mind knows that success will be blocked from him at every turn.

  So the solution?

  Simply give up and accept your place in the service of the collective?

  Nope. There is a way out, regardless of your expertise and position in life. And it is simple.

  Redefine success.

  Appreciate success as control of your life. Enjoy the ticks of the day with those you love the most. Enjoy exploring God's nature and appreciating its beauty.

  Start your own business doing whatever it is which improves the quality of life for others, and which they are willing to pay you for. Trade your effort for theirs and you both win. Don't see yourself as a specific business, but instead commit yourself to destroying the monkeys economically by doing whatever they get paid for, only better, faster, cheaper, and with less drama. But don't hire a single soul.

  Enjoy denying the monkeys the fruit of your effort. Provide for your needs, and as much more as you wish, but not enough more so that you become sucked in again to their web.

  Develop that Depression Era mentality, not to survive collapse or to fight a war against your productive kinsmen, but instead as a weapon to deprive the collective. They surround us. But they need us. But we don't need them. For anything.

  Get in touch with the basics of life. Understand the crafts of centuries past. Then apply your knowledge to improve them. Don't abandon the tractor, but instead learn better how to maintain and fuel it. Don't abandon the microchip, but instead learn better how to employ it to pump water.

  Grow your own food and raise your own chickens. But not as your grandparents did. Instead, use the technology we now have to ease this task as you enjoy the leisure. And as the monkeys slowly starve without you.

  Enlist your subconscious mind to help you answer the question, "What do I need?" And not "What do I crave?" Because your cravings help them imprison you.

  Get your subconscious mind to help you find out what you can do to provide value to your fellow producers so that you might meet your needs through service to these few others. And then excel at that work.

  Equally important, collaborate with your subconscious mind on ways to automate away your need for help. If you have to, fire products or services or customers, starting with the most difficult first, to avoid having to hire an employee to handle that work. The high-value tasks which are left are generally the most easy to automate. You may have to learn new skills to do this, but embrace that effort as a joy in itself.

  Recall the diagram below, which relates the cost of automation to the cost of labor.

  As we discussed before, each regulation which comes along forces a purely economic decision whether to automate a task or continue doing it by hand through labor. I also started an example of a potter, and all the tasks which face even this simple vocation, long ago rendered obsolete for other than artistic purposes.

  Recall in our discussion that each new regulation increases the cost of labor sufficiently so that additional jobs or skills fall victim to the chopping block. Further, industries or enterprises, large or small, which don't automate these tasks soon find themselves as obsolete as the potter is now. It doesn't matter what your level of skill, you can't produce pots by hand cheaply enough without the machine to sell them in quantity.

  Some entrepreneurs then take another approach, and that is to advertise their offerings as specialized boutique items. "Hand-crafted pottery!" they might claim. In a shrinking economy, or an imploding economy if this book is taken to heart, boutique dies first. In any event, China has a lot of hands who could be crafting.

  Just after presenting that diagram the last time, I asserted that, for an entrepreneur, it makes sense to automate a task away long before a simple cost calculation would justify doing so. How can this be? How can you automate before it makes economic sense to do so?

  Two reasons. First, having read this book thus far, you know that costs of employment will continue to rise. As workplaces become more and more adult day care centers, you will be subjected to endlessly increasing regulations and restrictions which increase the cost of employment. These costs never go backwards in any meaningful way.

  So, by automating a marginal task now, you have an undeniable edge over your competition, large and small. When a new regulation wanders by which forces the rest of them to scramble to catch up, you will be smiling and thinking about the next task or skill you are automating away. I laugh each time I find myself in this situation.

  The second reason to automate before it makes economic sense to do so also relates to the adult day care nature of modern employment. Unless your ambition is to run a day care, chances are you didn't go into business to run one. Especially not for adults. In fact, you probably wanted to start your own business to escape someone else's vision of you as needing day care. Now that you understand the creative process, you can appreciate how employee drama itself creates another category of cost, as shown in the diagram below:

  The real cost of employee drama, when considered in light of its ability to destroy your creative flow, represents an increase in the cost of labor. The -ΔQ which this person inflicts, or threatens to inflict, decreases your creativity and your ability to think. The first time a key employee misses a deadline or an important appointment or fails to show for a critical push, you will fully appreciate what I mean. You will appreciate it more when you consider what creativity you lost as you had to fill in to get the work done which you had hired them for. You will appreciate it even more when you hear a sob story about their dog getting loose and you imagine them flinging your cash to the wind as they look for their flea bag.

  You may be tempted to hire another monkey to take that one's place, or worse, hire a second so that one can always back up the other. When both are off chasing their drama at the same time you will watch an opportunity vanish in front of you. Or you will scramble even harder to preserve an unexpected opportunity. When this happens, just remember that I told you so. Worst of all, the creativity which they destroyed, while you scrambled to deal with their absenteeism or their demands or the regulations which force your hand, is the seed of your future. While you are busy handling issues which you thought were already planned away, you are prevented from planning your next opportunity.

  Rather than reacting to today, lean back and think. Think about how to get rid of that next task which is almost at the edge. Learn how to automate that task or buy a machine to do it, even if you have to take some old bag of bolts and get it running yourself. Come to think about it, that last is probably the best, since you will learn something in the process of fixing it. Or introduce you to new services or products which you can provide. Or decrease your cost of automation across the entire spectrum of work,
making it easier to automate all other tasks which face you.

  Automation isn't just mechanical, either. Learn how to use spreadsheets and databases and HTML and Javascript or Python, and find out how to get all these things to work together. Commercials on TV make fun of entrepreneurs who try to do these things for themselves. Of course they do, they are trying to sell you Indian bugs so that you can spend your day becoming an expert with their flaky product instead of becoming an expert yourself. Once you start understanding how to manage your data, such as purchasing and invoicing and inventory, and the tools to do so, you will understand the inefficiencies in your business. And then be empowered to fix them yourself instead of hoping they won't take you under.

  Or, decide whether that task can be done differently, or in a different order, or eliminated entirely. Does the task stem from a specific problem customer, or a product line which generates endless support costs? Then kill it off and focus your energy somewhere else. If your customer isn't willing to pay the cost which is required to provide that product or service, why should you subsidize it?

  By constantly automating and chopping out inessential tasks, tomorrow will be free for you to repeat the process. Eventually, this outlook will create a snowball which makes you more efficient, and your costs lower, your best customers happier and your profitability larger. Or you can let your employees snowball you.

  An entrepreneur's task, in our modern world, is now primarily to destroy jobs wherever we can. This is the single most effective way which you can become more efficient in whatever product or service you are hoping to provide. But to do this, you have to learn, and you have to think. No longer can you just struggle and hope that hard work is enough.

  I can teach you how to think, but I can't tell you what to think. I can tell you where to go to learn what you need to know, but I can't tell you what you need to do once you know these things. You have to answer these questions for yourself. That is the essence of free trade, that you know best of all what is best for you. Anything else which anyone might tell you about what to do is necessarily worse than listening to your own judgement.

  I would like to tell you that you can become completely self-sufficient, but I would be lying to you. The collective ensures that self-sufficiency is out of your reach. Property tax must be paid, or they will seize everything you own. Health insurance is a moral necessity for caring for your family, and this is held deliberately expensive to thwart the individual and force him into a herd. Clothing, medicines, dental care all require cash.

  So living in the woods as a hermit is not an option. Nor should it be, you have a right to enjoy the things in life which satisfy you. And your subconscious mind demands some of these comforts so that it can work at peak efficiency to help you succeed. To pay for these things you need cash, and for this you have to play the game. But learn the rules so that you can play it well.

  Incorporate so that you can flow your pay through your company. Mend a fence? Have the check written to your company so that you can extract the value through your expenses before the tax man reaches out his hand. Those precious few dollars which make it to you as pay entitle you for assistance as a pauper. Earned income credit will dramatically increase your pay, as your tax bill shrinks. Wear the garb of a monkey and screech as you, your boss, pay you as little as possible, then clutch at all the bananas and coconuts to which a monkey is entitled.

  Apply for each dollar of every grant and handout you can find. Need a fence? See if an agricultural grant applies. Dedicate yourself to ferreting out these resources, which were meant as a chain around your neck as you struggled to pay for them. Wrap this chain around the neck of the collective instead and pull with all your might.

  The details change from year to year. A deduction which is fine this year will be closed the next as a new one takes its place. These deductions will always exist, as they are intended to serve the needs of this segment or that. Your task is to find them when they change. Filter your health insurance through your company while it is allowed, and then follow the deduction when it isn't. Build fences when the elites clutch at grants for fences, build ponds when the elites fund theirs. The monkey collective will always leave holes for itself as it tries to choke you out of hiding and back into your cage. Train your subconscious mind to find their warrens and then dig your own holes to match theirs.

  And always follow the law and document everything you do. Recognize that the majority of the cost of entrepreneurship comes in the form of those you hire. Each of the workers described in the previous chapter imposed various amounts of transactional -ΔQ on their organizations. Only the high-value idea workers add +ΔQ. As a productive entrepreneur, this guy is you. All the rest merely mitigate -ΔQ, or impose their own -ΔQ as they dramatize your life.

  The fewer employees you have, the fewer opportunities they have to inflict -ΔQ on you, and to drain your wallet and your energy. Ask your subconscious mind to help you figure out ways to achieve your goals yourself. And where you can't, contract and trade with others like you so that both of you avoid employees.

  Without employees, you can pay yourself and taxes once a quarter and still satisfy the tax man. With an employee, you have to pay taxes each time you pay them. The mere fact of adding the employee adds administrative burden to your life which adds unnecessary -ΔQ. If starting out, aggressively seek ways to avoid that first helper, no matter how much it seems like this should help. This is the most carefully hidden trap of all, and you must avoid it at all costs. You will soon find that a network of corporations, each run by your productive trading partners, sidesteps this trap entirely.

  You have to stop seeing your employees as dependents who need your care. This compliance technique traps you into making the wrong short term decisions, instead of the long term decisions you need to be making. Most of the impending legislation which will contribute to a collapse is based on penalizing employers under a false promise of helping the employees.

  The single most important thing you can do to avoid the snares of the monkey collective is to get rid of every single employee you have. All of them. Those who you need to help you, help them become incorporated themselves and hire them back as contractors. Then both of you benefit by deducting your legitimate business expenses, which are not deductible in many cases as an employee. The effectiveness of this strategy is based on the same monkey suit which Congressmen and their lobbyists use for their own protection. Like them, you want to appear to be a suit-monkey in your professional life, and a pauper welfare-monkey in your personal life.

  You will also need equipment. Welders, power tools, tractors and construction equipment of all kinds will soon be on your list. Avoid buying any of these new, except items like chainsaws, where their nature soon destroys them in careless hands. Learn about hydraulics and diesel engines, as these are the most efficient movers we have. Pneumatic and gasoline engines are more common, and best at some applications, but lack the concentration of effort of the former. Learn to repair anything you need, and soon you will have a skill worthy of serving others in exchange for what they have and can do. Attend auctions for your materials, and scour the salvage yards. Use the Internet, while it still exists, to find deals and avoid scams by learning from the experiences of others. Enjoy the simple satisfaction of providing for yourself, and you will avoid much of the need for cash which would otherwise trap you in servitude.

  Ditch your employee mindset, and develop instead an entrepreneurial mind. If you are unemployed, use this opportunity to restructure your life so that you think and act like a business instead of an employee. From this mindset, see those who you work for as clients instead of bosses. The distinction is important. We help our clients become successful so that we get more work from them. But too many see their bosses as merely sources of checks. The idea of a job has been created by monkeys to trap us.

  Another advantage of being your own corporation is that you can tap into more than one stream of revenue. This works out better for ever
yone. Your clients can use your services on demand, which makes them more likely to come to you rather than take on the responsibility to hire someone. And you get to spread your risk of employment out by not depending on only one source of work. A network of producers structured this way is much more like the tribal economy discussed earlier in this book, with all the advantages to the spirit and the pocketbook which come from being in a society of free men trading freely with each other.

  Another key advantage of adopting the client-contractor mentality is that this is exactly the economic spirit which will be required to pull us out of a collapse, if such a thing happens. Employees will be concerned about their health benefits and paychecks and where they can spend or deposit their money. Contractors and clients will already have the right attitude, just without all the tax forms anymore.

  As we provide the monkeys with less and less, they will clutch more and more at what remains. As they fall deeper in debt, they will print more and more money, which will inflate to be less and less, and dissolve any savings you might have. Your reaction to this destruction of your value? Follow them down into debt. A famous financial pundit advises people to pay off their debt and to accumulate cash instead. At his age, he should know better. Anyone who lived through the seventies or eighties knows the true value of a fixed-interest loan in times of even normal inflation.

  And what we are about to experience can best be described as hyperinflation. At no point in our nation's history have we had so much public debt, and so many feeding at the trough, and so few filling the trough. And so many regulations to bind them as they try. Even the nightmare of the seventies looks tame in comparison; as I have said before, I would love to have that simple regulatory environment. Any nation in history which has been in this situation has first turned to printing money faster, rather than casting off the chains on the productive. When that happens, hyperinflation is sure to follow.