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History, Current Affairs, Conservativism, Business, Freedom. All in All.
Hosted by author, conservative, business owner, veteran, dad - GH Edwards.
Hey, it's G. Jepards again. The American dream, I wanna talk about that a little bit. But before we get into the American dream, I wanna get into how we ended up with the American dream. Why isn't there a a British dream?
Speaker 1:Why isn't there a Ugandan dream? So it really comes down to there's a fantastic couple of books that I would always recommend if you can read books or listen to them, a big audio person. The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zahian, I think his name is. And Prisoners of Geography by, I think it's Tim Marshall. Great stuff.
Speaker 1:It really explains where we are in the world. And I'm gonna touch in a little bit of those as we go through here. But basically, when it comes to America, we need to realize that let's compare ourselves to Mainland Europe. We've got Germany, we got France, and we got Poland back in there with Russia, and even going up north into the British Isles. They've had people there for forever and ever and ever.
Speaker 1:It's the beginning of time, I swear. People have been in Europe doing European things. When you're in Germany, you are smacked between France and Poland. Okay? You don't have a lot of land to deal with in there.
Speaker 1:So you've gotta make your land the best you possibly can. So you're building out railroads and things like that to cover the small little breaks that you have there and really locking it in, locking it in. So this went on for hundreds and thousands of years. And then eventually, the migration happened over to North America. Suddenly, you had this land that was just immensely bigger than anything the Europeans had dealt with, the Spanish had dealt with, anybody had dealt with.
Speaker 1:And not only that, that was just the coast. They still had to break into the further inland of without America. I'm just gonna talk about just America, which by the way, when you say America, that does mean North America and South America. People in South America do consider themselves Americans. Surprising.
Speaker 1:Right? Didn't know that. Anyways, so as our settlers eventually became America, we started moving west, the Big West expansion. Right? And this is where the American dream was born.
Speaker 1:The American dream is to look out, quote, unquote, West. To look out into open areas to undiscovered stuff and to take a risk and a gamble that may succeed. So I I realized the I use the word succeed on purpose because is the American dream about being successful And is it about being rich? Is it about being powerful or whatever? Is that it?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna discuss more about defining success for yourself and for what you think about in the future. This is getting in more into the business owner side of things. But the American dream, in my opinion, is to be able to make it on your own, be your own boss, run your own thing, and do well at it. That's what I kinda what I define as the American dream. Now that came from our Westbrook movement, our entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:People packing up things in their wagon, heading out west, setting up towns. That's where the towns sprouted from. You got a bunch of congregation of farmers, and the farmers are together and, you know, know, they're on this little area. Okay. Well, they need supplies.
Speaker 1:Right? Let's open up a store. Sell some supply stuff. Crate John Deere in the middle of the country, you know. Why do you think John Deere's out of Moli, No One noise?
Speaker 1:Because this is the middle. This is they built this company to serve the farmers around them. This is how the the companies this is how the towns are built. Chicago is a major trading area, but it came out that way. Saint Louis is right there on there.
Speaker 1:This is why these Midwestern cities were born because entrepreneurs came there and created businesses. So with that being said, the American dream and entrepreneurship are very closely tied together. Unfortunately, entrepreneurship is the title of that has been kind of hijacked to everyone thinks you're a Silicon Valley, you know, tech startup or whatever. Entrepreneurship is something as easy as I wanna start a flower shop in my hometown. I wanna start a a business from home.
Speaker 1:That's entrepreneurship. This is what we should be going for. This is this should be a goal that America should be shooting for. When you go to school right now, my kids are both in school, middle school, high school. None of them are learning entrepreneurial type skills.
Speaker 1:They are learning the basics of of quote unquote how to think and and about history, which we'll discuss the education and how it shouldn't telling you what to think. It should be teaching you how to think. We'll discuss that. And I'll I'll lean into that one right now by saying entrepreneurship is something that's not ever discussed, appreciated, appraised, or taught anywhere else, anywhere in this country. Some of the best entrepreneurs did not go to college.
Speaker 1:And why is that? Because they learned from getting their hands dirty, diving into stuff. And, unfortunately, whenever they've created businesses now, there is a mindset of not appreciating the businesses that we have around us, the quote unquote small business owner operated businesses. These are the ones we should be leaning into. They should be part of our American heart, our bubbling warmth of American pride inside of us that we support our fellow Americans in their small businesses, in their owner operated businesses.
Speaker 1:Now I know they can be a little bit more expensive or they're not as easy as to do, or we can always just go to to Walmart and go there because it's cheaper. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. And that's a whole other discussion about how we're not getting paid enough money to do that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So in order to get supporting the small businesses, we need to have people who do work for big companies getting paid better, which would be a whole another discussion. Discussion. But But this this is is about the American dream and what it means and how it's fallen away. Why is it falling away? Why is the American dream seen as dead, which it's seen as dead because we haven't defined what it really means.
Speaker 1:We need to define what it means. Why is it why is it dead? Why is it not praised? Well, it's competition. When you're creating a small business, you're creating competition for another business, a big company, whatever.
Speaker 1:And you can delve back into the episode on capitalism if you wanna know my position on competition. It's episode seven. Competition is is vitally important, but it can also hamper the growth of companies. This is where we need to have a little bit of regulation in there. Starting a small business, running a small business, succeeding in a small business should be one of our government's top priorities.
Speaker 1:We should be encouraging small business growth through no taxes on small business. Do what you can to help them survive because it's a tough world running a small I've dealt in small businesses for years, and I'm telling you, it's it's rough out there. It really is. And not only that, the American people in general don't seem to support us. When we have a local business owner who is running a business, we should they should be like a a a small town hero, honestly.
Speaker 1:We've got the the military veterans, the police, and firefighters, and first responders, and whatever, and we should have small business owners right there because they are the ones who are keeping the American dream alive. We should appreciate them. We should love them, honestly. We should have a government that bends over backwards for small businesses to help them out so they can create jobs. You wanna know the other reason why small business is important?
Speaker 1:This is an off a little bit of a small business tangent, but generally, they will pay you more. Whenever you have only a few employees, you actually care about those employees. You actually wanna make sure they're taken care of. Their families are okay. When you work for a massive corporation, they do not care about your families.
Speaker 1:So small businesses should be encouraged because it gives everyone better jobs, everyone better opportunity, keeps the American dream alive, keeps us thinking more. So American dream, it's alive. It's there. We just need to define it, teach it, live it, learn it, love it.