Imitation is Flattery

Whenever a sports team becomes dominant in its league, other teams seek to figure out the secret sauce and replicate it. When the San Francisco 49ers began to execute what they called the “West Coast offense” in the 1980s and went on to win three Super Bowl championships that decade, we began to see multiple other teams adopting that style. When the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan won six NBA championships in nine years using their “Triangle” offense, other teams copied that as well.

This is not unique to sports. When The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight hit the Billboard Top 40 in 1980, it was quickly followed by other artists and hip hop has been among the most popular musical genres over the last 40 years. The history of pop music is filled with trend setters who are soon followed by numerous imitators. Likewise, fashion icons like Jackie Kennedy and Madonna influenced fashion trends. Everyone knew someone in the late 1970s with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and everyone knew someone in the mid 1990s with a “Rachel” cut fashioned after Jennifer Anniston’s character on Friends. When Walmart figured out how to gain amazing efficiencies in its supply chain management, other retailers rushed to do the same. We have Coke AND Pepsi.

But this natural human phenomena of imitating success is often offset by another behavioral tendency. When a sports team becomes dominant, some people start to pull against them. The “anybody but…” crowd emerges. Anybody but the Cowboys. Anybody but the Lakers. Anybody but Alabama. We do the same with our actors and musicians. M.C. Hammer, Miley Cyrus, Richard Simmons, Macauley Culkin and Lindsey Lohan are examples of people who were huge stars at one time that the public eventually tired of. It is said we like to build people up so that we can knock them down. Once the Dorothy Hamill haircut reached critical mass, no one wanted one anymore.

There is no question that the American experiment with emerging 18th century concepts about individual freedoms and a representative form of government resulted in the most prosperous civilization in the history of humankind. Even though there were and continue to be flaws in America’s systems, the leap forward from what was happening in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa in the 1780s is irrefutable.

The success of the American experiment did eventually stimulate some imitators. By the end of World War I, most of the European monarchies had given way to representative governments. The evolution of a modern banking system resulted in opportunities for individuals with creative ideas to leverage capital and generate a return on investment for their ideas and efforts. Prosperity followed.

Unfortunately, other systems emerged alongside the American model, especially as the industrial revolution lead to tremendous wealth creation and outsized political influence for a relatively small number of industrialists. The working class that had moved from farms to the cities for industrial jobs grew frustrated with the feudal-style system that was emerging. Fortunately for the U.S., the progressives of the early 20th century lead by Theodore Roosevelt began to implement reforms quickly enough to avoid the disaster that awaited some other countries – Russia being the most prominent.

Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, created a vision for a classless society in which all citizens share equally in the rewards of joint economic output. Nearly 200 years later, this dream is alive and well and is the one typically adopted by the “anybody but America” crowd. I won’t delve too much into how that vision has translated to reality in places like Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, except to say that the citizens of those countries have discovered that they traded a privileged bourgeoisie that they demonized for a privileged one-party political class that they’re stuck with. East Germany is one of the few countries to go down that road and eventually find an exit ramp.

A political class is much more difficult to dislodge when it controls both the means of production and the authority to tax. In a free society, private enterprises like Enron or Sears go away when they either lose face through scandal or fail to respond as new competitors like Walmart and Target enter the game. In a Marxist system, they remain in place forever. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created in 1935 to help bring electricity to rural areas.  The goals of this agency were met decades ago, yet it continues to be a multi-million dollar agency. Multiply this type of inefficiency by a factor of 100 in communist countries. And the low-value-add agencies are led by family members, often inept, of the political class.

Because descendants of western Europeans were the most efficient at implementing a system built on capitalism, it’s natural that some descendants of people who didn’t benefit from industrialization in the 20th century might become “anybody but..” activists who continue to cling to the Marxist ideal. They believe “it just hasn’t been implemented correctly yet…” However, the idea of a benevolent government that manages and distributes resources runs counter to human nature. As I pointed out in a previous article, humans are predators and are primarily motivated by self-interest. Both capitalists and Marxists are equally greedy, but capitalist greed is aligned with society while Marxist greed is more often at odds. Marxist politicians obtain their wealth by siphoning off their “taste” of the action throughout the process through bribes or taxes. The capitalists obtain their wealth by creating a product or service that is coveted and building or selling it to organizations who can deliver the product or service more efficiently.

It seems to make much more sense for countries in South America, Africa, the Middle East, etc. to imitate the American system, perhaps improving upon it, rather than pretending they are building a Socialist Utopia – because they’re not. Whether they do or not, we must adequately manage the “anybody but America” crowd already in America, for the path they would have us go down leads to shared misery rather than shared prosperity…unless you’re a politician.