Perhaps one of the things I’m most thankful for in my professional life is getting to study at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Consistently ranked in the top 10 among the nation’s business schools, the program was most recently ranked in the top five by Bloomberg Businessweek for its MBA program, as well as the number one public business school in the country.
While there, I learned about the time value of money, net present value, internal rate of return, valuation multiples, cash flow valuation, amortization, and a host of other concepts – all of which have been useful in managing our lumber business. However, one of the most important things I learned – particularly considering recent happenings in our nation’s immigration system – didn’t relate to business education at all, and it’s this on which I’d like to focus briefly.
It came from an economics professor, whose name, out of respect, I’ll omit. We were talking about global markets when the subject of global warming came up. He said something that stuck with me ever since.
Basically, it went like this: “We’ve got to be willing to take immigrants in from the third world because global warming disproportionately affects them. If we don’t, they’ll eventually show up at our doors with knives and pitchforks.”
I’ll never forget it, in part, because I was so surprised that these things were coming up in a business class. This professor also worked for one of the large international institutions (think UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) – which, according to some observers, have become much more powerful than they ought to be – so his statement carried more weight than if it was said by someone of less stature.
His statement has come back to me lately with a vengeance. For years, the Biden administration allowed illegals to pour through our southern border, claiming to want a solution to the crisis but doing nothing about it until recently – presumably because polls show that voters want something done about it and there is an election approaching. Further, despite claiming to want to slow down this immigration, the current administration has been busy bringing in additional immigrants, most notably from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Because of all of this, a reasonable person is left asking, “Why, if they want a solution to illegal immigration on the southern border, did they wait three and a half years to stop it?” Further, if we’re already taking in more immigrants than our laws allow, why are they busy bringing in more?
I believe the answer lies in the professor’s above statement. We’ve become a nation run, not from the ground up – by the people who have constitutional sovereignty over its decision-making – but from the top down, in large part by the institutions mentioned above, for which the professor was speaking. As in the case of the election-year conversion regarding the southern border, our leaders allow these institutions to have their way till they can no longer do so without putting their power at risk, after which we can assume they’ll return to the same governing style from which they briefly pivoted.
We’re losing so much in this country, but perhaps the most serious thing is the power to choose our own future, our own way of life. Although disinclined to admit it straightforwardly, our leaders no longer believe in a government established, as Lincoln put it, for, by and through its own people. You can hear echoes of this in Hillary Clinton’s speech about “deplorables,” as well as when Barack Obama called rural Americans “bitter” people who “cling to their guns”; and, just this week, a video surfaced of John Kerry bemoaning the limitations set on the government by the First Amendment.
If these leaders aren’t being informed by the U.S. Constitution, then what documents are they influenced by?
It’s a shame that we don’t know the answer to this, or that more isn’t done to find out exactly from where or whom our leaders are taking their cues. It’s merely assumed that liberalism or progressivism, or whatever we want to call it, is the way of the future, and we’d better all just get on board with it.
I learned many things in business school, but perhaps the most important lesson has brought more questions than answers. Regardless, the time has come to more robustly fill our role as les citoyens, as the French revolutionaries described us, and continue pushing even harder for answers about exactly who is running our government and what their intentions are. The integrity of our Republic depends on it.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at allen@kellerlumber.net.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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