In keeping with our philosophy of writing every other day we decided to skip a week… Wait that makes no sense - well true. But in our defense it was a week full of vacation time, powder skiing and a Holiday.

So the title Friedmans on my mind is reflective of the fact that I’m about half way through his book, “Hot Flat and Crowded.”

The main premise of the story is the demonstration of what has undergone in America in the last 30+ years and why it is not in any way sustainable. He brings up 3 important topics in the first several pages.

One: The US has become a country that has disconnected themselves emotionally from the rest of the world and in doing so become a world where we “export our fears” instead of exporting our “hopes.”
I feel like this is a pretty important issue today. We just decided to spend more money overseas in this stimulus package and in doing so send more troops to fight people we truly don’t understand (and don’t care to which is worse). We aren’t making an investment in ourselves when we go to fight. Where is the return? Maybe you could argue its in the safety for our future generation but what you need to ask yourself is, “is going around swinging swords and slinging guns a way to make friends?”

Two: “dumb as we wanna be.” A motto our previous President follow to a T. It’s the ideal that we can get to solving the problems ruining our way of life when we feel like it - in doing so we’ve placed this massive chip on our shoulders that has influenced every decision for the last 10+ years.
How many people do you know who bragged a few years ago about how well they were doing in the market or how much value they had in their two houses, or how they were getting into the “fix-it and flip-it” market. We really got out of control cocky and it came crashing down on us.

Three: “nation building at home” - Friedman says this one gives him hope. I’m guessing its because we still under all that cockiness have the ability to recreate ourselves and invent new ways of coping. Hopefully those new ways don’t come in the form of something as ridiculous as mortgage backed securities. But he has a point. America is working to solve the problems we have today - unfortunately it is coming from the bottom. This bottom up approach is great but this country has made it so difficult to see the bottom up survive and blossom - the incentives aren’t in line. The real question is when will they be? When will the administrations of Washington realize that innovation is what we are great at and small business operations are an enormous part of our philosophy and heritage. We need to cherish this and remember where we’ve come from and how we grew.

–The EBS Team