The New American Dream. 2010.

When my book, “Your Portable Empire- How To Make Money from Anywhere Doing What You Love,” was published in August, 2007, it was called “The most dangerous book ever.”

What made that book dangerous was that, underneath the technical “how-to” Internet Marketing information was a philosophy that the current economic model was terminally broken. The days when you could go to school, go to college, and then get a job that would support you economically for the rest of your life are over.

That philosophy stated that “a job is the least effective way to make money. That if you have a boss, you are a slave. And, it posited that it was past time to free the slaves.

Good bye, American dream.

Good riddance.

It’s time for a new American Dream.

Even if such a life would provide you with enough money to live, that’s not really living. Far too many people sacrificed their lives for a “McLife.” They had a house, a car, a TV set, and- possibly- a 2-week vacation once a year. Hatched 2.5 kids who grew up to do the same thing. Then, after 40 years in a mind-numbing job, they retired. Too old to enjoy the freedom and too many decades removed from the dreams that would make that freedom worth having.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Henry David Thoreau

A friend of mine who worked as a hospice nurse told me that he saw a tragic scene several times in his career: A terminally ill home-hospice patient, looking out the window at the RV that he never got to drive. Just imagine the trips not taken. The scenery undiscovered. The adventures not experienced. And for what?

A house, a car, and a TV set?

That is not living.

In my book, I proposed that almost anybody could make enough money from almost anywhere to support a creative and adventurous lifestyle.  My coaching clients are proving it.  I get emails regularly from people who have actually USED the information in my book to create the lives of their dreams.  You can do it, too- if you WILL do it.

The world has changed.

Before the industrial revolution, each family was a business. Groups of families were villages. There were towns, but the majority of the population was rural. It was entirely possible to trade one of your hens for an equal value in fresh-baked bread. Money, (which is an abstraction- it has no value, but it represents value. It’s a lie we all pretend to believe.) wasn’t necessary.

You could get your food, beer and wine, and entertainment within a mile or so of where you lived.

Centralized production created the demand for centralized labor. This led to some very shady political maneuvers that drove the peasants (that’s us) to the cities, where they could make “a living” working in a factory. This worked out fine for the factory owners and politicians, but was the moment when individual freedom pretty much ended.

Imagine pushing a “fast-forward” button, and watching the world change. You’ve seen videos of a flower opening- where days of blossoming are telescoped into a few seconds as the rose goes from a bud to a bloom. Imagine that you could see the western hemisphere like that. Watch Detroit, Manchester, Munich and other industrial towns as they grow like serf-devouring monsters in a bad sci-fi movie into mega cities.

Then, as the industrial revolution ends, watch them decay.

That’s where we are now on the time line. The industrial revolution is over.

Good riddance.

Remember Marx and Engels’ comments about the “means of production?” Their complaint was that in the battle between the owners of the means of production and the providers of labor, the power was on the side of the owners.

Until the advent of the internet, the cost of the means of production was beyond the reach of most people. It cost millions of dollars to build a steel factory or an oil refinery. So, the people with capital invested in the factories and refineries and, to them, labor (that’s us) was just a cost of doing business. To make a profit, it is necessary to keep the cost of doing business as low as you can.

In a nutshell, if you produced a dollar worth of value, you HAD to get paid less than a dollar. The difference between what you produced and what you were paid is profit for the company.

That means, to you and me, that as laborers we were in an unequal battle- and we lost it gracefully. We bought the “American Dream” and thought we were winning it. The TV told us that we had it made. Almost. There was always something else to buy to achieve happiness, and it never quite worked, did it? Because there was always one more thing to buy.

Fast forward that tape to a couple of decades ago, and look at the fortunes that were made by kids working out of dorm rooms and garages. Apple computer, Microsoft, Dell, to name a few.

Of that group, Microsoft is the most interesting, because they didn’t make anything. Bill Gates “acquired” an existing operating system and somehow persuaded IBM and other computer manufacturers to install it on the computers they manufactured. It didn’t work very well, and subsequent “improvements” to that code worked equally poorly, or not at all. Remember Windows Millenium?

It didn’t matter. It worked well enough to usher in a complete and total economic revolution.

Gates acquired riches that leave one breathless, and he did by recognizing the new paradigm. The industrial revolution is over, and we have entered a new revolution.

IBM had to make millions of computers one at a time. Make one, sell one.

Gates acquired code once, and sold it millions of times.

That one event changed everything. Forever.

That success of that event, which put a computer on every desk and in every backpack in the western world, killed the American dream dead, and put the final nail in the coffin of the industrial revolution.

The line between labor and capital has disappeared.

You can slope over to Best Buy and get the means of production for less than $500.

The most expensive personal computer I’ve heard of belongs to Armand Morin. He claims to have paid $8,500 for it, and I believe him.

That sounds like a lot of money, but it wouldn’t buy the door on a steel factory. It wouldn’t pay for the first pipe in an oil refinery. And he’ll make millions of dollars a year with it.

And, honestly, that computer won’t do a thing that the $500 computer won’t do. It may do it marginally faster, and I suspect the graphics are stunning- but, with a $500 computer and some rudimentary knowledge of Internet Marketing, you can replace that factory job.

Good thing, too. The factory jobs are pretty much gone, aren’t they? Unless you speak Chinese or whatever they speak in India and are willing to work for a dollar a day.

If you’re good, you can make more money than the manager of that factory used to make- and do it in less than an hour a day. From a coffee shop in Paris. Or a beach in Mexico.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

Last night, I was talking to my son and his girlfriend. The topic turned to: “what about all the people who just want a job?”

Incredulous, I asked them to explain.

“Some people just want a job. They want to be told what to do, and do it in exchange for enough money to live on.”

As hard as that is for me to believe, it must be true. The world is full of people who have let their dreams die and abdicated responsibility for their own lives. That’s what having a “job” means to me.

It can’t be for the security. There’s much more security in owning your own online business than there is in working for someone else. If you work for yourself, you know the boss is going to look out for you. If you work for someone else, you’re just an expense.

Profit = income – expenses.

The boss is looking out for profit, or he’ll lose his job. Or his business. He can’t look out for you.

Normally, I’m not a big fan of social darwinism. I’ve noticed that most of the proponents of social darwinism have rich daddies. However, in this case, I don’t see any options.

Adapt or die.

Personally, I’d love to live in a country that guaranteed “the basics” to all its citizens. So much of the wealth of a nation should, in my opinion, belong to the citizens of that nation. Oil, minerals, etc., in a perfect world, would belong to all, and the income from that wealth should be divided among the citizens of the nation.

I’d cheerfully do without a few wars of conquest, bridges to nowhere, and subsidies to large corporations to make that happen.

However, it ain’t gonna happen. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.

My theory is that if we all had “the basics” as a basic right- food, shelter, health care, clean water, electricity, internet access, to start with- then you could make a case for social darwinism. Survival of the fittest.

I understand why the trust fund crowd is against this. It would increase the competition. If one person is struggling to just pay the rent and another is living rent-free thanks to mom and dad, and those two people are competing against each other, it’s just not a fair game.

I’d love to see the playing field leveled. Then, we’d see who would prosper. I predict the results would be surprising.

The people who stand to lose the most from a level playing field also control the information delivery services. If you’re poor, uneducated and uninformed, the odds are that you get your information from Fox news. Somehow, Fox news makes the case that leveling the playing field would be bad for you. They use high-impact words like “socialism,” Marxism, and Un-American- and, if you’re in that group, you don’t know what those words mean. You haven’t read the Communist Manifesto. You haven’t really explored the socialist countries that are actually kicking the United States’ ass in terms of quality of life for the citizens. And, you’re probably not reading this blog.

Shawn Hannity says it. You believe it. That settles it. You go to bed with a comfortable sense of righteous outrage and wake up still a slave.

It’s amazingly effective propaganda, and it’s not going to change.

So, odds are that unless you happen to have a trust fund, you’re going to have to come up with enough money to provide your own basic needs before you can work on the fun stuff- like investments, self-actualization, culture, spirituality.

Above, I pointed out that the difference between the value of what you produced and what you got paid to produce it equals profit to the company.

In the new economy, you have the freedom to receive the entire value of what you produce. That can be very good news.

The framework of what I call the Portable Empire System is based on solving problems. People will pay for the solutions to their problems.

Some people have the problem of being bored. If you can entertain them, they will make you ridiculously rich. That’s why sports stars, actors and musicians can make the kinds of salaries they make. Johnny Depp, as Captain Jack Sparrow, was underpaid- even though he makes tens of millions of dollars per picture- because he entertained millions of people. Lady Gaga, Madonna, Dr. Dre, the Beatles, U2, Tiger Woods, Tony Romo- you’ve got your own list, I’m sure- are making exactly what they’re worth. They sell tickets. They create wealth.

The cover band at the local bar, and the actors in the community theater are making exactly what they’re worth, too.

We can’t all be Johnny Depp.

Who are you? That’s the question. What value do you bring to the world? What problems can you solve?

Your income, if you choose to maximize it, will represent the value of the problems you can solve multiplied by the number of people you help.

Some people have the problem of being fat, and they’d rather be thin.

Some people have the problem of not having money, and they’d rather have some.

Some people have the problem of not being clear about spirituality, and are seeking clarity.

Acceptance. Self image. Health. Sports. There is not, and never will be, a lack of problems. People will pay you for a solution to their problem.

That’s the information economy, and it’s the economy we live in now.

I don’t know where the jobs are in this economy, and I don’t know why you’d want one.

With a laptop computer, some training- which is available online, and less than fifty bucks a month for operating capital, you can make more money than most jobs will pay- and you can do it wherever you want, whenever you want, and have time to actually live.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, I recommend that you learn Chinese and start packing.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau

Before we leave this subject, I’d like to talk about my friends in Terlingua. Some of them are rich. Almost all of them are wealthy- even the ones who don’t have any money. One of the wealthiest guys I know lives in a 400 square foot geodesic dome in the desert. He’s my nearest neighbor.

He’ll help you out for $10/hour if he likes you. If he’s not busy watching a sunset or playing with his pet roadrunner. Or, tooling about the desert in his old jeep.

You can buy land for $80/acre in the desert near Big Bend National Park. I’ve done it. So have hundreds of other people. Some of them are living in domes or yurts. Others are living in RVs and travel trailers. Some have salvaged old railroad cars or shipping containers and converted them into shelter- and some of them are pretty comfy.

Since the government isn’t going to provide the basics, these people just redefined what “the basics” means to them and provide it for themselves.

What do they really need?

Shelter, water, food, and some of the most inspirational scenery in the world seems to do it for them. By decreasing consumption and creating their own entertainment they’re able to live on a couple of hundred dollars a month. For another hundred, they can get internet access and a land-line telephone. Even at $10/hour that represents very little time spent on earning the money to live, and leaves a whole lot of time for living.

If everybody lived like they do, it would be the end of some things that have long outlived their usefulness.  Oil companies and electric utilities, for example.  We’d have to find new reasons to go to war, wouldn’t we?  Or we could just skip the war part completely.

Most of them have spent their time in corporate America. They’ve had jobs. They took a cold, hard look at the “American Dream,” and rejected it. At least, they’ve rejected the pre-packaged “American Dream.” The McLife. They turned their back on the plastic imitation life and are living real ones.

Having the freedom and resources to do exactly what you want to do when you want to do it is a pretty good definition of wealth.

So, once you decide what it is that you really want from life, you’ll know how much money you need. Making that decision can be tough. I’m still struggling with it myself. In a world of infinite options, and infinite potential lives, how do you choose the one life that’s right for you?

I’m still working on that, but I’m sure that being a slave won’t make you free.

If you’d like to learn more about the Portable Empire System, and how to start and run your own online business, click HERE.

Finally, I’d like to propose a new American Dream.

Free people, living where they want and doing what they want, when they want.  Imagine a nation of people like that.  Imagine living like that.

That would indeed be a land of the free and the home of the brave.  Let’s make it real.

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