The Martha Stewart Complex

For about two years, the most recognizable businesswoman in America has been waiting on the chopping block. She has shown commendable strength and an unbending character throughout her ordeal, and perhaps because of this, the executioner continues to refuse a final verdict. Martha Stewart’s legal battles, and more importantly the public reactions to them, are one of today’s most telling signs of the impending end of freedom, life and wealth in America as we know them.

The Facts

Martha Stewart swept to fame as a knowledgeable, able homemaker able to strut her abilities for her fellow Americans. Seeing her at work has delighted housewives and home improvement geeks throughout the world. Whether her ideas are bland or creative, second-rate or brilliant, she nonetheless has been a champion for doing things right, doing them with showmanship, and doing it to the best of one’s ability. The majority of the fans who remain admire her either explicitly because of these personal traits, or because they genuinely enjoy her ideas and her work, perhaps only subconsciously recognizing the relation between the two.

Martha Stewart’s ideas and work translated in the late 1990s into the public sale of her company, Martha Stewart Omnimedia. She saw the opportunity to use her talents to increase her wealth and millions of investors saw her potential and joined in. Martha Stewart’s business created tens of millions of dollars in wealth for numerous people. She followed the ideal American business model, which dictated that once a successful formula is found and it becomes profitable, the best thing to do is more of it, making it even more profitable. She did it. She produced. She created. She enriched lives both in terms of the wealth she made for herself and her stockholders and in terms of the ideas and creativity of her professional endeavors.

Self-made millionaires are a great asset to our world, not only because of the wealth they generate in the jobs they provide and the money they spend, but also in terms of the reinvestments they make of their wealth. Martha Stewart’s rise is due exclusively to her knowledge and ability, and one of her long-known abilities is as a Wall Street trader. She has been active on the world’s stock markets ever since she obtained the investment capital to be capable of such activity.

One company she chose to invest in was the biotech firm ImClone. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are, to any rational investor, a vital and lucrative opportunity. With an aging, more affluent population, the ability of people to afford expensive new treatments, combined with the need for such treatments to extend the human life span, logically shows that the research and products of these firms will be singular in its importance to us in the years to come. Martha Stewart knew this, in addition to being acquainted with many fellow businessmen in the industry, and chose to invest a small part of her fortune (but a significant amount of money nonetheless) in ImClone. She counted on her knowledge, her advisors, and the rationality of the markets to see that her investment was a wise one. The only thing she did not count on was the aristocracy of pull that runs our economy today.

The Witch Hunt

The Food and Drug Administration purports to have the welfare of the people of America as its goal. It is given unlimited power to approve or disapprove of men’s creations and levy penalties and restrictions at its sole whim. The rules governing its decisions are totally arbitrary, and rely on one single thing to keep it legitimate: the acceptance, sanction and support of a people who believe that they do not know enough to take care and protect their own life, health and well-being.

The FDA is responsible, along with various related bureaucracies in our government, for the persecution of smokers, the subsidizing of terrorists and drug cartels, the incarceration of drug addicts and the anemia of the American health care industry. One thing Americans too often take for granted is the supposed goal of all of the FDA’s actions. Americans too easily shrug at the destruction of the tobacco industry that occurred in the 1990s, eliminating the freedom of smokers, restaurateurs and bar owners. We shrug at the destruction of hundreds of millions of research dollars when a quick decision is handed down by the FDA sounding the death knell of a great achievement in medicine or food production. The FDA approves of the mystic witchcraft of herbal remedies and organically-grown foodstuffs, whilst at the same time making it illegal to help an infertile couple use cloning to bear children or help transplant patients grow their own organs. Vital, life-making procedures, chemicals and newly-invented organisms are given the axe, and the same organization is the judge, jury and final court of appeals.

Thus were the actions of the FDA when, two years ago, it made the decision to ban the sale of a new drug invented by ImClone. Martha Stewart, being a major stockholder, discovered this fact and, rather than face the destruction of her wealth, sold her shares of ImClone in favor of other investment opportunities. The aristocracy decided that, not only should ImClone be prohibited from selling its new invention, but that its stickholders should be required to bear the loss precipitated by its decision.

The aristocracy of pull told Martha Stewart, and all other able, intelligent stock traders, that it is heir duty to not only have no part in the deciding of whether their creation is banned or permitted, but to also accept said decisions by others as final, and to accept their own destruction when it comes. Similar to the old law of the sea, it is a dictate that requires captains to go down with their ships, enforced solely by the murderers who blew the cannon which caused it to sink. It’s the acceptance of our own destruction as a given, and as something over which we have no power which has led to the sorry state of this nation.

The media’s attention has been focused very squarely upon this event. Horrifyingly, it has been focused primarily upon the supposed shortcomings of Stewart, and of the illegal nature of her sale of stocks. Bafflingly, it has completely sidestepped the issue of the arbitrary destruction of wealth, life and property that continues to be perpetrated by government regulators every day of our lives. We are told of the virtues of contributing to the growth of our economy, and given education on how to save and invest, and then told that once we begin acting as benefactors in the economy, that we have to accept the occasional rape and plunder of our investments. We are told of the usefulness of knowledge, of creativity and of contributing to society, and then told to accept as our duty the destruction of our creations and contributions by the arbitrary whim of men whom we know nothing about, whose motives are stated in official documents, but who logically know less about our discipline and have no material interest in our endeavor.

The witch hunt has continued for two years, as Martha Stewart has dodged the fate of a criminal only barely, and, like the Microsoft witch hunt several years prior, is never given a final verdict, but left to stay in wait for the next indictment. The goal of government regulators is simpler than ever to deduce: it is the creation of fear and terror in the minds of Americans that they seek. They do not want to create or enforce rational laws (something necessary for the self-defense of all men), they wish to demonstrate their power and to enforce a terror in their victims which encourages obedience and keeps all individuals under constant threat of imprisonment and makes us feel that our lives and our property could, at any moment, be confiscated for some unknown wrong we committed or obscure law we’ve broken.

The End of Freedom, Wealth and Life in America

The regulators who run and ruin our lives are the forgotten villain, never mentioned as such by media or government spokesmen. They are only mentioned as the clear and unmistakable source of the downfall of the men at whom they take their aim. This reference to them instills in us a fear of these entities. Do not cross the [insert bureaucracy here] or face the consequences demonstrated by [insert fallen idol here]. It is a lesson they tell us every day on the morning news. Meanwhile, government-funded PSAs (aka, “Commercials”) pop up between the news stories, endeavoring to convince us that we are free (“Freedom, appreciate it”), despite the fact that we had no choice whether to turn our wealth over to those who are using half of it to plan our destruction, and the other half to convince us that our destruction should be appreciated.

Constant terror is kept in our minds by the occasional persecution of our greatest heroes. Whether or not you appreciate the products of Martha Stewart, Bill Gates or any other major creator of wealth, their ability to create that wealth and deliver value-added services to society is indisputable. Their work creates thousands of high-paying jobs in the companies they build, and millions more jobs in the companies they do business with and the industries that are recipients of the secondary and tertiary wealth they pass down. By publicly enforcing their arbitrary destruction, the powers that be are making a show of force, and convincing us that we, in fact, have no freedom. The message is not “stay in line, don’t cause trouble”, but rather “watch your back, be afraid”.

There is no right or wrong way to create, produce or live; there is only the expediency of the moment, they are telling us between the lines. It is demanded of us that we obey the regulators who would destroy us, and not question their methods, manners or motives. It is expected that we appreciate their work as the duty of government, and that we accept our own sacrifice as a necessary part of the world. We are not supposed to obey laws, for who knows what is legal and what is not anymore? What rules of logic are governing the creation and enforcement of laws anymore? Instead, we are to obey men, men who make the laws, change the laws, and choose on whom to enforce them at any given moment, for any given reason.

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Martha Stewart is the latest in a long line of outstanding creators of wealth and abundance who has been told that all of her work is nothing compared to the unlimited power of the government she is owned by. She is being made the villain in order to show her admirers that admiration is a myth, ability unimportant, and the creation of wealth a crime for which to be punished most horribly.

Martha Stewart, for her part, continues to portray herself admirably, and has gained immense respect from me since the scandal started. More ever than Bill Gates (who crouched in corners cowardly agreeing to every dictate handed him), Martha Stewart has acknowledged the motives of her enemies: the destruction of her wealth and the incrimination of her ability to produce it. A noble, creative individual is being destroyed before our very eyes. And, like the ancient spectators above the gladiators, our only reaction is cheering for the death of the noble knight by the hand of the hideous ogre.