DISCLAIMER

I am not a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Nothing in this video, should be taken as legally binding investment advice, in the same way that SEC licensed stockbrokers can advise their clients. I am not “selling” any stocks or OTC penny stocks as a broker in this video. The purpose of this video, is only to offer guidance to those who are interested in educating themselves, about self-directed investing and Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI).

References to The Idea That Millionaire Fortunes
Are Usually Built by Rejecting Salaried W-2 Employment (and Stocks)
and Instead Starting a Successful Business

William Mathews, Getting On in the World, p. 271.

Irvin Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America, pp. 168-169.

Entrepreneur Press “StartUp” Series

Andrew Carnegie, The Empire of Business, ch. on “How to Win Fortune”. Notably, he never got a college degree. He’s an example of a person who saw America as a place where there was no barrier to entry for achieving a life of wealth. Parlaying job experience into profitable self-employment was all that was required. He was a poor Scottish immigrant; and it has been said that he embodied the American Dream of upward mobility through self-employment. Even the cartoon character Scrooge McDuck came to be based on him.

Paul and Sarah Edwards, Secrets of Successful Self-Employment (audible)

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So You Want to Start Your Own Business, Eh?

This thought has to be put to the question as well; and although Carnegie believed that self-employment was the key to making a fortune, he also at the same time accepted the bleak reality of the Industrial Revolution. That factory work was replacing a lot of the small business manufactures of the earlier period. Small businesses suffered, self-employment came under attack, and men were compelled to work in the hellish conditions of Carnegie’s fiery smoky steel mills. Statistics of the time were saying that 95% of small businesses fail after the startup phase, for one reason or another (see William Mathews, Getting On in the World, pp. 304-305; Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success, p. 124, n38). The contradiction inherent in Carnegie’s opinion can be reconciled by the fact, that he followed the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, which proclaimed that the wealthy industrialists like Carnegie, were at the top of the human food chain, in an evolutionary system where the “survival of the fittest” sorted out the top 5% to be among the fortune-makers, while everyone else was deemed by Providence to experience entrepreneurial failure. The depressing conclusion drawn by most men, in the late 1860s and early 1900s, was to simply succumb to work for someone else as a wage slave; and never try to be free as an independent 1099 contractor or sole proprietor:

Workers nationwide were unleashing their frustration at feeling trapped in the new industrial order that the railroads had forged and that Carnegie had come to symbolize…Tens of thousands of American workers came to believe in the late 1860s, early 1870s, that upward mobility would not be open to them; that they would never be able to become self-employed; they would never become capitalists; and they therefore saw their status in American society as wage slaves. They saw themselves as forever dependent on the will of another for their livelihoods (American Experience. “Andrew Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World,” 1:02:48 – 1:03:25).

The white American wage slave in the North and the black slave in the South are not too different. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing the slaves. But the Spencerian ideology of “survival of the fittest” continued to affect the business world, and discouraged self-employment and independence for everyone. Escaping from the evil and slavish city; and going to live in the country, either as a farmer or some other self-employed tradesman, as expressed in Little House on the Prairie, continued to be idealized by Francis Clark’s The Gospel of Out of Doors (1920). The city came to be viewed as a lost cause with a bunch of dead-end jobs. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Biff judges his father’s outlook of upward mobility through big city business to be an unrealistic pipe dream. “The American West, on the other hand, symbolizes Biff’s potential. Biff realizes that he has been content only when working on farms, out in the open. His westward escape from both Willy’s delusions and the commercial world of the eastern United States suggests a nineteenth-century pioneer mentality—Biff, unlike Willy, recognizes the importance of the individual” (SparkNotes). However, I wouldn’t say that the country is the first place to initially look for jobs as a young person. Using temp agencies and Indeed in the big city is the best place for that. But I’d say that eventually the time should come, during this career launch in the big city while job skills are being acquired, that one of the Entrepreneur Press “StartUp” categories should jump out at you the most. When this happens, you might have found your calling. You then might find it to be more desirable to work 100% remote at home; and then have the choice of living in the country or staying in the city.