Toward Guerilla Commerce
Guerilla commerce is a commercial application of Mao Tse-Tung's ideas in his treatise on
Guerilla Warfare. The aim for us is to use unorthodox commercial methods to restore usurped property rights and economic freedom in the United States.
The Base
When Mao wrote his treatise, Japanese behaving badly had occupied all of China. Mao wanted them out of there. Whatever you think of his politics, his methods of guerrilla warfare were effective. Of course, he wanted China to be a Communist nation, and it is. But you don't have to be a
socialist of any kind to adapt the methods and techniques of guerilla warfare to a capitalist restoration in America. My personal feeling is that if Mao had been a capitalist, all China would be quoting Adam Smith today.
So, what are the defining rules?
Guerillas are small, disciplined attack groups formed to augment and support conventional forces. Guerillas are not bandits or anarchists.
Guerillas cannot win a war by themselves: They must be affiliated with conventional forces to be effective.
Nevertheless, guerilla units are independent. They're not under the direct command of any conventional force.
Guerillas must be politically coherent: All must be conversant with and pledge their allegiance to the same political and economic causes.Guerilla commerce is not Guerilla Marketing:
J. Conrad Levinson's books should be required reading for every American school pupil from the third grade on, but guerilla commerce is a much broader concept.
Guerilla commerce is not based on the underground economy. Once we’ve instituted our desired changes, we want the populace as a whole to observe our rules as we observed theirs. If we do violate laws, we should be prepared to accept any condign penalties that might result.
There are businesses that I believe comport with the idea of guerilla commerce. We can share only one ideology: Capitalism, defined as private ownership of the means of production; but there could be many ways to implement it.
The Issue
The United States as we enter 2010 is passing through a period of national socialism (General Motors is a prime example) on its way to exclusive government ownership of property.
Government regulation has become a tool for driving private concerns out of business and transferring their functions to government. Taxes and regulations on businesses that hire employees have grown so great that employees can no longer add sufficient value to their services to be competitive in a global market. This is causing employers to ship jobs overseas, cut back on hiring locally, and reduce the number of work hours available for whoever is left.
Looming on the horizon is a crippling, socialist legislative program, Cap and Trade, that can be expected to drive out or destroy millions more American private sector jobs. That the whole thing is based on a monumental academic fraud – and that it proceeds in spite – is further proof of its true intent, which is solely to increase joblessness and dependence on government.
Even if Cap and Trade fails, though, forced unionism under the name of Card Check lurks in the wings, promising to accomplish the same ends. Lost private sector jobs and nanny-state dependency have become the ascendant political philosophy in America.
In this way, our federal government, hungry for despotic power over the citizenry, has taken an important step toward its new collectivist tyranny. Its motivation for making employees ever more expensive and unemployable appears strongly to be a matter of forcing people into government employment or government welfare, allowing the government to take over more and more private property until their rule becomes absolute.
Some of the damage they’ve already done can be reversed, and presumably will be in the elections of 2010, assuming we’re
allowed to hold such elections. In the meantime, is there anything we can do to survive the present crisis, or will we all be working for, and beholden to, government even if the election actually rolls around?
Toward Guerilla Commerce
It seems evident that there are now severe penalties associated with being an employee in the private sector in America. What free people need to do, therefore, is to cease being employees. It would be nice if we could do so and still make a living.
Guerilla commerce is a blanket term for legitimate ways in which ordinary people can make a living without being employees.
Kiyosaki and Lechter’s
Rich Dad Poor Dad provides the best blueprint for starting the right kind of business. Most important, your business should not simply provide you a job, in which you trade time for money. Rather, your business once built should provide you with a reliable income even if you don’t participate in its day-to-day operation. You should be able to duplicate the mechanism by which your money is earned and collect royalty income on the operation of that mechanism, and that mechanism must minimize to the extent possible dependence on employees and employment: The purpose of a business, after all, is not to create jobs. The purpose of a business is to create wealth.Guerilla commerce thus calls for some kind of franchising model, as franchising is the most reliable way to replicate the guerilla unit. One of the more famous franchisors is McDonald’s, which exemplifies the principles of guerilla commerce, to wit:
Each restaurant is a small, disciplined frontline group intended to augment and support the parent company. Each franchisee is a legitimate business owner.
Restaurants cannot operate without the parent company for standardization and training.
Franchisees own their businesses. They subject themselves to certain parent company rules to maintain their affiliation, but the day-to-day operation of each unit belongs to the franchisee.
Franchisees adopt the culture of the parent company. If you’re blindfolded, led into a McDonald’s anywhere in the world, and your blindfold is removed, you know you’re in a McDonald’s.
It’s true that a franchisee must hire employees; however, these are largely uneducated, low-skilled people who don’t cost much to begin with and are easy to replace. The more capable employees go on to the better positions required by the parent company, or they find better jobs elsewhere. Of course, there's always government employment for those workers who cannot survive in the private sector.The individual business owner and all restaurant employees get training in all aspects of running a successful restaurant, and this training is augmented by strong corporate support going forward. A franchisee is not guaranteed success, but the corporation makes every effort to make the franchisee successful.
All it takes, I’m told, is teachability, enthusiasm, willingness to work hard to reach a goal, and about $1,000,000 in initial franchising fees.
I don’t question for a moment that this franchise is worth the million bucks: Between 3% and 5% of new business startups actually last beyond their first five years. For franchises generally, the success rate is closer to 75%.
On the other hand, I don’t have a million dollars. I don’t even have a quarter of a million with which to buy a franchise on a popular hardware chain. My feeling is that if this is what it takes to start a successful business, then few businesses will prove successful.
There is a class of multi-level marketing (MLM) opportunities based on a franchising model. These are the ones I consider the most likely to fit the model of guerilla commerce as well. Of these, the one I like best is an $8.2 billion, 50-year-old company with over 2,000,000 products that people use again and again.
Aside from the fact that fits my model of guerilla commerce, I like
1. The MLM compensation plan: This is a simple MLM plan that distributes a bonus to Independent Business Owners (IBOs) participating in the MLM opportunity. The best feature of this kind of plan is that everyone joining the system has the same opportunity as anyone else who ever joined. It’s also the easiest of all MLM plans to understand.
2. The outside affiliations: The company manufactures or grows something like 500 products of its own, but it has arrangements with over a hundred stores in 28 departments, offering 2,000,000 additional products at a great price, all on the Web.
3. The flexibility: Anyone can sign up as a customer, a wholesale customer, or an IBO.
4. The fee structure: It costs you nothing to sign up as a retail customer. To sign up as a wholesale customer costs $75 per annum, and to sign up as an IBO takes $150 the first year and $75 each year thereafter.
5. The opportunity: This company has made more millionaires in the 50 years of its existence than anyone else except Microsoft.
6. The freedom from employment and employees: The parent corporation takes care of all the functions requiring employees. It manages the manufacturing and distribution functions, leaving the individual IBO to manage only the retail operations. Everything is done on the Web, so there’s no equipment or building expense at the store level. If an IBO needs employees, there are no store-level functions that can’t be handled by automated assistants or answering services that work on contract. Heck, you can even save some money by farming these functions out to India!
Capitalism is economic freedom. Socialism in all of its forms is economic and political tyranny. Time and again, American ingenuity and industry have pulled this nation back from the brink of tyranny. My belief is that it will do so again.
So let us unite.
CHARLES R. COOMBS