MOSS MESSAGE
Crazy People
Here's the question: if
That's right! I said crazy people. A century ago Michigan was full of them. Where I grew up, they always talked about a local guy whose nickname was "Crazy." Old Crazy lived in town, had died a few years back, but everyone remembered him
The Town Loony
"Crazy" was this chemist out of Cleveland, and he had the idea he was going to make valuable concoctions out of brine, which is salt water you find underground. Back in the 1880s he came to a played-out lumber village up in the woods where brine was easy to drill for, and built himself a skunkworks south of town. Now and then he'd blow up his skunkworks, go back to Cleveland to con his investors out of more money.
Now the local farmers knew about drilling wells for water. People even knew about oil. But brine? They rolled their eyes and called him "Crazy." But he stuck with it, which is why we remember him today. "Crazy's" last name was Dow, as in Herbert Henry. His Dow Chemical Company became one of the world's great corporations.
It Wasn't Just Him
He wasn't the only one; there were lots of crazy people around. You had Upjohn in Kalamazoo, and Kellogg in Battle Creek. C.W. Post was genuinely certifiable. And the auto guys put them all to shame. Ford was nutty as a fruitcake. The Olds Brothers would leave you breathless. But the wildest loony of them all was a guy named Billy Durant.
He was combination super salesman and maniac gambler, and he had the crazy idea that every single firm in the new automotive technology should belong to one company--his. He almost pulled it off, too. Chrysler actually worked for him for a while and Ford came an inch from selling out. The company he founded was called "General Motors." Durant lost GM to the bankers, got it back, lost it again. He made and lost three fortunes, and if he'd lived long enough he'd have made and lost another one.
Michigan Was Full of Crazies.
These were the crazy people we remember, but there were way more than that. Michigan was full of vitality, ideas, energy, and what they called then "enterprise." We were a hotbed of it, Crazy Central, an industrial-era Florence. And out of 100 crazies, 95 would fail, 4 would be moderately successful and one would be Dow Chemical.
So that's what Michigan needs to do now. We have to become again a place friendly to enterprise, where folks with crazy ideas can come, try them out, and maybe grow. Right now we're not that kind of place. Too many people, the government, or the union, or a judge, will tell you "NO." If you do start succeeding, too many folks will come around for a piece of your action and to tell you how to run your business: from the taxman, to the unions, the regulators, "community activists," and Gotcha! Media.
Needed: Crazy Folks.
But if Michigan has a future, its from new enterprise, built by Crazy visionaries doing things no MEDC grant czars in a political Governor's office can predict. It's an army of loonies, each with some weird notion, creating something where there was nothing. They're there--they always emerge, in every generation. Once it was Dow and Durant, then it was DeVos and Van Andel. They're always there, doing their thing. But if we want them to come and do it in Michigan, we have to become a place where Enterprise is free, welcomed, and rewarded. Then the crazy folks will come.
We used to be that kind of place. We can be again. For 100 years we've lived off the wealth created by crazy people and now its time to create more. Is Michigan open to crazy people with enterprise and ideas? If not, why not? Talk all those "why-nots" and get rid of them. That's the goal. To do otherwise right now is…well, just plain nuts.
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