CAPITALIST HERO
When it comes to creative business leadership, Michigan is to entrepreneurs what Italy is to Opera. From Henry Ford to the Amway Duo, Michigan seems to breed ambitious, practical, enterprising individuals who seize opportunity and find profit where few others would look. The career of one modern entrepreneur shows that even in days of industrial transition, the Michigan Capitalist can win success, wealth, and fame. His career is a testament to how innovation, creativity, and hard work meet American freedom and boundless opportunity, making him a modern day Capitalist Hero.
This individual wasn’t born rich, but to a modest family, raised in a small town in the south-western Thumb. He showed great promise, achieving the rank and honor of Eagle Scout. Like fellow entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he dropped out of college, and at age 22 he started his own business in his chosen field. He expanded it to statewide distribution, before being recruited to move to New York City and run a well-known nationwide firm. This relationship foundered, as he had his own creative ideas for product that conflicted with upper management. He left, and took his severance package to begin a new venture.
The genius of this Capitalist Hero lay in recognizing a previously untapped market. For years, people with a particular political position were identified as a voting bloc and as financial supporters of political campaigns. Our Capitalist Hero realized that this group could also be consumers, and would buy a product that appealed to their social and political preferences—not just during election cycles, but all the time. With this market identified, he began to build a brand and find a proper product.
The brand was easy. He made himself into personal spokesman and an iconic, cartoonish figure. As Harlan Sanders dressed like a caricature “Kentucky Colonel” to sell fried chicken, our Capitalist Hero presented himself clad as a 1970s-era union autoworker—complete with T-shirt & flannel, and ballcaps from colleges he dropped out of or never attended—all with a Michigan theme.
The product? His second innovation was finding a tired old medium called the “documentary.” These were earnest, schoolmasterish, exercises in lecture and boring objective background. Our Capitalist Hero took this played-out institution and jazzed it up with humor, entertainment values, and a point of view. Critics said the results were not objective fact finding, but heavy handed propaganda—but they missed the point. The object wasn’t to provide scholarly research but to give the chosen market what it wanted: an entertaining validation of its point of view.
The first product roll-out, debuted in his adopted home town, was roundly flogged as fact-challenged, emotionally manipulative, and intellectually dishonest. But the customers loved it, and clamored for more. Our Capitalist Hero had found a formula for satisfying his market, and more product flowed, as regularly as a new Apple model or Windows version.
Along the way he relentlessly promoted his brand, making himself an instantly recognized public icon, and symbol of his popular products. From the guest of a former President, to street events connecting with customers, he tirelessly appeared to support his market and keep the brand fresh and relevant. He even returned to Michigan to establish a yearly product tie-in festival in an upper Michigan city, not far from his palatial summer home.
With fame flows fortune, and the rewards of his hard work and innovation have been many. His dress may be industrial but his lifestyle is patrician. He lives luxuriously in New York City, and his Michigan summer home rivals any auto baron’s “cottage.”
There are many who’ll say that he’s a big fat hypocrite, making a fortune peddling a product that he doesn’t use himself, selling a worldview that his own life spectacularly contradicts. This totally misses the mark. Our Michigan Capitalist Hero validates the capitalist system, with a ringing testament to economic freedom, showing by example that one guy with ideas can by hard work and brains achieve business success, fame, and fortune. If anyone wants to doubt that America is still the land of economic opportunity, look no farther than this modern day entrepreneur, as we celebrate our Michigan Capitalist Hero: Michael Moore.
All from Selling Communism! Is this a great country, or what?
