Innovation

Tonight a long-time friend and I brought our families together over a meal in Portland. We have known each other since diapers, drifted apart until my graduation from high school and then rekindled a very unique and withstanding friendship. Our dads used to coach football together when they were in college and still remain very close friends today despite their economic differences. You could say we two boys echo our fathers.
My wife actually looks forward to hanging out with them which is a blessing I never take for granted. We enjoyed catching up respectively and amidst my vocal wanderings with my friend we turned to politics in a way that only two can do when we know we may not agree.

Switching from back-country snowboarding in Jackson Hole, he says "I don't want to spend too much time on politics, but now that it's been awhile how do you feel our President is doing?" With a few glasses of wine under my belt I felt no shame in getting to my point quickly so I started with healthcare.

As of now I am unemployed and carrying only a major medical policy and I prefaced my soliloquy with that to him. Then I continued with "What do you want to know? Do I advocate socialism, communism? Do I dig Marxist theory? If we standardize healthcare by making the wealthy pay for everyone and even the playing field of coverage and the pay that the medical field sees it will in turn lower the standard by which we operate." He sat there silently knowing he opened up a can of worms that was going to get all over the boat in short order. "When is the news telling us of a new breakthrough that some Canadian made in asthma research? It doesn't happen because they aren't going out of their way to experiment and make changes to what we currently know because what's in in it for them?"

He quickly retorted from the gut "Yeah, they are waiting for us to do it".

Without hesitation I said "Exactly! That is what a free market economy gives us!" And the conversation ended just as abruptly as it started, yet we went on to enjoy the evening with each other wholeheartedly. That is a great friendship. I'd like to think the conversation turned away because he knows he just hit it out of the park for my team.

Innovation.

Could you imagine if the government dictated what we pulled our drift boats around on? Every trailer would be the same and there would be no one with crazy enough notions that there is a market for something better. No one would have thought to add a winch and roller to a flatbed trailer offering protection with all around versatile utility. No one would have spent hours in a machine shop developing a rack that held a gear raft above the drifter for the guides and super-avid river-rats. And definitely no one would have been allowed to add recessed motorcycle wheel chocks to the deck (because that is another agency that governs those products). We would have no trailer to haul motorcycles and quads as well as your driftboat and raft, not to mention just being able to use it for getting a load of lumber for the deck you had been been putting off. There would be a few regional manufacturers of driftboat trailers and a few manufacturers of motorcycles trailers and they would all operate under the guise of being able to build what they want, within their own specific limits of course.

What FinChasers has developed is the epitome of the free market and represents exactly what gets stifled when legislation removes the capacity/desire for an individual to achieve the pinnacle of greatness.