This is the 1st point within the Case Study Guide for the episode titled,
"The Capitalist School: A Study of the Soul of the American Economy."

Fact: We've each got to become better teachers of the entrepreneurial skill. Novak says, "We've got to tell people how valid and important it is. It's the only hope of the poor."

Action 1: Watch Small Business School regularly. Become part of our growing group that TiVo's the show. Collect DVDs and use an episode of the show as a roundtable discussion over lunch with your employees.

Action 2: Each one of us should be teaching at least two others. One should be looking at taking the reigns of the business and the other to expanding the physical locations. To help, you are invited to use this web site as well as the Learn Online section.

Action 3: If you join or renew your membership in local PBS-member station at the $75 level or higher, you can get the course for free. Use the LearnOnline with your employees. To take this even further, read the 2nd point.

This is the 2nd point within the Case Study Guide for the episode titled,
"The Capitalist School: A Study of the Soul of the American Economy."

Fact 1: Jacques Maritain wants us to tell the world's people the secrets of the free society. The students in Tiananmen Square bravely declared, pointing at their model of our Statue of Liberty: "That's the liberty we need."

Action: Read a little about Maritain. He's still right. Post a note on your web site, "Hiring: Students from Tiananmen Square" and have them employ student translators so your website is in Chinese. Here is our posting.

Fact 2: The greatest source of wealth in this country are the small businesses. About 80% of all people who earn over $250,000 per year are small business owners. In the USA, there is a small business for every 11-12-or-13 people (depends on the designated market or DMA).

Action: You are a business person. You know we are not articulating what it is that we do very well. Where else on television would you find a show that is struggling with the very nature of business, especially small business, and the role of government and morality?

There is no other place.

So, if you have it, renew. If you don't have it, join. Your membership within your local PBS-member station should begin at $75; do it and we will give you any one of our courses online (worth $99). Renew at your station at the $150 rate and you can receive all the courses without additional charges ($250 value). Become a member of your station's Producer's Club ($1000) and we will provide access to the courses for everyone in your business ($1000 value). Again, there is more information about the courses under Learn Online. And, your local PBS-member station is also listed here on this website. Just send us a note that you have renewed your membership, the dollar level, and the name of your station!

You'll receive a promotion code from us and a "thank you" from your station! Now, let's get back to this episode of the show and struggle -- together, of course -- with the meaning and value of life!

This is the 3rd point within the Case Study Guide for the episode titled,
"The Capitalist School: A Study of the Soul of the American Economy."

Fact: Employee-stock ownership programs have proven themselves over time. Ownership programs encourage people to act like soveriegns. Be careful. You have to prepare yourself to share ownership. However, we all die. Consider it as a possible exit strategy at the same time you empower your business and your people to go to the next level.

Action: So, if you own the business or you work within a business with aging leadership, consider proposing to do an employee-stock ownership program. The owner can become increasingly liquid and the next generation can begin to take over. There is an episode of the show that focuses entirely on the ESOP and there is an summary page as well.

To study other options, all are the beginning of an exit strategy and liquidity model, click on Step 7 and Step 8 within Paths & Steps.

Fact: Democracy is strengthened when there is an independent citizenry who can act like sovereigns.

This is the 4th point within the Case Study Guide for the episode titled,
"The Capitalist School: A Study of the Soul of the American Economy."

Fact: Every country needs an independent citizenry who can act like sovereigns but aren't afraid to get their hands a little dirty from hard work.

Action: We are building a country virtually from scratch in Iraq. To win this war with guns and no butter will be costly in human lives and dollars spent. What would happen if most of our small businesses were to work through the State Department and Department of Commerce to find an Iraqi to translate our web site into Arabic? What if we were to collaborate with other small business owners working through the First Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Pendleton and their citizen volunteers, the Spirit of America?

We would need cyber cafes and satellite dishes everywhere. In translating, every Iraqi would learn about your small business and the path to prosperity. In working with that Iraqi, each of us would be forced to learn how to articulate "the secrets" of our free society.

Our dollars would be well spent.

Wall Street Journal (Friday, April 16, 2004, A14, "Here's a Way You Can Help The Cause in Iraq."): All of us would want the opportunity to back up and support our soldiers in uniform. This article is about getting seven defunct, Iraqi-owned TV stations back on the air.

Spirit of America (800-691-2209) is collecting donations. We will donate our show, 260 episodes of the entrepreneurial spirit of America. And we will give classes to any Iraqi who can come online. We will also pay for Iraqi-voice overs and translations of every show.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal is to be congratulated for bringing this program to our attention.

All of you small business owners. We can make a difference. We will keep you posted on next steps to hire an Iraqi to translate your web site! You're creative and tenacious, once that web site is translated, you know you'll find the next step. Within the year, we could have a beachead for business in Iraq that could help free that entire region from fanaticism.

We all know that when a person has a good and meaningful work to do, there is no time for fanaticism.

This is the 5th point within the Case Study Guide for the episode titled,
"The Capitalist School: A Study of the Soul of the American Economy."

Fact: You are working too hard. You know you are. Too many long hours. And, it is true what they all say, "You are not spending enough time with the family." And it is also true that you are not spending enough time for you, just for your own peace of mind. Just for a little time to breath. Just to climb a mountain -- a physical mountain -- in a leisurely way.

Action 1: So, hire someone to help you. Small Business School is hiring people from all around the world. They do not have to come into your home office. Create a job and good work. Take some time to imbibe the first principles of democratic capitalism and become a teacher of the next generation. Help others to understand what it means to own something. You know that we all die and we can't take it with us. The real value in what we own is creating the foundations by which it continues to be nurtured and grows.

There are many episodes of the show about the people part of business that might inspire your thinking. You'll also need to get up to speed with the latest and greatest technology tools so you can manage and work with people remotely.

Action 2: The New order of the Ages. Begin by taking out a dollar bill, flip it over, and read the banner under the pyramid: "Novus Ordo Seclorum." The new order of the ages. It is written into our primary value equations.

Here at Small Business School we believe, even though it's been well over 200 years, we are just beginning to understanding this new order. Our on-going exploration, called First Principles, is part of every episode of the show.

Go deeper. To dig down, we ask, "Are there common foundations shared by business, religion and science?"

9/11 challenges us. We all need to become evangelists for democratic capitalism and we may discover as we get the concepts and the language to move from our brains through our mouths, the words may be more inclusive, creative, and embolding than any prior historical depiction of democratic capitalism.

For more fundational reading, review Novak's "A Closet Capitalist Confesses," Washington Post, 1977, and even Max Faber, The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit Of Capitalism (1904). We need to begin using the words that describe an enlightened individualism, and the very nature of asceticism and its correlation to our sense of purpose and desire to do hard work.

6

Fact 1: The tensions between religious belief systems are so profound, this statement could readily inflame tensions further.

Fact 2: All religion is about the universal, that which transcends and begets all space and time.

Fact 3: The most basic principle of an ordering system is continuity. All religions are ordering systems for universals, yet as a starting point, some do not emphasize an understanding of the continuity conditions for order.

The most fundamental binding fact, a first principle of reality, is our seemingly inherent drive to create or see the order within any level of chaos. Ordered systems are essential for all three legs of democratic capitalism: (1) Business requires order and continuity. (2) Liberty and freedom, a democratic government, requires order and continuity. (3) Morality begins with order and continuity.

And, in fact, order / continuity is the starting point, the form / function, of math, logic, and all of science.

Though within that dialogue between Michael Novak and Hattie we hear that the religious task of Jews and Christians is to change the world and to purify their own heart, at this time we need to discover common grounds within first principles with all religions.

Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims now share in common a basic understanding of science. Science is science and tecnology is technology. If it works, it is right. If it doesn't work, it is obviously not good technology or good science.

Most religious people put their religious beliefs in a separate container from science and never the two shall meet. However, if our religious beliefs are to be truly universal beliefs, somehow those beliefs must also encompass space and time, and the only starting point that religion and science can share is order and continuity, the form and the function. With a common starting point, a dialogue about the very nature of a relation can then come into play.

Action: Let us debate and discuss and formulate first principles together.

Action: Some of you may want to read Professor David Landes, Harvard's Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.

7

Fact: Democratic capitalism invokes the role for government and rule for law. The Sherman Antitrust Trust Act of 1890 was invoked as law to discourage monopolies. Like principalities and any form of any oligarchies (rule by a few), democracies work when power is decentralized and is elected and representative. We know our history with kings, queens, and dictators and democratic governments and business attempt not to vest too much power within too few people.

Action: Revisit the Sherman Antitrust Trust Act of 1890.

8

Fact: Most of our personal histories will include family members who were indenture servants and serfs. It is like we have come full circle. In business, we learn the heart of the transaction is service, and that the one who serves is the one who is in fact leading.

Action: Hire a new employee.

The freely open and creativty society of democratic capitalism has three legs:

• Order / continuity: Human, moral and cultural capital. Good discipline and good habits of learning, doing high quality work, and a willingness to work long and hard. It is knowing the point of the whole thing -- truth, fair play, trust and respect for others. It is that group, literally millions of people who get up every day and try to change the world, make it at least a little bit better.
• Relation / symmetries: Politics, laws, rights, freedoms and liberties.
• Dynamic / harmonies: The market, ownership, economics or capital, and business part of freeing people from poverty, and encouraging growth, development, and insights.

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: continuous enterprise, planned and organized. Evaluated for profit and loss.

'The invention of the market economy in Great Britain and the United States, more profoundly revolutionized the world between 1800 and the present more than any other single force. After five millennia of blundering, human beings finally figured out how wealth may be produced in a sustained systematic way.'

9

Self-interest is neither greed or selfishness.

Business has inherent in it a drive in its own success. It may not be a generous motive, but just to succeed at it you've got to serve others well. even if you have a lousy personality, business forces you to be better than you are.

The self is not developed. It's not a self until it's joined with at least one other and usually more than one other. And that's just the law of life.

10

A capitalist economic order stretches people. It demands more of them.

Markets are a terrific device for social intelligence.

11

Lincoln caught better in an address. He gave a wonderful talk on the six great moments in the history of liberty. Started with Adam and Eve. And one of the moments, which really surprised me, was the patent and copyright act. And he says that was so brilliant. And I'm going to say it in my own words, but his words are eloquent. But in my own words it was that -- that for the first time in history, the main form of wealth (Voiceover) will not be land, as it had been.

Homestead Act, 70 acres. But the intelligence, the ideas, the insights that led people to treat their land or anything else in a new way.

The main cause of wealth would be the head. I like to say caput. The root term for capital. The discovery, invention.

Lincoln and new strain of seed for grass.

Ideas matter more than ever before and it's astonishing how many things are born in someone's mind and something comes to be that was never there.

It's the first system organized around the mind, around invention and discovery.

12

Small Business is very good for democracy; it's he main strength, the best hopem, of democracy.

Democracy will work best the greater the number of independent owners that there are. That's where sovereignty resides.

That sense of independence that Jefferson and others saw is vital for the life of a republic.

Building your own businesses teaches a set of virtues which you just won't learn any other way.

It teaches you to live with failure.

It teaches you to do very difficult things.

It gives you a great many satisfaction to seeing something that you, that existed only in your imagination, come to life and reality.

The most important institutional change to be happening in the world is the promotion and the multiplication of small business.

It's the only hope of the poor.

It's the main instrument of raising up the poor, providing jobs.

Small business is the most important institution of civil society.

The backbone out of which democracy comes.

That sense of leadership, and strength and self-confidence that makes citizens willing to take on their government and become responsible for it ... to become the sovereigns.