Copyright 2005 By Dan S. Kennedy, RenegadeMillionaire.com

Editor’s note: The following article by direct response marketing expert Dan Kennedy is reproduced with permission from Dan’s autobiographical book, ‘My Unfinished Business’ (Advantage Media Group, 2009). The article is particularly pertinent today in light of Michael Moore’s latest film, ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ and the unwarranted attacks on capitalism and entrepreneurialism he and others have unleashed in light of the ‘global financial crisis’ and ensuing economic recession. Despite the American bias, the article has universal relevance…

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need total confidence in our free enterprise system, the unlimited opportunities it provides, and in the unlimited power of the individuals. You have to be an avowed capitalist, passionate in your admiration and appreciation of capitalism.

One of the currently popular voices of anti-capitalism is Michael Moore. Chapter 7 in his book, ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’ is so offensive, and so false, I have written this article in response.

Here, in part, is what Mr Moore wrote:

“We’re addicted to this happy rags-to-riches myth in this country. People elsewhere in other industrialized democracies are content to make enough living to pay their bills and raise their families. Few have the cutthroat desire to strike it rich… most people outside the U.S. don’t live their lives based on fairy tales. They live in reality, where there are only going to be a few rich people, and you are not going to be one of them. So get used to it… We bought the Kool-Aid. We bought into that lie that we, too, could someday be rich.”

Mr Moore says the very idea that you, an ordinary American, can get rich is a cruel lie. I say he is either a fool or a liar. Let’s look at the facts. It’s important to do so because Mr Moore represents a lot of voices, all telling you ‘you can’t do it’, urging you to cool your jets, accept your lot in life. These voices are dangerous. You – and everyone who hears them – needs to know just how wrong they are.

Michael Moore, Meet The Forbes 400, The Riches People in America

Maybe Michael Moore doesn’t read Forbes. Each year, Forbes publishes an issue featuring brief profiles of the 400 richest people in America. Multi-millionaires and billionaires – what he says you can’t be and shouldn’t bother trying to become. The 2003 Forbes list, the truth, destroys Moore’s fiction.

Certainly, a number are on the list due to inheritance – although the original source of the inherited wealth is still instructive. But let’s look at some of the people who got there doing what Moore says you can’t.

First, the top ten richest. Bill Gates. He started his business in a garage, only 30 years ago. Four of the top 10 are Sam Walton heirs. Sam opened his first little store in 1962. Now, as we go deeper in the list, we get a much clearer picture of just how wrong Moore is.

Richard Egan. A Marine helicopter pilot in the Korean War. In 1979, Egan launched a small storage company with six employees. He took the company, EMC, public in 1986. He’s worth $1.3 billion.

Harold Simmons. A school teacher’s son, once employed as a bank examiner. In 1961, Simmons put together just $5,000 and bought a small drugstore. Just 12 years later, he sold the chain of stores he built, Eckerds, for $50 million.

Wayne Huizenga. A college drop-out who started his garbage collection business with one used truck. He built that business (Waste Management) and sold it, then bought a small chain of 19 video stores, and built that into the Blockbuster chain, sold just seven years later to Viacom for $8.4 billion.

Leslie Wexner. This Ohio State law school drop-out started with one womens clothing store in Columbus, Ohio, in 1963. He methodically built a chain of more than 4,000 stores. Seven different brands, including The Limited and Victoria’s Secret. Worth $2.7 billion.

Kenny Troutt. This 55 year old bartender’s son grew up in a housing project, held jobs in construction, selling insurance. In 1988, he started his own network marketing company, Excel Communications, selling discount long-distance. He built it to $1.4 billion in sales, sold it in 1998 for $3.5 billion. He owns the stud farm where the 2003 Kentucky Derby winner, Funny Cide, was born.

James Jannard. A college drop-out who started a small business in 1975, making motorcycle grips. Expanded to sunglasses and apparel. Built his brands by giving free samples to celebrities. Worth $1.1 billion.

Margaret Whitman. Harvard MBA, worked at Proctor & Gamble and Hasbro, before taking something of a career gamble, taking the top job at an unproven new company: eBay. Worth $1.1 billion.

Gary Comer. Turned his hobby into a business, beginning with a small mail-order operation, selling hardware to boat owners. Added clothing. Turned the catalog into Land’s End. Sold to Sears for $1 billion.

Oprah Winfrey. You know her. Came from a very troubled background. Started working in local TV. Turned nationally syndicated show into multi-media empire. Her motto: “Own it.” Worth over $1 billion.

John Menard Jr. Opened a little hardware store, after building barns to pay his way through college. Has 184 stores. Worth $3.5 billion.

David Green. Opened a small store to sell his handmade picture frames. Today, 307 craft stores in 27 states. Worth $1.1 billion.

Sydell Miller. From my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. She started an eyelash make-up company in 1971, built it up from scratch, sold it in 1984 for a paltry $3 million. Started again, mixing batches of hair care products in the basement of a hair salon. Turned that company into Matrix, sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Worth $595 million.

Let’s review. We have highly educated; we have college drop-outs. Men and women. People in mundane businesses like hardware stores and garbage collection.

Who will be on this list five, ten, fifteen years from now? A whole bunch of people Michael Moore insists can’t possibly get there. Why not you?

Michael Moore, Meet The News

Maybe Michael Moore doesn’t read newspapers. It’s hard to find a daily newspaper anywhere in America that, in any given week, doesn’t run at least one story that proves what a fool or liar Mr Moore is. The news is chock full of accounts of very ordinary people achieving extraordinary success and wealth. As just one example, here’s a piece of news from The Cleveland Plain Dealer; October 28, 2003. It concerns a rust-belt manufacturing company and a janitor.

“The former janitor for Tinnerman Palnut Engineered Products has formed a group of investors to buy Tinnerman’s retaining ring unit. Anthony Lee, who rose from janitor to product manager, said he will be vice president of the new company, Ring Lasters LLC.”

Mr Moore frequently wails about the sad plight of th working folk in America, losing jobs as their employers consolidate or outsource. Looks like Anthony Lee did something other than complaining and woe-is-me’ing. But had Anthony Lee heard from Michael Moore early enough in his career, surely he’d have accepted ‘janitor’ as his permanent and appropriate lot in life. Had Anthony Lee read Mr Moore’s book, he would have been educated about the utter futility of a former janitor trying to assemble investment capital and buy a company.

I dare you: pick any city, take a full week of its daily newspaper, read them cover to cover, and NOT find at least one story comparable to this one about this former janitor. A janitor fortunate to have escaped Mr Moore’s advice.

Michael Moore, Meet My ‘Students’

I have more than 100 millionaire, multi-millionaires and men and women earning over a million dollars a year in my Inner Circle groups. Most have gotten there by starting diverse businesses from scratch, in as few as 3 to no more than 15 years. Are they somehow so genetically superior or ‘weird’ that ordinary people cannot do what they’ve done? Not at all. Let me introduce a fair sampling.

Louise Nielsen. At age 38, deeply in debt, considering bankruptcy. Her work experience: housewife and mother. She started a very unglamorous business – cleaning houses. With a bucket, mop and business card. Grew the business to employ 200 people. Sold the business for a very nice sum. Wrote a book about how she did it, which has sold tens of thousands of copies, self-published. If she can start like this and get rich, Mr Moore, why can’t anyone else?

Jeff Paul attended my seminar, desperate, living with his wife and kids in his sister-in-law’s basement, more than $100,000 in debt on credit cards, struggling to get a mail-order business going. Within months of that seminar, he had his first $100,000 income month. He has since developed multiple businesses, sold more than 150,000 of one of his products on QVC, and become a much sought after marketing consultant. You might have seen his TV infomercial.

Joe Polish, a once dead-broke carpet cleaner. He searched for and found ways to succeed in that business and has since provided his ‘system’ to more than 5,000 carpet cleaners worldwide. In his ‘Better Your Best Contest’, he awards top carpet cleaners new Hummers and Corvettes. Joe is now a published author. Owns his own building. Has a 7-figure income.

Darin Garman is a former Iowa prison guard who bumbled onto Napoleon hill’s book ‘Think and Grow Rich’, gathering dust on the warden’s bookshelf. That book told Darin what Mr Moore says is impossible: you, an ordinary guy in a dead-end job, can get rich. Darin taught himself the business of buying and selling apartment buildings. Today, his brokerage controls over 60 percent of all such transactions in his local markets, he advertises nationally in Forbes and Investors Building Daily, and investors come from all over America to do business with him. I own properties with him myself.

Chet Rowland has gotten rich in another dull, mundane business: pest control. He comes from a disadvantaged background. Started from scratch, with a spray canister. Built the largest pest control company in central Florida, with thousands of customers. Has become a consultant to other pest control operators. Chet has also prudently managed his money, and actively invests in high-rise condominium developments.

Ron Le Grand was an auto mechanic working for a paycheck when he saw a newspaper ad Michael Moore would make fun of, claiming anyone could learn to get rich in real estate – even with no money to invest and no credit. Ron went to the advertised seminar. He had to borrow the $450 to go through the course sold at the seminar. Within a few months, he had acquired more than 70 properties. He has since bought and sold thousands of houses. He has taught his ‘we buy houses for cash’ and ‘quick turn’ strategies to over 100,000 people, too. The annual reunion of his students has been attended by as many as 7,000, a goodly number of them from-scratch millionaires. A lot of them, the kind of people Michael Moore says can’t get rich and shouldn’t bother trying.

I could share hundreds more stories like these. These stories are the real American story, the real story of life in America.

Michael Moore, Meet Me

I did not attend college, My parents were in deep financial trouble throughout my years in high school so I began with no family financial resources. Before age 50, solely via my own, started-from-scratch businesses, I amassed a fortune large enough that, if I so choose, I need never work another day in my life. Every marketable skill I possess was self-taught, diligently acquired in ways anyone, absolutely anyone, could emulate.

Like Mr Moore, I am a published author. A dozen books, published in more than a dozen countries, translated and published in Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Two of my books have been on bookstore shelves continuously for 12 years. One is ‘the bible’ of its industry. One was recently on the Business week bestseller list. Unlike Mr Moore’s books, mine glorify America and encourage and inspire people to do more, aspire to more.

I also became one of the most popular business speakers in America, addressing audiences of 10,000 to 30,000, and repeatedly appearing with former U.S. Presidents and world leaders, other famous authors and legendary entrepreneurs – although I stuttered uncontrollably as a child.

Like Mr Moore, I am an entrepreneur, although he tries his best not to have that noticed. Like Mr Moore, I have much to thank capitalism and the American free trade system for, although he tends not to express such gratitude.

Michael Moore, Meet Thomas Stanley

Thomas Stanley, Ph.D. is the author of the bestselling book ‘The Millionaire Next Door’, which summarizes results of an exhaustive 20 year research study examining who actually gets rich in America and how they do it. Maybe Mr Moore missed this book.

To quote Stanley:

“How do you become wealthy? It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes. Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning and, most of all, self-discipline. Who becomes wealthy? Usually the wealthy individual is a businessman who has lived in the same small town his entire life. This person owns a small factory, chain of stores or service company. He is a saver and investor. And he has made his money on his own. 80 percent of America’s millionaires are first-generation rich.”

Michael Moore, Meet The Man in The Mirror

Everybody I’ve presented in this article contributes something meaningful to America. They build or have built viable companies, providing jobs, career opportunities, prosperity to communities, inventions, innovations, and positive inspiration to others. Combined, their efforts have provided opportunity for millions. What has Mr Moore done that might be comparably honorable? Nothing. He has written and promoted only critical, venomous books and films that glorify nothing, help or encourage no one. He has wasted real talent as a writer, film-maker and promoter, delivering nothing that might improve anyone’s life. He is want Ayn Rand called a ‘destroyer.’ The people I’ve described here, who so ably prove his thesis wrong, are ‘builders.’

The Tortured, Twisted Logic Michael Moore Uses To Discount The Great American Millionaire Explosion

Even Mr Moore acknowledges the existence of a recent ‘millionaire explosion.’ But he views it as a conspiracy! From his book:

“The American carrot is dangled in front of us and we believe we are almost within reach of making it. It’s so believable because we have seen it come true. A person who comes from nothing goes on to strike it rich. There are more millionaires now than ever before. This increase in the number of millionaires has served a very useful function for the rich because it means in every community there’s at least one person prancing around as a rags-to-riches poster child…”

Mr Moore has a ‘conspiracy theory’ that America’s super-rich use the ‘lie’ that you can get rich to control you, to keep you from taxing them more or, presumably, boiling and eating them. If Mr Moore’s theory wasn’t so destructive it would be laughable.

Facts are facts, whether Mr Moore likes them or not. There are more millionaires than ever before and that proves it is more possible, more realistic than ever before, for you or any other American to set out consciously and deliberately to get rich. And, incidentally, there are more tools readily available to everyone to use to get rich than ever before. I built my earliest businesses before the Internet, before email, *before* the FAX machine.

Mr Moore is also fond of the term ‘strike it rich.’ This is strategic, said this way to diminish the act, the process, the feasibility of getting rich, to suggest it is freak accident or stroke of luck. The fact is, the majority of the rich don’t ‘strike it rich’ at all – they earn it. Just as Thomas Stanley documented.

Why I Think Mr Moore is Anti-American

There is nothing less American in my mind that stealing peoples’ dreams, dowsing their ambitions and extinguishing their initiative. There is nothing less patriotic than lying about the greatness of America and the opportunities our capitalist system affords each and every citizen. Radio commentator Glenn Beck, a rags to riches example himself, called Mr Moore’s messages ‘poisonous.’ He is right on target. There’s no good in it, for any individual or for America.

I might add: what could be more reprehensible than getting rich yourself by telling everyone else they cannot?

While disguising himself in scruffy clothes and posting as the working-man’s friend, Mr Moore is actually an elitist. He apparently believes that the success, celebrity and wealth he has created and enjoys is beyond the capabilities of most Americans. Why he would think himself so gifted and special is beyond me.

To justify his elitist beliefs, his silly conspiracy theory, his insistence that the average American cannot get rich and shouldn’t try, he points to the majority who do not create wealth for themselves. But this is an empty argument, a red herring. It erroneously confuses ‘don’t’ with ‘won’t’ with ‘can’t’. Mr Moore says because many won’t, you can’t.

I say, if someone does, if some do, so can you.

If you choose to follow Mr Moore’s doctrine, you get excuses as your reward, and a diminished, depressing view of America and American life as your philosophy.

If you opt for my doctrine, you get unlimited opportunity.

You choose.

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