The path led from the African river across a narrow flood plain toward a high embankment crowned with a dense thicket of tall elephant grass.  Beside the trail grew a few randomly scattered sorghum plants.  Continuing alongside this forlorn attempt at agriculture, the path suddenly stopped, made a wide semicircle to the left, and then resumed its straight course toward the embankment.  In the exact center of the semicircle, a lone sorghum plant grew.  Obviously, the seed had fallen onto the old path and had taken root.  The natives, not really understanding the connection between seed and plant, had simply diverted the path.  The gods have their peculiar ways, they must have thought.

The village above was protected by a fortification labyrinth cut through the otherwise impenetrable elephant grass.  Hidden alcoves provided places where any hostile intruder could be ambushed from behind.  Footprints in the dirt were regularly re-trod so that a stranger, wandering the labyrinth, would miss the hidden entrance to the short path to the village.  Eventually, though, I arrived to find a small settlement of dome-shaped huts thatched with elephant grass.  Bees swarmed in blizzards, their hives, woven baskets, hung in the village's trees.  Tools were made of stone.  I found myself thrown back twelve thousand years, all the way to the edge of the last Ice Age, back to the very beginning of Neolithic culture.  It was 1976.

Anyone who has traveled much in the backwoods outside this country will have had similar encounters, though probably not so extreme.  All such travelers have in fact been time travelers.

We usually don't think in those terms.  The standard way of thinking is that these backward places are impoverished.  And yet, the reality is that the poor people living in these places are living the same way our ancestors did only a few centuries ago.  These backward places are islands of the past in our present.

But not entirely in the past, as it happens.  There is a wonderful photo of a half naked East African tribesman.  He is leaning on a lion spear and talking on a cell phone.  So that native, too, is a time traveler, being drawn into his future.  As time goes on, more and more of the future is leaking into those islands of the past.

The rich is the future of the poor.  A corollary of this is that most middle-class Americans today are far richer than the very rich of the past.  This is true even of most of our poor.  The average American is, in most respects, richer than even the kings of the past.  Don't believe me?  What king of old could fly around the world?  What king had his choice of all the world's entertainments?  What king had the resources of knowledge that science, modern libraries, and the internet provide?  What king had today's medicine and a long, healthy life?  What king had warmth in the winter (check out the heavy clothes in old paintings)?  Yes, kings had a multitude of servants, but today we have mechanical servants that do a better job.  And we have a luxury that no king ever had: privacy!

So what has given us this gift of the future?  Why didn't the kings of old create our luxury-filled civilization?  Historians tell us it was entrepreneurial capitalists who created the modern world.  It is no accident that the Industrial Revolution began in Scotland and later flourished in New England in America.  The Scots had little love for kings, but great respect for independent-minded inventors and entrepreneurs. 

I have read that the free residents of Colonial America were, on the average, substantially wealthier than their British Isle counterparts.  But colonial wealth was different in the North from what it was in the South.  Wealth creation in the South came from tobacco and later cotton.  The Southern plantations revived the medieval manor system with its serfs, now in the form of slaves.  In so doing, the South closed off its future.  The rocky soil and cold climate up north required a different solution.  The colonial North gained wealth from timber, ship-building, trade, smuggling, and whaling.  This entrepreneurial Northern society was pre-adapted to capitalist industrialism.

So what drives us into the future?  I posit two factors: parallelism and differential wealth.  Consider differential wealth.  I liken it to the temperature difference needed to run any engine.  Without the flow of energy caused by a temperature difference, no engine can run.

Differential wealth has an analogous property.  There are two important factors involved.  Without differential wealth, there is no way to finance innovation.  Inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs must spend time and resources on a project.  This requires either their own wealth or wealth from investors.  The same is true for scientific discovery.  Then there is motivation: the prospect of riches drives many to work hard and creatively.  This is called "ambition." 

The second factor is parallelism.  There are two basic ways of organizing economic activity.  One is hierarchical, or vertical.  The other is parallel, or horizontal.  There are hierarchies in all civilized societies – both in governmental structures and in corporations.  But innovative societies tend to emphasize parallelism rather than top-down.

It seems to be true that most good new ideas come from the bottom of any organization, or from outside an organization.  In order for a new idea to be implemented, the idea needs funding. 

In a vertical organization, the new idea must be approved successively by each of the many levels of an organization.  In such an organization, it takes only one individual in the chain of command to doom a proposal.  Only rarely does a new idea get properly funded.  This is true whether we are considering a corporation or a government.

Now consider an entrepreneurial environment with many parallel channels for funding.  An innovator can present his idea to each channel for possible approval.  The probability that at least one of the channels will approve his project is substantial.  The venture capital industry is structured in precisely this way.  So is the military during wartime.

This model highlights the strength of an entrepreneurial society versus a hierarchical society.  An entrepreneurial society has wealth to invest because of its many successful innovations.  It has many parallel channels whereby that wealth can be funneled to develop interesting new ideas.  And it taps the human energy of ambition with the promise of success and prosperity.

All successful organizations start small.  They are established to fill an existing need or to create what will become an important need.  They grow if they "do well by doing good."  Organizations often remain innovative while their entrepreneurial founders are still in charge.  Mature organizations seldom retain the creative spark.

Societies follow the same path to maturity.  Long established nations tend to be strongly hierarchical and averse to risk. Such a hierarchical society stifles innovation and wealth creation.  Ambition for personal advancement then takes the form of political intrigue and character assassination.  Such a society becomes cynical; it stagnates, then declines.

In that stagnation is the danger.  Innovative high civilizations in the past have collapsed into long dark ages after they became hierarchically hidebound.  We are not immune to such collapse.  America has drifted into a oligarchic technocracy combined with creeping socialism.  At the top is a fusion of large corporations and government.  The "elites" that run this top-down conglomerate care a lot for the globe and very little for America.  Regulation and taxation – specifically designed to protect the establishment – dominates our economic environment.  Innovation is drying up.  The price paid is our long-lasting economic depression.

It isn't just hierarchy that stifles economic growth.  Socialism does as well.  The ideal socialist society is one of equality of result.  This means that the wealth differential needed to power innovative activity disappears.  More than this, history tells us that socialist societies almost immediately evolve into tyrannical hierarchies.  Only innovations, such as military, that strengthen the top of the  hierarchy have any chance of being approved.  All others, being disruptive, are actively suppressed.

We need a shift in our culture back to our past era of American economic dynamism.  We need to cast off the strangling tentacles of socialism.  We need to provide both incentives for retaining our discoveries and disincentives for their export.  No, this is not isolationism; it simply re-establishes productive international competition with America competing.  America First is not a bad slogan to re-adopt.

We are not guaranteed a future.  To have a future, we need to recognize that wealth creation is the fruit of private enterprise and not government intervention in the marketplace.  We need to honor those who create wealth instead of shaming them, taxing them, and regulating them into oblivion.  For it is their new wealth, productively re-invested, that will carry us into the future.

As long as the laws stay what they are, our economic stagnation will continue.  These laws must change.  Our job, as citizens, is to elect agents of fruitful change and to keep their feet to the fire until we return to the dynamic America we once were.  Will we continue to be time travelers into the future, or will we recede into the past, into history?  Only the time will tell.