Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to another Dividend Cafe going into 4th of July weekend.

We are officially at the halfway point of the year.

Today is Friday, July the 1st. And markets open today, but it will now go into that

three-day weekend and will actually celebrate the 4th of July holiday on the actual 4th of July on Monday.

So markets will be back open Tuesday.

And we'll do plenty next week in the D.C. today on Tuesday to really recap where we are

at this halfway point of the year, the highly volatile and tumultuous market environment that we're in.

But today, we will not be discussing such current events.

Instead, we will be focused on the actual events of this weekend.

That is the 4th of July, which what I would prefer we refer to as

Independence Day. And what I've done in the Dividing Cafe today is actually try my best to connect

the thing we celebrate on Independence Day, the kind of key ideals and principles of our nation's

founding to markets, to the very thing that investors are engaged in day by day, what the very

nature of investment opportunity is, and how that connects to the pretty

radical experiment that is and was America. I believe that most of you know that the reason we call

July 4th the birthday of the country is it was the day the Declaration of Independence was signed and delivered,

declaring the independence from Britain and what our founding fathers laid out in sort of enumerated form in the decoration as a case for a

freer nation and one disconnected from the various hindrances that had become unbearable

in their relationship to Britain.

And it is my belief that many of these hindrances and many of these impediments,

many of these complaints are explicitly economic,

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