Galt's Gulch a scam?

[Sal9000]

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35591/Wendy-McElroy-The-Fate-of-Galts-Gulch-Chile/I can verify some of the facts that McElroy writes about. We had a look at some property at Galt's Gulch, but it was overpriced and as she mentions it had no water rights.

[SamuelS]

How does a subjectively undesirable feature make it a scam? Was this not disclosed or were people lead to believe things which were later proved false somehow?

[Sal9000]

Well, land in Chile, especially near Valpo is useless when you don't have water rights. It is a semi arid area and without irrigation, nothing grows there. In addition, there was a lot of in fighting and from what I know, Jeff Berwick was kicked out soon. There is more to follow, since Berwick promised to follow that story up. From what I can tell (we bought property in Chile too and we had a look at GGC as well) most people were not aware that you needed water rights in Chile. The land was way too expensive, even if it had included water rights.

[SamuelS]

You didn't answer my question, at all. Was anybody mislead?

 

Value is entirely subjective, I value a nice mountain view and privacy, others value the convenience of living next to a 7-eleven...am I wrong? Are they?

 

Water rights are separate from land in many areas, if one intends to be involved in agriculture it would behoove them to ensure their interests are covered.

[Sal9000]

You didn't answer my question, at all. Was anybody mislead?

 

 

It seems to be so. We looked it up and the advertisement did not mention any restrictions. Nor did they say that GGC was in a natural park, which makes some forms of agriculture impossible. We went there and had a look. We found that the parcels were overpriced and that it was really far off from the next big city (Valparaiso). If you did not have any background information you could have been mislead by the sales pitch imo. Plus, there were rumors about the person who started the projects and there were reports of heavy in-fighting with GGC. Jeff Berwick writes about that in a very in depth article.http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2014/8/27/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-on-galts-gulch-chile.html?fb_action_ids=10152629429555041&fb_action_types=og.likes

[PatrickC]

Yeah, not sure how Jeff comes out of this smelling entirely like roses. Blaming it on just this one man, seriously?

 

I do find Jeff's account to be somewhat dubious. I think this Ken Johnson used the oldest trick in the book. Convince these guys they could make billions and then soak them for all they and the final GGC customers had got. I find it had to believe Jeff had not met this before, but perhaps he hasn't. That said, these things happen. It's how he handled damage control thereafter that is my complaint here.

 

I know I'd have been pretty pissed with him myself, if I had been a GGC customer after he'd left the project and remained silent about his removal. I can understand the remining founders and purchasers from last August wanting him to remain silent about it. But seriously, by then I would know this was my reputation that was on the line and would have confessed all to future buyers.

 

I appreciate Jeff lost a lot of money in all this, but that is small change compared to his lifetime repuatation.

 

EDIT - Sounds like Jeff is having his feet held to the fire in the comments section. I think it's telling he has remained silent until Wendy brought it up. This really isn't shaping well for Jeffs integrity.

[Etwa]

Galts Gulch Chile is not a scam. It is very badly (mis)managed project. 

 

This is a comment on Jeff Berwick Facebook page ... from one guy who used to work there

 

 Imagine if you will, you have a client coming in to see the property, you have spent much time building relationships with them.. They are traveling from the other side if the world.. You meet them at their hotel and have an appointment to see the land where your boss, lets call him Ken doll, has agreed the night before and an earlier text message to meet you there at 11.. You drive an hour and a half to get there with your clients where you sit outside locked gates because this control freak boss makes excuses not to make copies of keys because he is insanely paranoid and wants all actions, all work, everything to depend solely on him.. Imagine you sit there for three hours, no gas stations near by, no restaurants, no restrooms, no cell phone reception.. In the hot sun.. Finally he shows up 3 hours late with some stranger in the car, laughing and joking at a leisurely pace... He pulls up beside where you are sitting on the side of the road.. Says hey what's going on.. You express that we had an 11 o'clock appointment and he shrugs and says I got caught up in blah blah.. He then says I got room for two in my jeep, your clients get in his dog hair infested disgusting jeep and he leaves you on the side of the road for another two hours doing a half ass tour.. Completely inconsiderate of the fact that they are starving and thirsty.. Imagine if after he simply drops them back off.. And rolls out again leaving you to do great damage control inflicted by him.. All the time building relationships thrown out the window as they are super pissed at the disrespect.. What you have imagined has happened on multiple occasions in dealing w ken doll. (Like 3 hours late almost every single day) Keep in mind this was before the clubhouse became a work area, or had Internet)Now imagine if the next day is pay day and he says I will meet you at the clubhouse he has "plenty if money" he showed off his big wad as he went to the casino.. So you are sure this time he will pay you.., you drive an hour and a half to meet him... Two hours later you drive back to town to get cell phone reception to see why he hasn't showed.. He says "yeah I've been super swamped, I'm dealing with blah blah blah" completely inconsiderate to the time you could have spent working on the project.. Or anything productive.. So you say ok I will meet your at the beach house tomorrow.. Can I count on you, he says yeah man.. The next day you drive 3 hours to the beach house.. You go in and sit on the sofa as he goes through 6 phone calls and never even acknowledges you exist.. An hour and a half later of not wanting to interrupt, you finally walk into his bedroom where he is answering an email and say... "Ken doll, what gives?" He says "what's up?" I say we were supposed to meet.. He says for what.. You say, to get paid.. He says for what?...... For my fucking work dude.. For the videos I created you troll faced fucktard.. He begins questioning you as if you are trying to get over on him and you present a calendar you have created to detail every day what you have accomplished.. He looks it over and says, sorry dude, I had to pay out a bunch of people.. I don't have any money.. His phone rings, he holds up his finger answers it.. And leaves you standing dumbfounded on such an asinine amount of inconsideration.. He doesn't bother finishing up your conversation as he gets up and walks out on the phone the whole time.. Saying to the caller "well I don't know what your deal is man, we are all over here working, I don't know what you're doing" He does this to team members who come from professional and entrepreneurial backgrounds.. If you are not in his direct eyesight he does not believe you are working.. This is but a snapshot of every single day working for Ken Johnson.. This actually happened to me... its a forced bottleneck under his control, every waking hour, insanely paranoid, incompetent business decision after decision.. Infested with Little man syndrome.. It's enough to make you seriously question the value of NAP. So why would you stay more than a week.. Because you believe so much in the message of liberty that you feel it will work in spite of him... After a while begin questioning your own sanity.. Like why the fuck is no one else saying shit? It was a fascinating thing to watch unfold, but words can't describe the frustration.Does it sound like freedom?

 

And this was also my experience.

[Sal9000]

Jeff has to provide some answers why he did not come forward with warnings as soon as he was kicked out from GGC.

[PatrickC]

Wow, that certainly sucked melons Etwa. Sounds like more than few reputations got tarnished in the midst of all this. As has already been suggested elsewhere, the guy sounds like your textbook sociopath.

 

What do you think of Jeff's culpability in all this. I've only ever had one business and the largest contract I ever had involved employing 70 people and only lasted 9 months. I worked night and day on that project, scared stiff I would fuck up. Mainly scared because I had to employ complete strangers for the first time. Fortunately I had two permanent staff that I knew for some years and could rely on to pick up my slack where there simply wasn't enough hours in the day for me. I was offered some bigger projects after this, all of which I turned down, knowing full well I didn't have the resources to guarantee meeting all my contractual obligations. 

 

So it's astonishing that an experienced businessman like Jeff literally hands over the reigns of a huge project to a complete stranger, with the excuse that he had no time nor qualification to operate or manage a real estate development. That said, the point of contention I think, is not that he did all the above, but that he's not really owning up to it in any meaningful way. No remorse for his ineptitude or personal responsibility. This is the particular disappointment as I see it, in the response he has so far given. That as well as the point Sal raises too.

[Magnus]

I did commercial litigation for about 10 years, and saw this sort of thing happen more than once.  The challenge with large-scale real estate development is that it needs to reach a kind of critical mass of buy-ins, or else the entire project goes bankrupt.  You see this a lot with high-rise condos, especially.  There were so many developments in Florida that never reached a profitable level of occupancy, and so much investor-money that went missing, even the Florida legislature noticed and passed a statute mandating the way that developers had to hold and use the residents' deposit money. 

 

I've met a lot of these half-assed real estate guys ... it has always amazed me how sloppy they can be before the whole operation collapses.  Although there's always more to the story than any one person's perspective, the description from the employee of Johnson's business practices is very familiar to me.  Salesmen should never be in charge.  But they end up in charge, a lot of times, because their role in the overall enterprise (especially at the beginning) is so critically important that they hold a lot of sway.  But these projects also need a manager -- a pedantic, administrative personality who enjoys the details and the formalities.  It's great to have someone who can sell ice to an Eskimo, but you also need someone to mind the till. 

 

This doesn't read like a scam.  It reads like a case of project mismanagement. 

 

It sucks that this will be used to discredit AnCap, even though the guy running it wasn't exactly a devoted contributor to the movement.

[Etwa]

What do you think of Jeff's culpability in all this.

 

I have never met Jeff. Ken Johnson had some very bad things to say about him. Both of them are claiming the otherone is a fraud. Both of them are stating the other one owns him money and that it was the other person he wanted to kidnap the project. I did find this article about Ken

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/12/libertarian-enclaves

Where is very obvious that it was not Ken who gave a name to the project. since he has not even read the book.

[PatrickC]

Where is very obvious that it was not Ken who gave a name to the project. since he has not even read the book.

 

Thanks for the article Etwa. Right, so it would seem on the surface that Jeff should be bearing 'some' of the responsibility. Despite this very apparent nut job called Ken.

 

On an aside, I find this a fascinating insight into how taking ownership of ones mistakes and keeping integrity are the all important factors to becoming a successful entrepreneur. That said, I'm not facing the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars from people I know, but still.

[SamuelS]

It seems to be so. We looked it up and the advertisement did not mention any restrictions. Nor did they say that GGC was in a natural park, which makes some forms of agriculture impossible. We went there and had a look. We found that the parcels were overpriced and that it was really far off from the next big city (Valparaiso). If you did not have any background information you could have been mislead by the sales pitch imo. Plus, there were rumors about the person who started the projects and there were reports of heavy in-fighting with GGC. Jeff Berwick writes about that in a very in depth article.http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2014/8/27/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-on-galts-gulch-chile.html?fb_action_ids=10152629429555041&fb_action_types=og.likes

thanks for the link, I started reading it the other day and got distracted...I still don't know that scam is the right word for it, but it's a mess for sure...I think my respect for Jeff is going to be eroding a lot over this.

[Etwa]

 

another "great" contribution from TYT. 

Well I guess Ken is on the run now and the people left will try to put the best of the mess.

[J. D. Stembal]

I did commercial litigation for about 10 years, and saw this sort of thing happen more than once.  The challenge with large-scale real estate development is that it needs to reach a kind of critical mass of buy-ins, or else the entire project goes bankrupt.  You see this a lot with high-rise condos, especially.  There were so many developments in Florida that never reached a profitable level of occupancy, and so much investor-money that went missing, even the Florida legislature noticed and passed a statute mandating the way that developers had to hold and use the residents' deposit money. 

 

I've met a lot of these half-assed real estate guys ... it has always amazed me how sloppy they can be before the whole operation collapses.  Although there's always more to the story than any one person's perspective, the description from the employee of Johnson's business practices is very familiar to me.  Salesmen should never be in charge.  But they end up in charge, a lot of times, because their role in the overall enterprise (especially at the beginning) is so critically important that they hold a lot of sway.  But these projects also need a manager -- a pedantic, administrative personality who enjoys the details and the formalities.  It's great to have someone who can sell ice to an Eskimo, but you also need someone to mind the till. 

 

This doesn't read like a scam.  It reads like a case of project mismanagement. 

 

It sucks that this will be used to discredit AnCap, even though the guy running it wasn't exactly a devoted contributor to the movement.

 

If anything, the Galt's Gulch debacle proves anarcho-capitalism works. You have to break a lot of eggs to make an omelette, and terrible real estate endeavors should be allowed to fail. A majority of people are sacrificed as investment "losers", so that there can be a minority of investors that do their research and succeed. Not everyone can succeed with every investment or endeavor. It's just not possible. If people are striving for something as powerful and enigmatic as a libertarian utopia, how are they going to get it right on the first try? It's telling that this land they were selling was protected, meaning regulated by the Chilean government.

 

"If you believe you don't need any government, you're gonna get robbed. That's why we set up government in the first place - so we don't all get murdered, raped, and robbed." - Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks

[Magnus]

If anything, the Galt's Gulch debacle proves anarcho-capitalism works. You have to break a lot of eggs to make an omelette, and terrible real estate endeavors should be allowed to fail. A majority of people are sacrificed as investment "losers", so that there can be a minority of investors that do their research and succeed. Not everyone can succeed with every investment or endeavor. It's just not possible. If people are striving for something as powerful and enigmatic as a libertarian utopia, how are they going to get it right on the first try? It's telling that this land they were selling was protected, meaning regulated by the Chilean government.

 

"If you believe you don't need any government, you're gonna get robbed. That's why we set up government in the first place - so we don't all get murdered, raped, and robbed." - Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks

 

Exactly.  The US government loses (not just wastes ... actually loses track of) more money in a day than this entire project cost.  Remember the Big Dig. The Hubble telescope flaws.  The Challenger explosion.  The real estate bubble.  War after war after war.  You can't even count how much the U.S government wastes. 

 

But a few people run into a water rights and minimum lot size problem from the Chilean government, and that's supposed to prove that free markets can't work?  Please. 

 

I really can't stand people like Uygur.  If the U.S. government confined its activities to preventing murder, rapes and robberies, I probably wouldn't object to it as strongly as I do.   But those goals, as worthy and laudable as they are, represent about 0.2% of what it spends its time (and our money) on. 

[PatrickC]

That video with the smirking (Strawmaning) Cenk and Ana is about as insightful as listening to Michael Dean gush all over Jeff Berwick's supposed integrity in this GGC debacle.

[Etwa]

The truth is coming out slowly

I just read this 2 articles. 

http://mcgillespie.com/galts-gulch-chile-story-timeline-references/

http://mcgillespie.com/the-creature-from-galts-gulch/