I have to confess: I’ve never read Ayn Rand. Not once.
But I still think this is pretty amusing.
by E.D. Kain| 93 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
I have to confess: I’ve never read Ayn Rand. Not once.
But I still think this is pretty amusing.
by DougJ| 70 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, Going Galt
Justin Fox has an outstanding piece on the effect of income inequality on economic growth. The gist: too much income inequality hurts economic growth, but businesses have pushed for — and will continue to push for — policies that increase income inequality. Read the whole thing.
There is an equivalent of a Laffer curve for inequality, but the variable of interest is economic growth rather than tax revenue. We know that a society with perfect equality does not grow at the fastest possible rate. When everyone gets an equal share of income, people lose the incentive to try and get ahead of others. We also know that a society where one person has almost everything while everyone else struggles to survive — the most unequal distribution of income imaginable — will not grow at the fastest possible rate either. Thus, the growth-maximizing level of inequality must lie somewhere between these two extremes.(This is a quote from Mark Thomas)
Assuming we’re near or have passed that growth-maximizing level of inequality, in the U.S. at least, the business community as a whole would be better off if the trend toward inequality slowed or reversed. But business people are accustomed to pushing for policies that tend to increase inequality, and are loathe to reverse their stances on tax rates, free trade, and free financial markets. As a result, businesspeople who worry about inequality have over the years tended to focus on improving educational opportunities. But you can’t say those efforts have made a noticeable dent in the inequality trend.
Business folks would seem to be stuck. They need a more equal distribution of wealth and income to continue thriving. But it doesn’t seem to be in any businessperson’s immediate interest — and in many cases contradicts deeply held beliefs — to make the sort of decisions or support the sorts of government policies that might halt the trend toward more inequality.
I would not be surprised to see income inequality get worse and worse in the United States for the foreseeable future. Indeed, “business people are accustomed to pushing for policies that tend to increase inequality”, and corporations run our government. On the other hand, income inequality tends to rise more rapidly on Republican presidents than Democratic ones, so maybe things will stabilize somewhat.
by DougJ| 98 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
Ah, the primal scent of wealth.
Currently in the design stage, the super-ship will feature smaller versions of the state’s famous landmarks such as the Monte Carlo Casino and racetrack, as well as swimming pools, tennis courts, a cinema, a go kart track and a Hotel de Paris.
There’s no news about a potential buyer yet. Whoever it is, I hope he gets a tax break soon.
by DougJ| 73 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Going Galt, We Are All Mayans Now
Back when lawyer jokes were big, I remember the joke: Q. Why are laboratory scientists switching from rats to lawyers for their experiments? A. There’s some things the rats just won’t do. The reason I’m a liberal is that I believe that sometimes the reason people ascend to the highest Galtian heights is that they are willing to do some things most people wouldn’t.
Conservatives would always have us believe that it’s their primal scent or patriotism or understanding of nominal dollars and regulatory capture (unless the rich people were liberals), but I think some people get rich simply by being bigger assholes than anyone else is willing to be. So is with Roger Ailes, the subject of an excellent recent Esquire profile.
What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News (“Obama sux” edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?
[….]He asks for quarter when he has given none, asks for sympathy when he has offered none, asks for fairness when he has been “fair and balanced,” asks for consideration while admitting that the only consideration he has ever shown is consideration for his mission, whatever that may be.
And yet of course there are many ready to hail him as a genius:
There’s a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism by the name of Dick Wald. Yeah, yeah, we know — Roger Ailes doesn’t give a CNN ratings share about what some professor at Columbia journalism school has to say. Indeed, whenever he’s asked what qualifies him to be the head of a major television-news network, he gives the same answer: “I dug ditches for a living, there are no parties that I want to go to, and I didn’t go to Columbia journalism school.” But Professor Wald is no mere don, no mere pointy-headed practitioner of the liberal arts. He used to be the president of NBC News. He likes Roger Ailes. And if you ask him the secret of Mr. Ailes’s success, he’ll say it’s pretty simple: “Roger, in many ways, is just more competent. He just does it better. The anchors are better. The crispness of the reporting is better. The anchors don’t interrupt, the shows move along, and the point of view is clear. It’s just a good product. Roger found an area in which he could reach each audience member individually. That’s the big difference between Fox and CNN.”
All this shit about his “good product”. How hard is it to have buxom blondes describe titillating stories with a information crawl at the bottom?
I am not confident that our society will survive Fox News. I think we will, but only because of demographic changes. But, hey, Ailes won, pin a medal on him and build a statue. All hail the Galtian hero. He’s worth millions, what are you worth?
by DougJ| 245 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
As MLK day draws to a close, I’d like to end all this hippie feel-good “I have a dream” flim-flammerie by reminding you of the harsh realities of the Objectivist universe we all inhabit. Actually, no, what I have in mind is this: when I asked for suggestions for new things to do on the blog, one of you suggested that I read all of Ayn Rand’s books and report back, while another suggested a book club.
What if we all read Atlas Shrugged, one chapter a week or so (maybe faster if there’s too many), and then I do a post describing my thoughts on it, then we continue the discussion in the comments. That would be fun, no?
The one catch is that you can’t get Atlas Shrugged that cheaply on Kindle (you can get Anthem for free, but it’s not the same). Has some ambitious young Galtian Eastern European or Indian scanned the thing in so we can all get free djvu copies?
Let’s make this happen.
by DougJ| 95 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
Dana Milbank’s column on the return of corporate power is shockingly good. Money quote:
A reporter asked (Chamber of Commerce Head Tom) Donohue for a suggestion of what corporate America, with its record profits, should do to put people back to work. “I got to think about this for a minute,” Donohue said, then added: “I think the most important thing to tell a company is to return a reasonable return to their investors.”
by DougJ| 233 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Going Galt
I feel compelled to respond to Kain’s post not to be last wordist or inflict more blogospheric navel-gazing on you (though commenters seemed to enjoy the gazing so far today), but because I was a bit sloppy with my use of the word “libertarians”. To Kain, it means anyone who calls himself a libertarian, whereas in my usage there, I mean Reason magazine, Megan McArdle, and the CATO institute. In fairness, Kain’s usage is probably more fair/accurate than mine here.
Go peruse Reason magazine and see if you can find a single article about corporate abuse of power. I’m sure there’s one somewhere in the archives, but there are none that I could see on the frontpage. I also suspect that the articles on corporate abuse of power in the archives focus on government-corporation colluding to abuse power, as was the case with the CATO piece ED used as an example of libertarians criticizing corporations.
There’s no point in playing the No True Scotsman game here. I think it’s clear that the libertarian online presence, such as it is, is primarily (though not exclusively) corporatist, as one would expect given that it exists at all in so small part through the beneficence of the Koch family.