PicoBusiness

Hmmm.

When businesses are truly made of people, rather than impersonal monoliths, these conversations will be a lot more real and a lot more likely to result in positive outcomes for all concerned.

I agree! We must replace the obelisks, statues and dolmens that run our businesses, and replace them with living, breathing human beings who can feel emotion, make plans and love children.

(Hat tip: Gaping Void)

Note: Yes, I read the whole thing. He seems to believe that human beings lose their souls when they go to work for corporations, which I find to be an unfortunately all-too-typical bigotry of the academic elite. And what’s more, it’s not like governments don’t have their share of soul-crushing systems-over-people, institutions-over-ethics mindsets. And they have all the high-end military hardware to boot!

From the BBC, an interview with the man who claims to have been in charge of the prison camp where John McCain was held during the Vietnam war. The money quote:

“But I can confirm to you that we never tortured him. We never tortured any prisoners.”

And then from the expository ‘graf on Digg:

.More McCain lies! His ethics or lack of should be a main focus of the elections

I’m not a fan of John McCain, and I don’t plan on voting for him. (Not that I’m going to vote for Obama either, and I’m rather lukewarm on Bob Barr). But this is an example of very bad thinking. Tran Trong Duyet is a communist, self-admitted leader of the Hoa Lo prison camp, that is well-cited for engaging in torture.

When Mr Duyet says “we didn’t torture”, it doesn’t make it true. The fact that some people (like the person who posted this on Digg) believe him, because believing him is convenient to their political objectives, diminishes the poster, and the causes he or she fights for.

I finally got around to listening to this podcast on jobs and captalism and poor people.

The basic concepts that Russ discusses:

• Does Capitalism require poor people to do the menial work?
• Do rich countries require poor ones to exploit in order to do the manual labor work?
• Is Capitalism “rigged” to ensure that only the top 1% get all of the benefit of economic growth?

In general, Dr. Roberts knocks it out of the park - discussing in clear and data-leavened terms about why he believes that the system is not “rigged”, and why rich countries do not require poor ones.

It is on the topic of Capitalism requiring poor people that I find myself disagreeing with him. Here’s the general claim:

Rich people don’t want to mow their own lawns or paint their own houses. Without poor people to do that work, the whole system would collapse

Dr. Roberts points out, quite correctly, that this is absurd. 100 years ago, there were a lot of dirt-poor people who made a living (barely) threshing wheat in fields. Now we have combines and tractors and other devices to do this work for us. The poor in the US have multiple color televisions, cars, refrigerators and all sorts of other amenities in their lives that those wheat-field workers would have never had, or been able to afford, if they were still doing that work today.

But where I don’t think Dr. Roberts fully explained things is that this definition of poor is always changing - no one thinks about wheat-fields anymore when they think poor - they think “garbagemen” and “cashiers”. If, through the miracle of science we automated those jobs, people would move the goalposts - mechanics and security guards would be “poor”. And if, again, through science those jobs were eliminated, a new set of jobs would be the “demeaning jobs that no one wants to do.”

Essentially, there are always jobs that are the “least pleasant”, and people will always think “How horrid that I should have to do this unpleasant job.” Thus, they will perpetually see these people as exploited rubes whose sweat grease the wheels of the market.

Perspective is in order here, but perspective usually gets in the way of a good sound-bite.

Political Observations

1. The vast majority of pundits, when faced with a crisis, will claim that the crisis would have been averted if only we had done what they told us to do.
2. Alternatively, they will say that the crisis happened because of the actions/policies of their rivals. Hah hah! They say. This is why you should never listen to _______
3. Pundits will generally ignore the complexities of issues in order to make their point clear. That is what makes them dangerous, and what makes it foolish to listen to them without a truckload of salt. There are no simple issues.
4. You can point out that an issue is complex to a pundit, and they will ignore you, or mock you. Because admitting that the world is complex and that their philosophy isn’t perfect hurts their pocketbook.
5. I’ve noticed a surprising tendency amongst progressives - they believe that corporations can brainwash people into buying their products like slaves, and they believe that journalists can brainwash people into caring about certain topics. Didn’t Air America disabuse them of this notion? Note: At least they’re consistent on this (fairly silly) belief.

Business observations

• I listened (on the radio) to the owner of a landscaping company say that without lower-wage illegal immigrants on his payroll, his costs would be too high, and he would go out of business. Really? No one will want landscaping at all if it costs a bit more? All of his competitors are well-prepared for this contingency? I’m not particularly indignant about immigration, but this argument is lame.
• Right now the business world is essentially all-doom, all-the-time. Historically, this is usually the time when it turns around.

Warning: Local politics for North Georgia. 

John Linder (My congressman) is co-author with Neal Boortz of the Fair Tax book and initiative, a desire to see the complicated IRS forms and schedules replaced with a much simpler form, while still retaining a significant progressitivity.  Reasonable people can disagree about the Fair Tax, but that’s not the purpose of this post.

On the Club for Growth blog, all of our Congresspeople are ranked based on their votes on Jeff Flake’s 19 anti-pork spending amendments.  John Linder scored a decent, but disappointing 74%

So I call on  you, Representative Linder, to do better - if you’re committed to making government better, more efficient and less of an intrusion in our everyday lives, I want to see you support more of these anti-pork initiatives!