iPandora

Big business means a better life for you

There are many misconceptions standing in the way of informed consent on the part of the American Electorate.

Bugbears and villains and bogey-monsters are trotted out each election cycle to herd the voting populace into the desired frame of mind.

One of the common scape-goats (ab)used by many is the spectre of “Big Business”. And not merely content to blame big business, the abusers often employ shake-down tactics when they need additional revenue.

After all, nobody likes their boss, and everybody knows businesses are endless sources of greedy men with far too much money, right?

Sticking it to “the Man” is the favorite sport in much of America, and it’s bred and grown in an environment free of logic and fact into a monster few can avoid.

Well, here’s one shot.

Business does good for people.

It’s not that they hold your hand and sing Kumbayah, or even that businesses that contribute financially to causes we agree with are good.

This is a blanket statement without conditions: The average business in America does good.

What is good?

Good is a quality of action or intent that brings about, supports, encourages some reasonable benefit to another.

Me winning the lottery is not good. Yes I get tons of money, but that money to one not capable of handling it wisely will with great consistency, harm me and cause me greater damage than were I not to have such largess.

Me working and earning a reasonable wage is good. I earn the money and therefore know its worth to me. I use that value to trade for other things of value which have greater good to me.

Now what just occurred? Each of the players in that last paragraph exchanged something for something else.

What is that called? It’s an economy.

Let’s look at it closer: The business I work for values my work more than a certain amount of money, so we trade. My work for their money. But I can’t live eating money or in a house made of money, so I trade the money for other things I consider more valuable than the actual cash, usually with other businesses such as landlords, grocery stores, utility companies, etc.

Each of us has something we can trade for something else and it is the constant trading and exchanging throughout America that creates the immense wealth we have.

If you think you have little and you live in America, you’re most likely very, very wrong. And this pernicious lie, that we have little, that helps fuel the constant badgering that businesses ought to do this and that and owe us one thing or another.

There are plethora ways the government inhibits business, and in each and every situation where regulation and restriction purport to keep businesses playing “fair”, it is the consumer, you and I, who are hurt most.

In order for you and I to survive we must efficiently and effectively trade what we have for what we need, hopefully increasing the value of what we have in order to trade it more efficiently and for more.

Education is one key way to increase our value. By increasing our skill, our versatility, our ability, through learning and practice, we increase our value to those we’d trade our abilities to. We make a higher wage when we have more skills.

Looking at our small economy described above, government inhibits the economy, making exchanges more difficult, by taxing. By taking away percentages of the money value being used in the trade, they lower the value of our abilities. When we give a business our labor in exchange for an agreed-upon amount of their money, government takes a significant percentage of that money given to us in the form of income taxes.

They also tax the business itself, not just our wages. In fact, America has some of the highest business tax rates of the industrialized world. The government takes around one-third of businesses reported Net Profit.

Do you want to know why businesses try to write off so many expenses? Because for every dollar they cannot right off as a valid business expense, the government will take 30 cents.

What would happen if the government took 30 cents of your pay check? Well, unless you’re making very little, the government very well may be.

So maybe a better question is: What if you made 30 cents MORE for every dollar you currently make?

Let’s say you make 40 thousand dollars a year now. What would you do with 52 thousand? $12,o00 extra per year would add up significantly. A house payment in just a few years, the kids in private schools (or home schooled, grin), a new business you start yourself.

Instead, the government takes it.

I don’t begrudge the government a fair share of money. After all, government is necessary in a fallen world. And government has reasonable and rational expenses. And they are immense, relative to each of our individual budgets.

But when the government tells us it knows, better than we  ourselves do, how to do things which could either be left well enough alone or by private industry and a knowledgeable populace. Then coerces us into giving it an exorbitant amount of money to perform those services. That is not right. And it hurts us.

A business must, by nature, make more money than it spends. It must be profitable in order for it to stay in business. When people talk about windfall profits and how we ought to tax businesses making more than there fair share, they illustrate only how imbecilic their own level of understanding is regarding the economy.

When a business operates effectively and efficiently and makes an immense profit, those large profits entice other businesses into the same market. When multiple businesses operate in the same market, they must give reason for their consumers to choose them over their competitor.

Competition drives prices lower, as this is the most visible way to differentiate ones product. Competition also drives quality up, as a second, very visible differentiation.

So because a market was allowed to become lucrative, the consumers have better access to cheaper and higher quality products. Sounds great to me.

And it’s not just looking on the outside, at the balance sheets of the business and on the store shelves, at the price tags.

Those businesses that make more profit are able to employ more and more skilled workers to further improve their products.

Sure, this is a sunny picture. But in the market, averages work out in favor of the sunny picture. Your job may indeed suck, but have you tried looking for one that doesn’t?

It may not be the best time, in the present economy, with government ham-handed handling of the economy stifling the recovery and prolonging this downturn. But there are still companies looking for workers.

Maybe leaving the big city, with is stifling regulation on top of already onerous federal meddling causes most businesses to fail or move away, to a smaller city which is more willing to lower it’s regulation and encourage businesses to build and hire is what needs to occur.

But when you hear a politician or government bureaucrat tell you that businesses must pay “their fair share”, remember that business may be employing you with the money the government wants to take.

And what the government takes, it does not give back readily.

Business Friendly means employee friendly.

Employee friendly means you have a job. A good job. One where the employer has the means to take care of you and compensate you well.

As for me, I’m already paying my fair share and more, and I’m getting fed up.

In case you had trouble guessing: I like businesses.

If there weren’t business there wouldn’t be internet, iphones, cars, bicycles, buildings, tents, sleeping bags, fresh produce in the middle of winter, heat and A/C, in cars too, hospitals, medication, surgery…

You get the picture.

We’ve had government since the beginning of time, and it hasn’t done a thing directly to benefit or develop beneficent products and services (except nuclear energy and other war-related items).

We’ve also had businesses since the first person decided he’d rather spread and grow his wealth instead of laboring over the same rows in the same farm for his own families sustenance.

Chipotle is an excellent example of a good business.

Our wealth allows us to pay premium price for food raised and prepared in a reasonably environmentally conscious and sustainable manner.

And it tastes good, too.

Walmart is not too different from Chipotle.

The monstrous store chain that’s easy to hate until we need cheap razer blades and jeans and socks and hand towels and garbage can liners. Then everybody loves it.

Except the unions, who are never going to love Walmart until it caves to their regressive and stiflingly stupid and anti free market strong man tactics and effects.

I pray Walmart never does, and for good reason.

When Walmart enters an area, consumers win as the often cheaper prices at Walmart “encourage” the other stores to moderate their own prices.

The prices are not always better, but they are better enough of the time and for enough products to justify the crowds you normally find at these supercenters.

Does Walmart Save You Money? (read the comments, many people report savings in the $1000’s each year while others disagree with their perception of the business practices)

But enough about prices already, Walmart benefits your health!

Huh?

Indeed, studies are showing that people living near a Walmart or “club store” (Costco, Sam’s Club, etc) are lighter on average.

But don’t all the fat and ugly people shop at Walmart? No, it’s just the ugly people and me.

In an article published in Forbes Magazine, Art Carden, an Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis TN, reports on studies showing that the increased buying power people experience when benefiting from the Walmart effect has a direct and close correlation to the health of those people.

There are several reasons this may be, and the why or how is always a bit murkier than fact of correlation, but all of the possibilities enjoy sound economic sense.

Those benefiting most from the Walmart affect are…

…women, the poor, African-Americans and people who live in urban areas.

The arguments as to why and how and many, as I noted earlier, and some may find them difficult. Read it a few times if necessary.

Our evidence is indirect, but we think it shows that price changes can have subtle and sometimes hard-to-detect consequences. Any change in price results in two phenomena. The first is the substitution effect: a change in consumption mix due to a change in relative prices. If a bag of salad is $2 and a bag of potato chips is $1, then the price of salad in terms of chips is two bags and the price of a bag of chips is half a bag of salad. If a Wal-Mart opens and reduces the price of salad to $1 a bag and the price of chips to 75 cents a bag, the “salad price” of chips has risen (from 1TK2 bag to 3TK4 bag) and the “chip price” of salad has fallen from 2 bags to 4TK3 bags. In short, salad has become cheaper relative to chips.

This argument is based on basic price comparison. If the salad cost 2 times what chips cost before Walmart,  Jack and Jill are more likely to buy the salad now because it only costs 1.3 times more than the chips now.

Then there is the income effect:

If Wal-Mart sells food at lower prices–even if our incomes don’t change–every dollar can buy more. Therefore, we’re richer.

The crux of their findings is that people, when given a choice and a suitable price range, will purchase healthier foods.

Our data suggest that we buy healthier food when our purchasing power increases. There is a small increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables in places where Wal-Mart does a lot of business and a decrease–or smaller increase–in fatty food consumption relative to places where Wal-Mart doesn’t do business. That is, people might consume more fatty foods, but consumption of those unhealthy goods increases more slowly than it does for the rest of the population.

There are other facts, findings, and arguments in the article. I urge you to read the whole thing: Wal-Mart’s Weight Effect.

The point is, don’t be too quick to denigrate or disparage the current state of our free martket system.

It’s not always pretty, and it’s easy to find fault.

However, compared with any other system out there, capitalism and the free market are the best at providing escalating levels of service and product to the most people most equitably and with the least amount of downside.

It’s been proven time and again, yet we in America now are dangerously close to forgetting completely, if we haven’t already.

The free market and capitalism isn’t about the blind, mindless pursuit of money at all costs, that’s anarchy.

Free markets and capitalism are about working in tandem with those around us to maximize our return by providing the best service or product to others. It’s a mutually beneficial system.

And we’re in danger of throwing it away.

In our increasingly government-controlled (-manipulated, -throttled, -ridden) economy, we get to see how people who do not believe in the free market expect the engines of American capitalism to run.

It’s not like we haven’t been able to see this before. After all, the 20th century is littered with the corpses of Command and Control Economies.

But this is the first (second: FDR tried really hard too with the alphabet soup of government agencies he successfully wielded to lengthen the Great Depression far beyond what it should’ve been) time we get to see what happens when our own beloved economy is ridden by the government to extremes we’ve not seen before.

Exhibit A is GM. Now bankrupt and after accepting huge loans from the government, the government will shortly own a majority of this company.

And now the revisionist history begins.

Today’s Bloomberg report on the bankruptcy, paragraph 1:

General Motors Corp. won court approval on its first day in bankruptcy to sell assets as soon as next month after collapsing under $172.8 billion in debt and failing to adapt to consumer demands for smaller cars.

All well and good except for one thing: Consumers are not necessarily demanding smaller cars.

Google “best selling cars” and you get a pretty consistent picture: trucks are selling well, and so are full-size sedans. The only compact cars in the top 10 of any list are the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and they’re in the middle of the list. In the worst 10 selling lists are bloated SUVs such as the Hummer. No surprise there.

Green machines (hybrids and ultra-compacts) have always been a lethargic segment of the auto sales and they’ve suffered as much as anybody else with the economic issues.

The Bloomberg article was reworded shortly after initial press this morning and has dropped the bit about demand for small cars. (you can still find the original wording at this splog (spam blog) site that rips headlines to create content for itself. Not actually linking to prevent follow spam: http://itsp.info/index.php/2009/06/02/gm-bankruptcy-judge-approves-asset-sale-on-first-day-bloomberg.html).

One of the major plans of the now government owned GM is to increase production of one of the most lethargic segment of vehicle: ultra-compacts and small hybrids. From  Bloomberg again:

One idle GM facility in the U.S. will be retooled to make small, fuel-efficient cars as part of an agreement with union workers, GM said May 29.

Now what kind of business is run by making cars for which there currently isn’t a real market?

Especially for a company emerging from bankruptcy, this kind of action is pointless and worse.

Unless the leadership of that company is aware of changing market conditions well beyond the awareness we’ve seen to date, or they know something we don’t.

Unfortunately for what appears to be the deepest desire of most the leadership in the Obama administration: you cannot control demand so long as there is choice.

The only way communist countries control demand is by controlling the entire market. And even when presented with only one option, they still usually get to choose whether or not to take it.

Because the government will very likely own 60% of GM, they will be very interested in one or both of these two options: running the company according to the ideology, and making a return on their investment.

The ideology of the current government makes those two options almost completely exclusive. You cannot control the market and demand in what is still, essentially, a free market.

My prediction: GM will continue hemorhaging money. Lots of money.

Our tax dollars will continue to be poured into the black hole of stagnating demand segments and poorly made vehicles.

Until the price fixing monopolistic unions are torn free and GM is free to hire talent at wages the market supports…

Until GM recognizes the necessity of meeting the market where it is instead of where it ought to be according to some Command Economy wet dream…

Until the free market is allowed to destroy those who do not adapt and innovate…

…We will continue to be force to send good money after bad. And we’ll be told we like it.

Burris is a crook. Whodathunkit?

And a liar, of the worst kind. Pretentiously hiding behind his squeaky clean image and claiming he’d never talked to Blagojevich about favors that resulted in his appointment to the Senate. Santimoniously sermonizing ad nauseum about how he was about the people’s business and wouldn’t allow sordid speculation sway his resolve.

There’s no sordid speculation here and that sactimonious sermonizing can go right back down the vile gullet it emerged from to add it’s putrid mass to the seething stench that inhabits that man’s soul.

Just a question, an honest one here: knowing the FBI had recorded phone conversations and in all likelihood had him incriminating himself with incontravertible proof, how did Burris walk the halls of Congress with his debonaire smile? Was  his conscience eating him at all? Or is his corruption so complete that he’s quelled all better things within him?

Oh, and now he’s “torn” over helping Blagojevich.

This much is true: as a parent we want our child to feel bad about doing wrong, not about being caught.

Burris is feeling bad about being caught. His emotional development is very likely so incredibly stunted it would take a redemptive work in his life to make him feel grief over his actual wrong.

So throw the Senator out already.

Judge Sotomayor has lots of things going for her: Obama likes her, and… Obama thinks she’ll do a good job.

Why?

A significant number of her decisions have been reversed, and of those upheld, her arguments have been faulted by superior judges. This indicates a consistency only in fallacy and not in skilled jurisprudence.

Reading through a list of Sotomayor decisions, one finds very quickly she is anti-business, pro-union,  and pro-regulation.

She believes business is out to hurt people.

She believes unions are completely good and no bad thing can come from them.

She believes generally that government knows best, especially when the right kind of people run government.

One thing conspicuously absent from her beliefs is a belief in the rule of law and the supremacy of law over all men equally.

It’s no unfair fear tactic to quote her (from the NY Times):

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Would a white male judge saying a version of that phrase last any longer than a water drop on a hot iron skillet? Of course not, and for good reason. There’s no place for preference or opinion in the law.

Justice is supposed to be blind.

Sotomayor, in her arrogance and conceit, proudly claims her judgement issued with her eyes of justice wide open and uncovered is best.

It may indeed her best judgement, but it’s not the judgement we require of those occupying the highest chairs of justice in our land.

Newt Gingrich:

Americans should look carefully at the anti-politician, anti-government mood exhibited in California last week.

This vote is the second great signal that the American people are getting fed up with corrupt politicians, arrogant bureaucrats, greedy interests and incompetent, destructive government.

The elites ridiculed or ignored the first harbinger of rebellion, the recent tea parties. While it will be harder to ignore this massive anti-tax, anti-spending vote, they will attempt to do just that.

Voters in our largest state spoke unambiguously, but politicians and lobbyists in Sacramento are ignoring or rejecting the voters’ will, just as they are in Albany, N.Y., and Trenton, N.J. The states with huge government machines have basically moved beyond the control of the people. They have become castles of corruption, favoritism and wastefulness. These state governments are run by lobbyists for the various unions through bureaucracies seeking to impose the values of a militant left. Elections have become so rigged by big money and clever incumbents that the process of self-government is threatened.

Albany is even more corrupt and dysfunctional. The special interests that own the legislators in both parties have been exploiting New York for two generations. They have impoverished the Upstate region to the point where it is a vast zone of no jobs and no opportunities. Their predatory tax and bureaucratic union behavior is beginning to cripple New York City. More and more successful New Yorkers are leaving the state. In the face of multiple crises, Gov. David Paterson has shown himself incapable of carrying out reform.

…the machines don’t care because all they want to do is own the wreckage.

…look again at the 62 percent-plus majority in California in favor of smaller government and lower taxes.

In the great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites, there will soon be a party of people rooting out the party of government. This party may be Republican; it may be Democratic; in some states it may be a third party. The politicians have been warned.

Read all about it: States have become castles of corruption

But Dan Walters, in the Sacramento Bee,  says we shouldn’t be as upset as we are:

When… new taxes expire in a couple of years, Californians’ relative tax burden could also drop further – but if the economy is rising by then, it could also mean a surge of revenues even when the increased rates disappear.

If nothing else, these data indicate that while income and sales tax rates may make a difference, the economy is the biggest factor in how much tax Californians pay in aggregate.

When the economy rises, so do tax collections, and when it falls, revenues fall with it.

Walters asks if Californians taxes are too high or too low.

It’s not that the taxes are too high or too low, it’s the socio-political philosophy which supports such confiscatory policies and uses the money to pad pockets and entrench power.

And they were singing: Bye, bye miss American pie…

Yesterday the US automakers, the UAW, and the US government failed to reach an agreement that could have secured a bailout for the “Big 3″. GM is consulting with bankruptcy lawyers. Chrysler is considering selling itself. Ford is apparently mostly OK and will survive with little change.

Senate Republicans and several Democrats followed their constituents calls and stood up to another free money day for American business.

I don’t believe Darwinian Biological Evolution is likely have occurred but there is scant proof indeed than anything besides a Darwinian approach to business is dangerous to liberty and allows for bloat and growth of government both in the breadth of responsibility and the expectations of the populace. The dying ought to be allowed to die to make room for new and fresh ideas.

It is not a closely held secret, the fact the UAW does more harm to GM than it does good for its members.

The entitlement mentality of many die-hard union members I know of is something to behold. I make an honest wage for a job I truly enjoy. I’m expected to contribute to my insurance costs and my employer does as well. I’m given the choice which benefits I wish to make use of, and I have a marginal cost for each one. But for each additional cost, my employer also contributes amounts and so while I’m paying more (or taking home less in each paycheck) I’m actually earning more. The benefits are delayed but there nonetheless.

The union workers I know are decent people, no worse nor better than many others I know. However, they have become used to two paradigms at least which are either wrong or detrimental. They are used to a conflicting relationship between themselves and the management and they are used to a level of coddling by their employers at the behest of the Union.

The relationship of the employer to the employee ought to be one of shared and communicated goals and observed ability and process communication and refinement and achievement recognition. This is admittedly an optimal goal, but it is not unattainable and for it’s optimal nature it ought not be dismissed.

The Union infrastructure destroys both directions of communication necessary to the successful and profitable enterprise. By setting up a default adversarial relationship between the average workers and the management, with the workers via their Union trying to get more and more of the company ‘pie’ for themselves with deeper and longer guarantees of remuneration and the managers trying to get concessions and extra work from the increasingly insulated employees.

When you have cases where GM has shut down a factory and is still paying full wages and benefits to thousands of people there is something obviously wrong.

You may say that GM owes it’s employees something: I would get severance if I was fired, but the idea is to make me WANT to get a new job. Paying me as much as I made previously as part of some inactive workforce is sound business sense only to those without sense or with an incredibly skewed set of priorities.

Now that, directly because of the UAW’s actions, GM is in free-fall and will likely file bankruptcy, they will be firing a lot of people. There will be thousands fewer jobs. People will be in REAL hurt. Good union people too. And the UAW will be unable to to anything about it.

GM will be restructured and without the UAW in their shops.

Congressmen were quoted saying that if the UAW had only agreed to wage cuts they would have been able to salvage the bailout. Thank God they did not.

Greed and avarice are light labels for the UAW.

I will rise again…

But look out.

Barack Obama will be president soon, and the unions are virtually guaranteed that federal law will be changed to allow “card check” which will set the bar for unionizing agonizingly low. With public votes, strong arming and union thug pressure will thrive and the UAW will be able to unionize the Toyota and Honda factories.

So they’re not dead. They know their payday is coming soon.

If you don’t know Chicago politics you don’t know that corruption is the norm, and the appearance of honesty is a closely honed art. Unions run Chicago arm in arm with the Democrat political machine. They’ve delivered Obama to the White House and they are expecting a high return on investment.

My union friends have a problem, they refuse to see the forest for the trees. They are used to the safety and coddling in benefits they receive because of the Unions work, but they refuse to acknowledge their accepting the benefits of the Unions come at such a price.

Unions served their purpose, and in some cases they may still have  a valid place. Federal law for the most part has codified the reasonable purposes of the Union. But Unions are about power, and their continued presence in America is without merit.

The internet and the vast web of information and advocacy outside of the Union are quite capable of keeping accountability within the workplace without the need for the stultifying and parasitic presence of the Union.

Until the UAW dies, American industry will fail.

Does the truth we find in this humor scare anyone else?

I’ve had the following images floating around on my computer for a while, waiting for me to actually post them. It seems to me, in their attempt to paint the liberal and Democrat as the loving, caring, truly human leadership, anybody with a mind will recognize the fallacies and dangers of the blanket statements made in this children’s book.

Children reading this book will be cursed with the feeling there is actual truth to be found in the ideas. They will accept without thinking the lies of socialism and liberal socio-political theory and practice.

Read and weep for America.

What parent wants their children to hurt?

What parent tries to protect the children from the pains of life?

What parent can?

Laudable.

But given the current state of Political-Business relations, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say: “Democrats give the Police Officers’ and Firefighters’ Unions the tools they need to keep dead weight and stupid policies in place hampering the heroes efforts, abilities, skills, and desires to serve as they are called”?

And I would want my children to go to those war-zones, indoctrination facilities, stupid-makers, great-levellers of the people they call schools?

I know what they mean is that we can all go to college. But 1) where is that a constitutional right or a universal requirement, and 2) aren’t there plenty of great colleges for cheap?

There are plenty of jobs in which one can work their way up to a comfortable level of pay which require no college. And the government has neither interest nor right to take money from those who aren’t going to college to give to those who are.

Maybe if there were less “free” money floating around from the government, the cost of education would come down, and only those dedicated and intelligent people would stay in teaching as it became less of a lucrative career option.

Democrats are government, not Mommy. This is a legitimate role for Mommy, not government.

To the extent that Democrats seek to usurp this role, they confuse the nature of society and culture. This is immoral.

Pompous, self-aggrandizing, megalomaniacal do-gooders!

Show me someone who believes this and I’ll show you someone certifiably insane.

First, there is no proof the Earth is “sick” with Global warming. There is proof there are regular and natural cycles of warming and cooling, and there is not proof we are even in a warming cycle.

Second, the temerity of the writer and those who agree with him in assuming a political party which has existed a mere 200 years has the might to enact significant change in an entire planet which they believe has existed 4.5 Billion years.

Someone call the nice men in white coats.

False.

The truth is, Democrats make sure schools cannot fire bad teachers. Democrats make sure children know all about condoms and how to have sex with each other, leaving it to the parents to teach reading and writing and true morals.

Individually, Democrats are generally caring people. But are they busy loving people to hell?

UPDATE:

These are not parodies, these are selections from one of two books for children:

Why Mommy Is A Democrat & Why Daddy Is A Democrat

Over at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation blog, Lynn Harsh presents a reasonable argument which will be dismissed as all the others which come against the entrenched and combined strength of the public education establishment and the teachers unions.

What is so difficult to see and understand regarding the benefits that competition would bring to education.

Is it that difficult to see that on average private schools can do and have done more with significantly less money than the public schools?

Is it hard to stomach that the system is broken, and that pouring more money into it is NOT the solution?

Yes it is. Because it is lust for power that drives bureaucracies and unions, fueling and feeding their insatiable appetites. Power is as blinding as it is grasping.

In this video, Tom Bates, President of the Bucks County AFL-IO pledges to show local Democrat candidates how politically powerful the AFL-CIO is. We’ll show the candidates of Bucks County what we can do for them, he dreams.

“And just think what they will do for us later,” he says and recites a litany of union subsidies such as Employee Free Choice, health care, and project labor agreements. “Just think what that will do for labor and working people.”

Money and volunteers may be Tom’s only draw because his presentation style… well, lacks charisma.