Notebook 13 September 2012: Pushing Back. Again.

Since my comment would not go through on American Banker’s BankThink blog, I post it here. Perhaps there is a restriction on comment length, I don’t know. However, since formatting is removed in those comments, it is better off elsewhere, anyways.

The BankThink post dumping on Elizabeth Warren’s speech at DNC2012 is titled, “Elizabeth Warren’s Warped Reality” in which the author manages to blame Warren, unions, the liberal left and god knows who else. It is the type exemplar of narrow-minded, my-way-or-the-highway thinking which demands we ignore things already well known. It is the perfect example of someone not trying to be heard, but rather someone running an agenda on his/her readers.

Specifically, it claims:

1. Elizabeth Warren was wrong about the system being rigged in favor of oil companies, Wall Street, and billionaires
2. Elizabeth Warren is wrong about Obama trying to support the middle class
3. Mitt Romney didn’t say (or didn’t mean it) when he said “corporations are people”
4. Obama knew he had to clean up Wall Street
5. Banks who were “innocent” are harmed by the regulatory regime

Half-truths, distortions and above all, a blindness to what we already know characterize this drivel.

Notebook, 8 June 2012: On Markets and Electorates

“When you all grow up, most of you will be average adults.”

     —High school teacher to my class. By definition, most of us would be “average.” However,this assertion was taken as an insult by all of my classmates.

You’ve paid good money to take your family to the museum. A red line on the floor takes you through the museum, but the exhibits are no closer than forty feet away. A sign politely asks you to stay on the red line. The line aimlessly circles a post. Do you:

1. Ask what’s going on?
2. Ask for your money back?
3. Shut up and just walk the line

Something I saw on television. The answer is that many people will do as asked and walk the line. Add an official looking seal to the sign and you get greater compliance. Station a mean looking but elderly enforcer (even though he says nothing) along the line and even more people will walk the line, forgetting why they came to the museum in the first place.

Notebook, 8 May 2012: Just for the sake of argument . . .

Some random thoughts I put out there just for the sake of argument:

• After reading Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job, I think there’s one thing which should be made absolutely clear from the start: the economic “utility” of the vast, vast majority of jobs could only be quantified in negative numbers. And really, even under the best conditions, who would want to work for a bunch of people (shareholders) who believe you are lazy, think that cutting your wages and eliminating your benefits is a good thing, and are happiest (given AAPL’s share price) with a mute, compliant workforce out-of-sight in any foreign country?

  File this under, “I want to be an corporate cog when I grow up!”

• Belonging to, believing in, and identifying yourself with any organization necessitates tendering the individual’s moral proxy to the organization. Who today would want to work at Goldman Sachs? In the political realm, taking back one’s moral proxy is, in itself, a radical act.

  Full disclosure: By another criteria, believing in the need for major structural reform makes me a “radical” as well. However, I am content (but not overjoyed) to do my own thinking and bear the burden.

• Once you’ve taken back your moral proxy, it’s easy to note the myriad ways the organizational precepts both underlie and are reinforced in the media. Over time, the foreign press is frequently shown to be a more reliable gauge of America than we are of ourselves. The downside is that participatory government is only as strong as its electorate.
   
  
• The big difference between now and when Hayek and Von Mises were developing the economic philosophies we today call neoliberalism is that we now have decades worth of good, hard data and the computing power to view and analyze it, which didn’t exist then. I commend you to the revelations shown by viewing a century’s worth of income tax records as well as The Two Income Trap, based on real data from the Department of Commerce.

  Many times I’ve claimed that free markets expand to absorb all resources (even real, but intangible resources like time and human capital), and Elizabeth Warren’s work does a fine job of documenting this in action.

• Those who were rich in land, and derived their incomes from rents are in what ways different from those who have fat bank balances and derive their incomes from renting their money out in financial markets? Aren’t they all rentiers?
   
  
• The retail investor with his sexy eTrade (or any other) platform . . . is nothing more than a noise trader.

Any more of this and my head will explode, however I do want to note an interesting exchange I had with CNN’s Ram Ramgopal and Richard Murphy, co-author of Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works. Beginning with the tweet of a story about how identity thieves might be responsible for $26 billion in tax return theft, I countered with the fact that it’s estimated that $15 Trillion sits in tax havens worldwide, and Murphy chimed in with the finding that tax evasion could be removing as much as $3.1 Trillion from the world’s tax revenues annually.

CNN’s face on Twitter had this to say: “Wow, that’s big. Had no idea.”

Who does? Of course I’m a radical, but is this because I am a bomb-tossing nihilist or the result of a massive failure of the mainstream?

Now you can go back to watching the Military Channel, some major league sports, NASCAR or Dancing With the Stars.

Too Good Not To Share…

From Tanya’s Wall:

‎”There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along.”
– Elizabeth Warren