Category Archives: Business

No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity

Business, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Republicans, Terrorism

Yes, it’s scarcity—the thing politicians are incapable of grasping—that’s at work in Donald Trump’s thinking. “No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity,” now on The Unz Review, argues that Donald J. Trump’s Muslim moratorium is rooted in an aversion, so natural to a business man, to squandering scarce resources, money or manpower.

“… Good businessmen are programmed differently than politicians. As a tremendously gifted entrepreneur, Trump is averse to squandering scarce resources, money or manpower.

By contrast, politicians do not understand the natural economic reality of scarcity. They control the production of money for their promiscuous purposes, and they exert power over millions of interchangeable people in their territorial jurisdiction.

To a politician, 14 lives in 322 million is a small price to pay for “our freedoms.” Trump’s political rivals look at the price exacted by a Muslim like Syed Farook and his bride in the aggregate. Fourteen dead is not a steep price to pay for unfettered immigration from Islamic countries, peddled politically as “our values,” “our tolerance,” “our greatness.” This callous calculus is second nature to politicians like Lindsey Graham or Darth Vader Cheney. …

Not to Trump. “This must stop. We can’t have this,” he roared.

See, statistics are funny things. Insignificant probabilities, in this case an attack on each one of us, are immaterial unless they happen to YOU or ME. It is this calculus that politicians peddle. They rely on the fact that we’ll adopt their sloganeering because each one of us is unlikely to die by Muslim.

But to do nothing stateside, as Trump’s rivals imply, is to accept that lives lost are, in the grand scheme, insignificant.

The opposite is true for Trump. Taking losses offends his sensibilities. Trump, the consummate businessman, abhors and is angered by the preventable squandering of scarce assets: American lives. (Yes, Trump is an America Firster.) The death of a few Americans pains Mr. Trump, something that cannot be said about Obama, Hillary, Bernie or any of the insider GOPers.

How can you tell? The politicians – Rubio, Ryan – offer up platitudes; political niceties to excite the asses in the anchor’s chair. They propose nothing to stop the slaughter, stateside. Instead, they demand a leap of faith – that you believe dropping “daisy cutters” on Muslims in the Middle East (only on the bad ones, naturally) will reduce the danger to Americans at home.

The instincts of private enterprise and politics – never the twain shall meet. Private-enterprise driven considerations are aimed at conserving, not squandering, scarce resources. If it loses an asset, the Trump Organization hurts.

Read the rest. “No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED: Prima Donna Paul Ryan Gets His Work-Life Balance & Much More

Business, Constitution, Government, Law, Neoconservatism, Politics

According to historian Clement Wood it is an unwritten law followed “scrupulously,” “although omitted from the Constitution,” that the Speaker of the House of Representatives possesses “the czar-like power” “to recognize only such members as he pleases, and thereby strongly to influence legislation.”

After playing hard to get, pampered prima donna Paul Ryan has agreed to be the czar-like Speaker of the House. (Were you to ask neoconservative kingpins like William Kristol and John McCain who they’d tap for that position, any position, the Ryan/Rubio duo would be the choice. Bear that in mind.)

Ryan haggled until his “conditions” were met. These were for him “to emerge as House Republicans’ unity candidate, endorsed by the three major factions of House Republicans”—the Freedom Caucus, especially—and to “have enough flexibility to spend time with his wife and kids in Wisconsin.” (TIME)

Ryan’s feminist worthy demand for work-life balance—it got the girls on CNN hot, especially Andy Cooper—really irks. Try telling a major high-tech company that you want to enjoy work/life balance, and they’ll tell you in deeds more than in words that you can have your balance, but expect to remain at the same grade till you retire (or are nudged into retirement on account of “laziness”), and don’t expect good performance reviews or raises.

The pampered parasitical political class goes on about Donald Trump tweeting late into the AM. Successful tycoons are accustomed to staying up till the wee hours.

In any event, poor baby got his wish.

Here is Ann Coulter on other unappealing aspects of Speaker-to-be Paul Ryan.

UPDATE (10/24): “Fox’s Charles Payne Calls Work-Life Balance ‘A Bunch Of Crock’ And Calls For Children To Work More.”

‘I’m Owned By The People!’ Says Trump

Business, Elections, Family, Media, Republicans

In a long feature about Donald Trump, Rolling Stone’s Paul Solotaroff breathlessly declares, “What I saw was enough to make me take him dead serious. If you’re waiting for Trump to blow himself up in a Hindenburg of gaffes or hate speech, you’re in for a long, cold fall and winter. Donald Trump is here for the duration — and gaining strength and traction by the hour.”

On CNN, Solotaroff noodled on about the absence of “Republican wise man” among Trump’s political entourage. The pundits are part of the nimbus of power that is DC. As such, they refuse to comprehend that the “Silent Majority” detests them, their politcal masters and their scheming handlers. Very good that Trump’s entourage doesn’t include these Republican snake-oil salesmen.

It is unclear whether Solotaroff is showing condescension when he describes the Trump “singular family gift as seeing the future and beating everyone else to it.”

As to child rearing, Donald Trump was no sissy boy and he has been tough on his own spawn. “If the nation’s mothers and fathers want fabulous kids like Donald Trump’s, they ought to try conducting themselves this way with their stroppy offspring” (From: “Megyn, Jorge, and a Reaganesque Trump”)

… Though Fred [Donald’s father] lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. “We’d go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors,” he says. “You’d see ’em ring the bell and stand way over here. I’d say, ‘Why’re you over there?’ and he’d say, ‘?’Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'”

Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. “I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping,” says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father’s. “My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar.” “I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn’t an option,” says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump’s kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they’ve nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. “We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well,” says Don Jr. “But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently.”

When all is said and done, the contempt this reporter has for the Trump crazies is palpable:

… As we stand there, hundreds of feet above New York, gazing on the Lilliputian tourists, it occurs to me to wonder: How on Earth, from this vantage, did Trump see into the hearts of underemployed white folk? How did he know that they stewed and simmered over free trade, immigrants and fat-cat Republicans who’d sold them down the river for decades? How did he guess that they’d conflated those things to explain the flight of factory jobs, and that all they really cared about, besides the return of those jobs, was that someone beat the hell out of the party hacks — the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers and Karl Roves? …

MORE.

Oregon Oink Sector And The Urban-Renewal Trough

Business, Federalism, Government, Taxation, The State

Broadcaster Lars Larson did a bang-up job, today, in shaming City of Oregon Mayor Dan Holladay for his ambient lawlessness: first, for securing appropriations in the cause of urban, central planning; next, in his haste to frustrate the democratic will of the outraged citizens.

The circumstances, courtesy of the Portland Tribune:

Mayor Dan Holladay’s opinion piece published in the Autumn 2015 Trail News, a publication providing citizens information on most city departments, told every household in the city that a petition to kill urban renewal would have a “very chilling effect on economic development” not just in the downtown urban renewal district, but throughout the city.

After the state received a complaint on Aug. 25 from petitioners, Holladay said he “made a mistake” by submitting the piece for the Trail News.

State law (ORS 260.432) says that elected officials shouldn’t publish letters advocating a political position in “a newsletter or other publication produced and distributed by public employees.” Oregon City’s mayor has for years submitted a piece to the “City Matters” column on page 2 of the city’s Trail News publication.

John Williams, one of the petitioners, offered this trenchant condemnation:

Holladay doubly misstepped by submitting the argument for a city publication before the measure had even gotten enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

“He has the right to express his opinion, but he shouldn’t be using citizens’ taxpayer dollars to try to put a halt to a democratic process,” Williams said. “Signing the petition in question will not ‘put a halt to these programs and many others’ as he claims, but only put an issue on the ballot for citizens to debate.” …

And no representative ought to use “citizens’ taxpayer dollars” for job-creation programs. The narrowest interpretation of a local government’s authority ought to be pursued and adhered to by all local representatives, whatever their political stripe.

That government job-creation programs are a racket for the locality is abundantly clear in our neck of The Evergreen State. Paving over quaint, perfectly lovely trails is a political hobbyhorse around here.

Local politics is not my bailiwick; but when I do venture into the miasma, the blood boils at the excesses in the pink state.

Those who’re better suited to confront the juggernaut that is local government might find it useful to apprise themselves of the history and politics of Urban Renewal, a history that has a lot to do with making poor people go away by demolishing their homes—gentrification, if you will. City officials—they live off wealth others generate: taxes—“grow” concerned over “declining incomes in and tax revenues from certain neighborhoods.” They then use their power to designate them as “blighted.” Government’s hope, ultimately, is to generate more tax revenues from the neighborhoods.

The CATO Institute speaks to how cities use tax-increment financing (TIF) in the service of “crony capitalism and social engineering.” If you want to slum it, read about the history and politics of TIF.