Category Archives: Business

The Parasites Pursue The Productive

Business, John McCain, Private Property, Taxation, Technology

The greatest company in the world, Apple, is also an “American job provider that employs 600,000 people.” Our elected Grand Inquisitors, who’ve never created wealth—only seized and distributed other people’s money—want what does not belong to them: the stash of Apple and its shareholders.

To that end, the Torquemadas of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations summoned Apple’s Timothy Cook to justify the company’s tax strategies.

That Apple uses creative ways to keep more of its private property is a good thing, and is reason to cheer the company on. It is just and good that property remain privately owned. While economic efficiency is secondary to the issue of natural justice, more private property in the hands of its rightful owners (Apple and shareholders) means greater prosperity for all.

And at last a Young Turk has taken on John McMussolini:

[Rand] Paul went on to accuse the committee of “bullying” one of America’s greatest companies, prompting Sen. John McCain to quickly defend the inquiry and say that Paul’s remarks were “frankly, offensive.”

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Privatize Aviation Sector And Say Goodbye To State Sequester

Business, Debt, Private Property, Regulation, The State

If all aspects of the airline industry, “curb-to-curb,” were truly private, as they ought to be, we wouldn’t chafe about whether pilots should carry guns or not, whether granny and grandpa from the prairie ought to endure patdowns, or whether air traffic controllers should be furloughed because central planners have run out of other people’s money, to paraphrase the late Mrs. Thatcher.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma, it’s hell for the faithful who believe Big Brother will deliver them from want—and from A to B. Via The Guardian:

Republican and Democratic leaders are working on draft legislation that would protect aviation from the estimated $87bn across-the-board spending cuts.
Furloughs forced on air traffic control staff have seen flights cancelled and many others delayed. FlightStats reported that on Thursday alone, up to mid-afternoon, 107 flights had been cancelled and 3,387 delayed. The sequester cuts are being implemented by the Federal Aviation Administration, after Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on a budget plan. Although the sequester began on 1 March, the cuts have been slow to take effect; the flight disruption is now highly visible and it is set to become worse from 15 June, when dozens of control towers are set to close.

Fisker, Tesla: Fisting* The Paying Public

Bush, Business, Fascism, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Regulation, Sex, Socialism, Taxation, Technology

Last night we dined at a local eatery in our Washington State town. Parked outside the restaurant was the electric commie car, the Tesla Roadster.

Well of course, the pinkos who proliferate and rule my state are as dumb as they are dastardly.

DUMB because they fail to understand that, “Whether a vehicle is propelled by hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electricity, both electricity and hydrogen don’t magically materialize in the vehicle. They must first be generated. Be it coal, natural gas, nuclear or a hydroelectric dam, these cars are only as clean as the original source of energy that generated the vim that powers them.”

Other than to increase the consumption of gas, because people drive more in them, state-sponsorship of so-called fuel-efficient cars is a grand exercise in compulsory misallocation and waste of capital. It proves that the development of technologies is best left to the market, not to environmental bureaucracies. The electric car is a marvelous metaphor for the legislator’s attempt to shackle the ‘wayward’ consumer. Purchase one, and your best bet is to avoid straying too far from the socket in your garage, or, alternatively, drive with a very long extension cord, lest your vehicle turn into something not nearly as useful as Cinderella’s pumpkin at midnight. The benefits to the consumer are few, much less to the environment, unless a steady discharge of lead, cadmium, and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—is a blessing in disguise.

[“Commie Cars”]

DASTARDLY because the immoral pinko has no qualms about forcefully taking from taxpaying Americans to give to favored state-sponsored interests, like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive.

The first “received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.”

Here, Republicans deserve to be reminded to hang their heads in shame. “The Department of Energy loan program was created in 2007 during the George Bush administration,” for the purpose of manufacturing the equivalent of the USSR’s “People’s Car.”

The second “has received $193 million of a $529 million Energy Department loan … Fisker Automotive — the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce — is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company …Fisker laid off 160 of its roughly 210 employees Friday morning from its Anaheim, Calif., location.” (Fox News April 06, 2013.)

Don’t look to GOOGLE to serve you news straight up either. News about the bankruptcy or lack of viability of these subsidiaries of the state does not pop up first in related searches.

Writing in the Mises Institute’s indispensable Free Market, PETER G. KLEIN partially explains the dynamics that underpin these examples of American fascism (state-corporate collaborations). “Partially,” because Dr. Klein omits the private-property variable and philosophical fulcrum. (And the editor of TFM does Dr.Klein a disservice by giving the essay a title that is unexplained in the text: What on earth is “Tang”? Writers/editors should never assume their readers know what they’re talking about.) Explains Klein:

Today, when we look at private companies like Google,
Apple, and Facebook and marvel at their innovations, we
should remember that these companies are constantly
subject to market tests, and that the goods and services
they innovate must be accepted by consumers to be profitable. When they succeed, we know that they are creating value for society because consumers have chosen their products and services over others.
The goods and services produced by the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services they produce are valuable to the directors, and
members of Congress, and to the researchers themselves
who are on the payroll, but the value of this research is
determined arbitrarily.

Tesla and Fisker “produce” for the dim-witted Hollywood and D.C. elites, whom YOU are forced to finance. That’s it.

Fisker and Tesla are fisting* the paying public.

***

* Disclaimer: The reason I know about this practice is because I used to volunteer as an HIV/AIDS counselor in South Africa. Filthy and perverted, it’s an appropriate metaphor for robbery by state and special-interests.

Easy Money, Soaring Stocks & A Stagnant Economy

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Middle East

Some in mainstream media are making good progress in connecting Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus to a rise in all prices, stock-market prices included.

The Fed’s monthly confetti of funny-money stands at “$85 billion total every month.” The Fed’s balance sheet reflects “more than $3 trillion.”

The Fed, explains Elizabeth MacDonald (Fox Business News), purchases mortgage-backed and Treasury securities from Fed dealers.”

You can see how hooked the market is to the central bank’s money printing — the correlation in fact is rather astonishing. It shows the government and the central bank’s power to create money, manipulate market prices, and transfer wealth. The market is powered ahead by a growing strength in corporate profits, too.

Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is more than hip to the “monetary Ritalin” scam:

…And, for some, there is a deeply imbedded worry that the Fed’s contortion of the yield curve and cost of money cannot last forever, or, if it lasts too long, will eventually result in financial bubbles and/or uncontrollable inflation, adding another uncertainty to the plethora of uncertain factors that already plague them. “Credit is super-abundant and stock market behavior is conditioned not so much by the fundamental performance of its underlying companies but by increasing doses of monetary Ritalin.

Then again, if you listen to the likes of Shepard Smith (also on Fox News) or Brooke Baldwin (CNN) expatiate on the topic of a stagnant economy against the backdrop of soaring stocks—you’ll hear their extra curricula exhortation for The Ben Bernanke to keep those interest rates low. Lovely!