Category Archives: Business

A Corrective On Canada

Fellow Canadian Kathy Shaidle gave one of her American readers a reality check about Canada, one you’ve also received from me more than once:

I’m afraid I can’t agree. Our corporate tax rate is lower than yours, we have a simpler tax code and fewer weird regulations — I hear it can take even wealthy movie stars years to get “permission” to put a swimming pool in their own L.A. backyard.
Our Mexican migrant workers live in all male, booze free barracks and are shipped back home at season’s end. We ingeniously decided to pick our own cotton — that is, we have none of the fallout from slavery that hobble the U.S.
We also cleverly declined to hand mortgages to welfare bums. Our personal debt levels are lower and [we] have more disposable income.
Last year we deported more criminal aliens than we had in the previous twenty years combined.
The “Canuckistan” stereotype really doesn’t hold true anymore. We’re just hoping Justin won’t get elected and undo it all.

A Confetti Of Funny-Money & Confidence In Confidence Men

Business, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Big media (BM) is making a big noise about the stock-market rally, which the same BM attribute to King Tut’s animal spirits. Reports Bloomberg.com: “U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000 for the first time in five years, as data on the labor market and manufacturing boosted confidence in the world’s biggest economy.”

The “market’s” confidence in confidence men, notwithstanding, how are these “Big Gains” possible in “a debt-fueled economy”?

Easily: The consequence of Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus is a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. But an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in it value.

“Markets are now driven by stimulus, not fundamentals,” notes investor Peter Schiff, who also expects “deficits to approach $2 trillion annually before Obama leaves office.” (His is a reasonable assumption based in evidence.)

“Monetary and fiscal stimulus [are] pushing up stock and bond prices.”

…it is important to look at the nature of the rally. Most significantly we would bring investors’ attention to the increase in gold and oil and other assets that are expected to outperform in an inflationary economy.

Google Goes Galt

Britain, Business, Economy, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, Taxation

Hurray. Google Goes Galt, as a sickly Starbucks (what do you expect from people who burn their coffee beans) prepares to “‘voluntarily’ hand more money over to the UK Government.”

With their unbounded enthusiasm for state power, British protesters prefer that their omnivorous state own what belongs to Amazon, Starbucks and Google. But Google Big Guy has other ideas. Libertarian ones.

“Google boss: ‘I’m very proud of our tax avoidance scheme'”:

The head of the internet giant Google has defiantly defended his company’s tax avoidance strategy claiming he was “proud” of the steps it had taken to cut its tax bill which were just “capitalism”.
In an interview in New York Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, confirmed the company had no intention of paying more to the UK exchequer. … “It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”
He also ruled out following Starbucks in voluntarily handing more money over to the UK Government.
“There are lots of benefits to [being in Britain],” he said.
“It’s very good for us, but to go back to shareholders and say, ‘We looked at 200 countries but felt sorry for those British people so we want to [pay them more]’, there is probably some law against doing that.”

For a background on the British assault on tax havens, please read “Could Her Subjects Be Making Kate Middleton Sick?”

A Free Lunch, Or The Last Supper?

Business, Europe, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Private Property, Regulation, Welfare

Permanently tethered to the welfare state, Europeans are unwilling to make the connections between the regulatory state and steep prices, high unemployment, and a declining standard of living. It would seem obvious that the greater the cost of doing business, the less business will be done. But not to the individual who is motivated to keep the gravy train chugging along.

He wants to get that free lunch, even if it is his Last Supper.

Via John Stossel:

In Europe …workers … get “vacation do-overs”- if they are sick on vacation, they get additional paid time off to make up for it. In Spain, employers must give 24 months of severance pay after they fire someone. No wonder companies don’t hire. [Unemployment among youth there is 50 percent.]
America doesn’t have mandatory vacation time, but we still have 170,000 pages of rules.

Want to expand your business? The costs to a proprietor of adding new workers will be prohibitive, often in excess of the workers’ productivity.

In Italy, it is near impossible to fire an employee once he has been hired. If he steals and worse; the onus is on the business owner to prove his case before he can fire the offender. Bad work habits and low productivity don’t constitute cause for dismissal.

In all, a European business is better off staying small. Don’t reach for the sky. Limp along below the regulator’s radar.

MORE.