Category Archives: Business

UPDATE III (9/12/023): “Who Owns The Food Chain?” @ Quarterly Review (Monsanto Monopolist)

Britain, Business, Capitalism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Free Markets, Justice, Private Property, Technology

The state is in the business of death. State-subsidized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are the intensive rearing facilities in which the animals we eat live wretched lives and die a grisly death. Yes, and I am the same libertarian who penned perhaps the only propertarian defense of Michael Vick (I & II), which so horrified Sean Hannity, that he had me on his radio show. I regret that.

JULIAN ROSE, writing for Quarterly Review, pens a piece titled “Who Owns the Food Chain.” Rose rightly inveighs against the “factory farming and agri-chemically dominated conglomerates that retain their stranglehold over around 90% of the Western world’s food chain.”

While I disagree with the way Rose frames the life-giving profit motive (smaller family farms must too pursue profits to feed us), he rightly denounces the putrid practices of the factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, where animals are nothing but “units on a conveyor belt designed to extract the maximum amount of milk from the cheapest available high protein diet – a diet that will be laced with antibiotics and composed of genetically modified soya, maize and quite possibly nanotech feed components as supplementary ingredients.”

I recommend this thoughtful British magazine. Subscribe and read “Libya: a war of the womb: ilana mercer detects a uterine quality to US action in Libya.”

BACK TO THE ANIMALS. A careful philosopher named Jonathan Safran Foer has written the first philosophical treatise arguing against eating animals to have captured my attention because of its appeal to logic and fact. In “Eating Animals,” Safran Foer’s concludes: “We should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them. ‘In the way we now eat them’ denotes their utterly miserable lives in intensive rearing facilities – factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – and their horrific deaths at assembly line slaughterhouses.”

UPDATED I: Fred, please read the articles I wrote in defense of Vick to understand my perspective. (HERE & HERE.) I would never suggest any state regulation; just voluntary attrition. You can purchase “happy meat” at your local farm market.

Karen De Coster, for example, writes a lot about “food freedom” and equates “true conservationism” with a rejection of the cruel “anti-nature destructiveness of monoculture.”

My local farm market guarantees that their animals lived free and died unafraid. Yes, we own these sentient creatures, but we must husband them humanely.

UPDATE II (Aug. 1/2011): MONSANTO MONOPOLIST. Most libertarians have not awoken to the fact that big farma is antithetical to the free market VIA RT:

Nearly 300,000 organic farmers are filing suit against corporate agriculture giant Monsanto, who have in recent years squashed independent organic farms from coast to coast.
270,000 organic farmers filed a lawsuit in March 30 in an attempt to keep a portion of the world’s food supply organic. The plaintiffs in the case are members of around 60 family farms, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations.
Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the suit lashes out at Monsanto to keep their engineered Genuity® Roundup Ready® canola seed out of their farms. Organic agriculturalists say that corn, cotton, sugar beets and other crops of theirs have been contaminated by Monsanto‘s seed, and even though the contamination has been largely natural and unintended, Monsanto has been suing hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patent for incidentally using their product.

UPDATE III (9/12/023)::

‘Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight,’Albert Schweitzer.
The intensive farming of sentient creatures has no place in our world
It is devastating for animals, environment & our planet

Via “Compassion in World Farming,” by Philip Lymbery

The Uncertainty Chant

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Inflation, Regulation, Taxation

In “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” I counted the ways of Barack Obama’s stupidity, as far as the natural laws of economics go. Today he did me one better, claiming that “uncertainty over the debt ceiling has hindered hiring in the private sector.” The horrible jobs reports, in other words, were a function of market fears that the US would halt the borrowing and bankruptcy trends. That’s certainly novel. Let’s not forget that Republicans feed this folly by advancing, as a counterargument, the same tack: we have no certainty in capital and other markets, therefor no one will hire.

Nonsense on stilts: There is ample certainly; certainly about economic gloom-and-doom to come. Given the indicators in the US—OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) almost equaling GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the first is growing faster than the second—businesses have to become as lean as possible.

The uncertainty mantra is a mindless one. There is plenty of certainty: certainty about a dark future. A business that is to survive needs to streamline and become super efficient. It has to hunker down and stay in survival mode. So should you.

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.

Errant, Adulating Adults Enable Stupid Youth

America, Business, Critique, Education, Etiquette, Family, Intelligence, Outsourcing, Trade

On Facebook, Bob Murphy has presented a scenario that annoyed him:

… was at a restaurant in the Boston airport. It was very relaxed, just a few customers. My bill was for $14.85, and I paid with a $20 bill. The waiter gave me a $5 bill as change, then sauntered back to talk to the bartender. Discuss.

My take on Facebook: The young waiter probably can’t do simple math unless he closes the till, or something. The Korean young woman who mans the dry cleaners I frequent does all calculations in her head, as quick as a whip. Just as we were taught at school back in the day (I’m old, I know). Okay, be a pedant, Rob. You wanted a bill (as in an invoice). You wanted the agency to control the change you gave. But this is US youth you are dealing with. The other day, checking out at a big-box store, the same sort of simpleton insisted that the product I was purchasing (I told him the per-unit price) looked too expensive. There was no arguing with this hubristic creature. He would not check himself. He ended up shortchanging his employer to the tune of 90% of the item’s total price. I wanted to pay full price, but the young man kept shouting me down. “No, this looks too expensive to be true.” I knew this was an expensive item. He would have none of it.

Look, the adults who employ the youth adulate them, and do not wish to correct them. That’s been my experience. So let them live with the losses these pests incur.

Postscript: Meantime the Korean-owned dry cleaners I visit is making a mint, as other such establishments close down in my vicinity. The owner values every penny; he employs a sharp cookie to front his business. She’s sweet and genteel too.