For violating laws enforcing information socialism, billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, innocent in natural law, could be incarcerated for decades. In their latest efforts to bring ruin to capital markets, SEC blood hounds have ensnared one of the country’s most powerful hedge-fund “impresarios.” MORE.
It’s easy to be thrown off scent when trying to divine the vague, ill-defined, unconstitutional laws under which the Securities and Exchange Commission hunts for corporate prey. Suffice it to say that the SEC operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities.
Rajaratnam had not violated the rights of other shareholders or potential buyers. There is no natural right to a guaranteed profit, nor is there a right to be shielded from losses. And there most certainly is no such right as a one that guarantees to the collective information the individual has worked hard to obtain and optimize.
Watch out Alec Baldwin (or should that be America?), publicity hound Donald Trump is considering a run for office. Trump is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to look closer to home for the cause of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny and the Fed, for example. Trump thus blames OPEC because he has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate—at the burdens of doing business in the US. OPEC and the Chinese.
Among American opinion makers, Sinophobia is considered an economic theory and is thus sanctioned. Disliking China falls within the realm of economic theorizing. Accordingly, Chinese success is put down to currency manipulation, and not the industry, frugality, and hard work of that people.
The Trump plan to reclaim American power and prestige in the world includes force, of course. Like Baldwin, Trump has never wanted for anything for too long, at least not in recent memory. Strutting around on the world stage; showing those South Koreans and Chinese who’s boss: that’s a perfect complement to the waning testosterone and increasing megalomania that are the ingredients of Trump persona.
That’s our First Lady, Mrs. Michelle Obama. “Almost immediately after arriving at the university [of Mumbai’s] library, she kicked off her flats and joined in a game of vocabulary-building hopscotch with the 8- to 13-year-old orphans and runaways who receive English-language instruction from Make a Difference volunteers,” reports CBC.
“I love dancing. Oh that was fun!’ Mrs. Obama said after they danced to the theme song from the Bollywood movie ‘Rang de Basanti.'”
A grass skirt and a pail of water on her head would have completed Mrs. Obama’s regal regalia. (What horrid “music” she’s bumping and grinding to.)
It’s interesting that these kids are receiving English-language instruction. Hardly something Michelle would be fighting for back at home. She’d be the “English as a Second Language ‘Program” advocate.
Meanwhile, Michelle’s less earthy husband is talking a good game against outsourcing, and doing what he does best: central planning, promising tax breaks to companies that create jobs in America.
Strange: the president visits India, which is outsourcing central, only to tell his put-upon hosts that he wants to discourage their bread-and-butter industry.
Obama would do better to ponder the following: In the U.S., companies endure endless, punishing, government-imposed regulations, which make doing business and staying competitive increasingly difficult. Foreign investors in China and India are not subject to more than 180 federal labor laws; to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an IRS and an EPA; or to a work force where merit is marred by affirmative action. To the cost of the assorted alphabet soup of regulatory agencies a corporation must pay off in the U.S., add exorbitant corporate taxes and expenses like workers compensation insurance … as well as the cost of a government rape known as Social Security.
Factored into the wage price the corporation pays are, thus, large government-imposed costs. The company’s before-tax wage package must offset the cost of the income-tax burden as well as the cost of Social Security. Without the onerous government taxes, this American employee would cost the firm 30 to 40 percent less.
Consider that the annual Social Security burden alone on an American high-tech employee, borne by the employer, is the equivalent of the annual salary of a high-tech worker living well in India—and the logic of outsourcing is self-evident!
Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of the book “Outsourcing America,” knows how corporate America works. Via the WaPo:
“They have successfully built a business model where not only do they offshore large numbers of jobs, but the fraction that remain in the U.S. are filled by lower-paid foreign guest workers … They are often also forced to train their foreign replacements.”
This is indeed the model. You have to be at the top of your game to retain viable employment as an engineer in the US.
“President Barack Obama took to the podium well before President Sebastian Piñera did. Chile’s president bided his time patiently with the group of rescue workers in hard hats, until all 33 miners had surfaced from deep within the San José copper-gold mine, in northern Chile, where they had been entombed for 69 days.
If not for the translator’s running commentary, I would not have guessed that the man with a beaming smile—so different from Obama’s gleam of dentition and Bush’s demented grin—last in-line to meet and greet the miners who ascended from hell, was no other than Chile’s president. Sebastian Piñera wife, first lady Cecilia Morel, was equally low-key, fading into the background and ceding to the heroes of the unfolding drama.
The images transmitted from Camp Esperanz showed no swat teams, personal body guards, or retinues of handlers and props—the sort of ‘presidential comitatus’ that accompanies the head of the American hyperpower everywhere.
At ‘Camp Hope,’ the pensive group of rescuers and their president looked like a band of brothers. The media scrum did nothing to shatter what was almost a religious atmosphere. All present—mining men, the rescued and the rescuers, and their families—seemed oblivious to the din from the outside world. Nobody appeared star-struck; few were playing to the cameras. All present had eyes for one another alone. Expressions of joy were all the more poignant because so dignified. There was no slobbering, no Geraldo-Rivera hyperbole.” …
Next week I hope to introduce you to the work of a dear friend, Professor Dennis O’Keeffe, who has just written a gem of a book about Edmund Burke. My conversation with Dennis will be the first of a two-part interview. You’ll enjoy it.
But back just a little less than 40 years ago, Chile was a typical, poor South American nation, with intrusive government and sluggish growth.
How was it transformed?
Read a short essay called “How the Power of Ideas Can Transform a Country,” by one of the leaders that made it happen – Jose Pinera.
He relates how, in the mid-1950s, the Catholic University of Chile signed a cooperation agreement with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago, then home to the world’s top free-market economists, including the legendary Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman’s classic “Capitalism and Freedom” explains how individual liberty can only thrive when accompanied by economic liberty
Thus began the education of a generation of young Chileans in the wisdom of economic freedom.
Beginning in the late 1970s, these young leaders, with newly minted Ph.D.s, helped implement new economic reforms in Chile protecting private property and promoting free trade.
A graph showing annual economic growth in Chile over the last hundred years looks like a hockey stick. From the early part of the twentieth century until 1980, the line is flat, averaging less than 1 percent growth per year. But beginning 1980, growth takes off in a vertical surge, averaging over 4 percent per year.
