"A Arte da Fuga" ("Die Kunst der Fuge", BWV 1080) é uma obra-prima de Johann Sebastian Bach: um único tema musical persegue-se, a si mesmo e as múltiplas variações, num diálogo musical intenso desenvolvido a diversas vozes, rico de simetrias, inversões, ritmos e tempos diferentes. Fugas para aartedafuga@gmail.com
Lap dancers receive performance-related pay. Miserly and overenthusiastic customers aside, they get £20 per lap dance. The more beautiful, charming and determined the dancer, the more lap dances she will sell and the more she will earn. By allowing a woman with these qualities to work in his club, Peter Stringfellow puts her in the way of potentially large cashflows.
The same goes for investment bankers. Their roles vary but all can earn bonuses for their performance. For example, a foreign currency trader is typically paid a bonus equal to about 15 per cent of the net revenue he generates for the bank. By giving someone a job at an investment bank, its owners are putting him in the way of potentially large cashflows.
But here is one of the many differences between lap dancers and bankers: whereas Mr Stringfellow makes his lap dancers pay for the privilege of being put in the way of their bonuses, with a “house fee” of about £100 a night, investment bankers are paid to have the chance of earning bonuses in the millions, with base salaries ranging from roughly £50,000 to £300,000.
This is silly. Investment bankers, like lap dancers, should have to pay to go to work ..
Imagine you’re an expert in some field of technical knowledge. Your field impacts quite a lot of people but most of them don’t understand the details the way you do. One day, Congress proposes legislation called the Make Things Better Act, which, its sponsors say, will make things better.
But wait. The Act happens to deal with exactly the field you’re knowledgeable about. And you know what? It won’t make things better. In fact, it will make things far, far worse. Not only will it make things worse, but any benefits the legislation does create will accrue exclusively to a small but powerful interest group.
So you and your other technically-minded friends mobilize against the Make Things Better Act and, through coordination and outcry, succeed in killing it. Two days later, Congress proposes another piece of legislation called the It’s Good for the Children Act. Except this time the law deals with an area outside your expertise. If you applied the lesson learned from the Make Things Better Act, you might react to this new proposal with skepticism. After all, when you were in a position to evaluate what Congress was really up to, you discovered that it wasn’t working in the interests of the American public but, instead, of a tiny and powerful minority. Couldn’t it be possible the new bill is just be more of the same?
Most likely, though, based on the way people typically react in these situations, you won’t apply that lesson. Instead you’ll say, “Boy this new law is great because my favored political party wrote it and, well, it’s good for the children.”
.. the call for privatization does not get at the real reason the private sector works better than the political sector. The great advantage of the private sector is not private ownership per se but that private owners compete with one another. Classical liberals would do better to contrast not the “private” and “public” sectors, but the “competitive” and “monopolistic” sectors. If the goal is efficiency in delivering the goods, private ownership is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Instead of calling for the “privatization” of government services, classical liberals should be calling for “de-monopolization.”
In some of his later writing, F. A. Hayek recognized a similar point when he suggested that it was problematic to talk of “private property” and that we should talk instead of “several property.” The distinction is not merely semantic. His point is that the important thing about “private” property is not that it is private, but that it is divided among “several” owners who then compete to make the best use of it.
The rhetoric of “privatization” may turn people off who might otherwise be more sympathetic to classical-liberal ideas if we were to frame them as opposition to monopoly rather than as support for shifting resources from “public” to private hands ..
Private ownership is not a goal but a means to an end. What really matters is what best serves the public in its role as consumers. Private ownership only does that if it’s within an institutional context that promotes competition. We classical liberals need to shift our rhetoric from promoting privatization to promoting competition by ending government monopolies wherever possible. That is the path to lower prices, higher quality, and more freedom.
.. “Should Everyone Be Required to Have Health Insurance?” ..
Does Prof. Davenport advocate this model also for other businesses – say, restaurants? Does she think that restaurant customers would be better served if government required restaurants to price meals without regard to ‘hunger status,’ so that the bill paid by a diner who orders three lobsters, two filets, and a bottle of ’61 Chateau Latour be the same as the bill paid by a diner who orders only a single cup of soup? Does she think that whatever problems might arise from such a regulation will be solved if government also forces every American to buy a minimum number of restaurant meals? After all, food – even more so than health-care – is necessary for life.
If Prof. Davenport doesn’t advocate this regulatory model for restaurants, why doesn’t she? (Please, Prof. Davenport, no protests that the health-care market is ‘unique.’ Of course it’s unique; every market is unique. But is the health-care market unique in ways that prompt people consistently to act against their financial self-interest, as you apparently expect insurance companies to do?)
The more segmented those brains became, the weaker the overall social network was. Every new game system, and every new variant to those systems, subdivided that network further, making it weaker. Between 1993 and 1999, the social network of the TRPG players had become seriously frayed. Even if you just looked at the network of Dungeons & Dragons players you could see this effect: People self-segmented into groups playing Basic D&D, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and within 2nd Edition into various Campaign Settings that had become their own game variants. The effect on the market was that it became increasingly hard to make and sell something that had enough players in common that it would earn back its costs of development and production.
We looked around the industry and saw the same problem at virtually every company that had become successful: White Wolf had 5 World of Darkness games which were all slightly different, surrounded by a more diffuse constellation of games somewhat related to the Storyteller system but designed to be mutually incompatible. FASA had 4 games, none of which shared anything in common. Palladium & Steve Jackson Games both had “house systems” that they tried to use across their entire product lines, but they had ended up with the “Campaign Setting” issue that was bedeviling TSR; the variant rules at the edges of their games were creating independent game networks despite the shared DNA of the core. And we knew that inside every one of those companies they were seeing the same financial information we were seeing: Each new release was selling fewer and fewer copies, and in response, the companies were increasing the pace of releases trying to sustain planned revenues by volume of titles, not by volume of units. And it was killing everyone.
…My opinion is that the hobby gaming industry is going to transform into a very small niche business. It will cater primarily to an aging group of players who have made TRPGs their lifetime hobbies. As those players age, they’ll need less and less support in the form of commercially produced products. They will instead seek out community support tools to help them remain in touch with their hobby even as the social network they’re directly connected to becomes ever more frayed.
.. Economists of a libertarian persuasion find this frustrating because our enthusiasm for free markets is often mistaken as enthusiasm for specific businesses or corporate interests. But just because something is good for General Motors does not mean it is necessarily good for America.
.. One of the key features of a free market is that it is a system of profit and loss. The “free” part of “free market” means free entry and exit ..
Do free-market solutions sound harsh? Perhaps .. In a free market, people compete to see who can best secure others’ cooperation. Government, on the other hand, works by the threat of violence. If we’re going to use government to protect a business, we can only do it by threatening violence against its potential competitors.
I teach economics, and I write for a couple of different websites. If I were to insulate myself from foreign competition by hiring the mafia to prevent potential foreign economists from teaching classes that compete with mine or from writing articles that compete with mine, it would be a criminal act. Change “teach economics” to “make cars,” “mafia” to “government,” and “foreign economists” to “foreign car-makers” and you have flag-wrapped American industrial policy.
.. Businesses should not be protected from competition, losses, and bankruptcy when they fail to deliver for the customer. All three are essential to truly free markets and free enterprise.
Uma das queixinhas mais frequentes das pessoas é que as coisas são muito caras porque alguém anda a fazer muito dinheiro. Descontando explicações macroeconómicas para alguns problemas reais (por exemplo política monetária), o que se constata é que este descontentamento deriva não só do mito da "ganância" como de uma profunda ignorância da estrutura de custos dos prestadores de serviços (incluindo custos fiscais - veja-se por exemplo toda a polémica à volta do preço dos combustíveis) .
Earlier today my friend and fellow photographer posted a link to a craigslist ad from a woman in Seattle looking for a wedding photographer. The woman was upset because she thought that $3,000 for a wedding photographer was “wack” because all we do “is hang out at a wedding taking tons of photos and editing them” and that we are “making so much money its crazy.”
I am a wedding photographer in the Erie, PA area. Wedding season only last about 4 months here, so I photograph an average of 20 weddings per year for an average of $2,500/wedding (which totals about $50,000/year).
That being said, I am a small business owner, so I pay all of my taxes, totaling about $15,000/year, which leaves me with a gross income of around $35,000..
That would technically leave me with about $7,000/year to feed myself, buy groceries, pay for my heat and electricity, clothe myself, etc. But, usually I end up reinvesting whatever I have left on upgrades and new equipment:
..
All of that being said, I’m usually in the hole at the end of the year, and take on many family portraits, senior portraits and corporate jobs in order to make ends meet.
Photography is my passion and my livelihood, and it is also expensive. Yes, it seems like a lot of money for one day, but one day isn’t all we spend on your photographs or on our business. You will spend thousands of dollars on a wedding dress or flowers or a venue or on catering which you are going to have for only one day, but your photographs will be the only thing you have to remember that one day for the rest of your lives.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." ..
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Why is there so much passion about global warming .. a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet ..
.. There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
.. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.
Obama, Gingrich, Perry -- they all hate capitalism, but they sure like the loot it gives them to be the career politicians they are. Where would career politicians be without capitalism?
Don’t kid yourselves. The liberal-statist agenda is to raise taxes on the wealthiest (who already pay the great bulk of taxes), lower taxes on the poor and middle class, and massively expand the welfare-entitlement state, especially for the middle class. The conservatives will only ask, “How are we going to pay for it?” But the real question should be: WHO is going to pay for it? Obviously, those who make the most money are the ones who are going to pay for most or all of it as both taxes and government expand over time. Yet these are the same people who provide the jobs for the great majority of the working and middle class. They are the “capital” in “capitalism.” How does hitting them up for more money help the middle class? The politicians will take the credit for the seizure of wealth and expansion of nice-sounding programs, but those upon whom the middle class and the career politicians depend for their paychecks are going to be burdened ever further.
The more our government drains our economy of capital, the less capitalism there will be. Government is the vulture -- not anyone who runs a business! This means higher unemployment, more bankruptcy, and generally less productivity and economic growth. The world will be a less comfortable and poorer place, as capitalism continues to fade away because of government spending and taxation. We cannot go on like we are.
It doesn’t really matter who’s in charge in the long run ..
.. A great majority of Americans, with each election cycle, express disgust with “the system” as we know it; and demand “change.” Democrats, when in power, outspend Republicans; then Republicans, once in power, outspend Democrats. I suppose the next step will be “Independents” outspending both the Republicans and the Democrats. When will people understand that the “system” is nothing more than this continued process of spending more money on things that patently and self-evidently don’t work, even on their own terms?
Keith Preston interviews Paul Gottfried. Topics include:
The core characteristics that distinguish the Right from the Left, including a belief in the necessity and legitimacy of organic hierarchy, respect for the limitations imposed by human nature, and a preference for tradition ;
How the American “conservative movement” is not really of the Right and how mainstream American politics is dominated by two factions of the Left;
The transformation of the Left from its previous orientation towards Marxism to its current obsession with multiculturalism and alternative lifestyles;
The role of the managerial state in promoting Political Correctness;
The relationship between Christianity and modern “politics of guilt”;
Neoconservatism as an outgrowth of the radical Left.
Few people have heard of ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, but the provisions in the agreement are just as pernicious as anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.
Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning. The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes, with unelected bureaucrats working closely with entertainment industry lobbyists to craft the provisions in the treaty.
Across the country, the youth vote is down. Registration is low. Voter enthusiasm for Republican candidates has been lackluster.
Unless that candidate's name is Ron Paul.
Motivated by Paul's purist libertarian ideology — he opposes most foreign wars, advocates for severe cuts to federal budgets and believes drugs should be decriminalized federally — supporters say they're drawn to a movement that is consistent, fair and free. And while the 12-time congressman has failed to win any of the first three voting states, he's captured the youth vote every time, sometimes dominantly.
Paul has attributed the idealism of his platform to his popularity among young voters. Asked by Jay Leno, on "The Tonight Show," in December, about the issue, the candidate said: "Freedom is very appealing, it's based on principle. …. And I think younger people tend to be more principled and later on resort to blend in and mesh in and go along with the crowd".
Em Portugal, a despesa pública representa oitenta mil milhões de euros, ou seja, 47% do PIB .. quase metade é originada nos chamados Serviços e Fundos Autónomos.
.. não me refiro aos gastos do Governo nem dos seus ministérios; refiro-me "apenas" aos institutos, às agências, às comissões, às entidades, às direcções, aos centros, às fundações, às administrações, aos serviços e fundos autónomos que, com estas ou outras designações, fazem parte do chamado Serviço Público.
Ora, neste labirinto, o dinheiro é facilmente esbanjado entre organismos que, sem razão de existir ou redundantes entre si, sugam recursos à actividade produtiva .. serviços e fundos autónomos a) não têm massa crítica e b) não tendo massa crítica, provavelmente, não têm razão de existir. Serão, porventura, redundantes no objecto, na forma ou até nos dois. E no total, representam um universo global .. no qual a miríade de estruturas, certamente, esconderá muita burocracia, muito ineficiência, muita artificialidade; tudo isto, é claro, pago com o dinheiro dos outros ..
Enfim, fala-se hoje muito numa agenda para o crescimento. Na minha opinião, uma boa forma de começar seria libertando o País destas redundâncias, reduzindo o peso que um Estado excessivamente oneroso e regulamentador persiste em impor à economia. O combate pelo aumento da produtividade tem, pois, de começar no próprio Estado.
El error fatal de los liberales clásicos radica en no haberse dado cuenta de que el programa del ideario liberal es teóricamente imposible pues incorpora dentro de sí mismo la semilla de su propia destrucción, precisamente en la medida en que considera necesaria y acepta la existencia de un estado (aunque sea mínimo) entendido como la agencia monopolista de la coacción institucional.
Por tanto, el gran error de los liberales es de planteamiento: piensan que el liberalismo es un programa de acción política y doctrina económica que tiene por objetivo limitar el poder del estado, pero aceptándolo e incluso considerando necesaria su existencia. Sin embargo, hoy (en la primera década del siglo XXI), la Ciencia Económica ya ha puesto de manifiesto: (a) que el estado no es necesario; (b) que el estatismo (aunque sea mínimo) es teóricamente imposible; y (c) que, dada la naturaleza del ser humano, una vez que existe el estado es imposible limitar su poder.
Se abre, pues, un futuro apasionante, en el que continuamente se descubrirán múltiples nuevos caminos que, en consonancia con los principios esenciales, nos permitirán avanzar en pos del ideal anarcocapitalista. Futuro que aunque hoy nos pueda parecer lejano, en cualquier momento puede ser testigo de pasos de gigante que incluso sorprendan a los más optimistas. ¿Quién fue capaz de predecir tan solo cinco años antes, que en 1989 se desmoronaría el Muro de Berlín y con él todo el comunismo del este de Europa? La historia ha entrado en un proceso acelerado de cambio que, aunque nunca se detendrá, sí que abrirá un capítulo totalmente nuevo cuando el género humano, por primera vez en la historia moderna, logre desembarazarse definitivamente del estado y reducirlo tan sólo a una oscura reliquia histórica de trágica memoria.
I recently read Planet of the Apes, the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle that inspired the movie franchise ..
It seemed absolutely clear that industry did not require the presence of a rational being to maintain itself. Basically, industry consisted of manual laborers, always performing the selfsame tasks, who could easily be replaced by apes; and, at a higher level, of executives whose function was to draft certain reports and pronounce ceratin words under given circumstances. All this was a question of conditioned reflexes. At the still higher level of administration, it seemed even easier to concede the quality of aping. To continue our system, the gorillas would merely have to imitate certain attitudes and deliver a few harangues, all based on the same model.
.. apes gradually assimilated and displaced a former human civilization simply by imitating their masters. The discovery of this older civilization (confirmed by the remains a talking human doll, as in the 1968 movie) explains the mystery of why ape culture stagnated at the level of its former human model. The apes could imitate, but not innovate.
.. the usual effect of the attempts of government to encourage consumption, is merely to prevent saving; that is, to promote unproductive consumption at the expense of reproductive (investment), and diminish in total the national wealth by the very means which were intended to increase it.
When the economics profession turns its attention to financial panics and crashes, the first episode mentioned is tulipmania. In fact, tulipmania has become a metaphor in the economics field ..
.. this paper will present evidence to the contrary; the supply of money did increase dramatically in 1630s Holland, serving to engender the tulipmania episode.
The powerful Charles V was among the most culpable for altering the value of money .. suddenly raising the value of his gold coins to 13 1/2 times the value of silver coins .. This action raised the value of gold nearly 50 percent and by this device, Charles was able to replenish his dwindling treasury.
This transgression, in 1546 .. may have been "the straw that broke the patience of his long suffering subjects." A revolution was then sparked in the Netherlands ..
One of the first measures instigated by the revolutionary government was "free" or "individual" coinage.
.. the Bank of Amsterdam was originated in 1609 ..
The effects of free coinage combined with the stability of the Bank of Amsterdam, created the impetus that channeled the large amounts of precious metals being discovered in the Americas, and to a lesser degree in Japan, toward Amsterdam ..
.. a rise of prices ensued, which found one form of expression in the curious mania of buying tulips at prices often exceeding that of the ground on which they were grown.
The National Health Service enjoys strong support among the public, making it almost impossible to introduce radical reforms, even if the performance of the NHS is relatively poor ..
The problem with such ‘part-privatisations’ is that ..
.. since politicians and officials retain control over funding, the system remains unresponsive to consumer preferences and subject to capture by special interests, particularly producer interests such as the medical and nursing professions and the pharmaceutical industry. Mixed public-private systems therefore risk introducing additional transaction costs while suffocating the potential gains from private sector entrepreneurship. If this results in disappointing outcomes, as is likely, the whole concept of privatisation may be brought into disrepute.
.. an alternative strategy would seek to bypass the NHS by liberating the private healthcare sector such that the NHS became less and less relevant as more and more people opted out of state provision to avoid long waiting lists and substandard care.
.. a nossa servidão voluntária quando nos pretendem impor ideias que são simplesmente páginas novas no processo de apagamento da identidade portuguesa em curso. Vem isto a propósito de .. ataques do rolo unidimensionalizador do estado, que encontra quase sempre, infelizmente, uma enorme passividade da sociedade portuguesa em relação aos ataques por ele prosseguidos.
.. É aceitar que o estado é dono da língua. É aceitar que, sem que ninguém lhe tenha conferido esse mandato, o estado se pode arrogar a possibilidade de fazer o que quer com a língua. No caso em apreço, é aceitar que o estado pode convocar um grupo de alegados iluminados e permitir-lhes redesenhar a língua de milhões de pessoas a seu bel-prazer.
Escapa a estes iluminados, provavelmente herdeiros da filosofia cartesiana que incorre no racionalismo construtivista – um ignóbil produto da modernidade que inspirou totalitarismos assentes no princípio de que é possível desenhar ou redesenhar uma sociedade complexa a partir de cima, ou seja, do aparelho estatal – uma coisa tão simples quanto isto: a língua é uma das instituições humanas originada e desenvolvida espontaneamente, i.e., através da interacção de milhões de indivíduos ao longo do tempo. A língua originou-se através da natural evolução humana e é por via das interacções que se registam numa comunidade ou sociedade que se vai modificando, de forma lenta, gradual e sem coação estatal. A língua não é produto nem pode ser apropriada por um aparelho cuja fundação é posterior ao momento de origem da língua da sociedade de onde aquele emana.
Sinto-me ultrajado com este acordo e pela violentíssima forma como o estado tem avançado para o impor. Raras vezes tenho sentido uma revolta tão grande, uma revolta que cada vez mais me custa calar e que é, com toda a certeza, partilhada por milhões dos meus compatriotas. É difícil, mas não impossível, resistir ao rolo unidimensionalizador da única instituição que detém o monopólio da força legítima. Mas não resistir é aceitar a coação estatal num domínio que é nosso, dos indivíduos e da sociedade, dos portugueses, não do estado. E é por isto que sou terminantemente contra a existência de qualquer acordo ortográfico. Este ou outros (e sim, sei que se fizeram vários ao longo do século XX e sempre por razões políticas). Não discuto os critérios do acordo porque, por uma questão de princípio, este nem sequer deveria existir.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” .. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.
In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.
So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.
Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.
"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."
It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.
At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
In a scene straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a group of congressmen have submitted a bill that would create a “Reasonable Profits Board” to regulate how much profit oil and gas companies are allowed to make.
The board would consist of three members, appointed by the President of the United States to three-year terms, and would be responsible for determining when oil companies were making excess profits.
Of course this is a terrible idea. A tax on a commodity supplier’s profits only disincentives the capital investment required to find and produce more of the commodity. Tax oil unfairly and you’ll end up with less oil, which would only push prices up higher. Furthermore, a tax on U.S. oil producers would only incentivize foreign producers like the OPEC nations to collude to raise the price of oil to “unreasonable” levels, knowing that their U.S. competitors would be taxed out of the marketplace, thus strengthening the position of their cartel-opoly.
.. any kind of tax on the producers of any commodity will eventually be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Purposefully targeting U.S. producers only strengthens foreign producers, while destroying the wealth of U.S. shareholders and destroying jobs.
If it’s just “unreasonable profits” that they’re worried about, there’s a lot more obvious places to look than oil companies. Exxon’s net profit margin is roughly 10%. Microsoft‘s is 33%. By the politicians’ logic, if we levy such a tax on Microsoft, we’ll magically end up with better software. Do you think that will work?
Public discourse on matters of the economy is and has always been dominated by the idea that the road to prosperity is to create jobs. In a moment of high unemployment, the “create jobs” rhetoric becomes that much more prevalent. We get a “Jobs Bill“; opponents of Obama’s reform call it “job destroying“; after a brief period of discussing deficits and debt national news outlets turned right back to talking about jobs.
The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.
This is not a matter of semantics. If you think the problem is a lack of jobs, all sorts of dangerous “solutions” may come to mind. Anything from having the government hiring en masse to do make-work, valueless jobs, to setting high tariffs and immigration restrictions so that domestic companies and labor do not have any foreign competition.
.. Yes, there would be more “work” to do if we cut off trade and immigration, but it would also impoverish just about everyone as the cost of getting anything would skyrocket. Getting a job is not an end unto itself; the whole point is to trade our labor for other things that we want. Getting a job at the cost of not being able to afford anything is an absurd proposition.
But we need to get our priorities straight; what we want to do is help people create value. Unless giving someone a job will enable them to create more value than it costs, the existence of that job is counterproductive.
I regard the Fed as a criminal organization, since it engages in (well, aids and abets) counterfeiting. The Fed is to the U.S. economy as was the old central planning apparatus of the late and non-lamented Soviet Union to the entire economy of the U.S.S.R. The Federal Reserve System has been responsible since its inception in 1913 for destroying some 97% of the value of our dollar, the life blood of our economy. This organization has exacerbated the business cycle. It has created both inflation and unemployment. These people, along with HUD, Fannie and Freddie, are responsible for the depression that currently afflicts us.
I pray, hope and trust that Ron Paul will be the next President of the U.S. .. I hope he appoints me the next head of the Fed. If so, I will do my level best to end this monstrosity of an institution with all deliberate speed, and institute a 100% gold backed dollar in its place. But more. I shall also do what I can to institute a Nuremberg type trial for all employees of the Fed. Not only should we audit them, we should throw in jail all of those responsible for counterfeiting, creating unemployment, inflation, and all but destroying our currency.
