For as long as there has been an Objectivist movement, its ranks have periodically been thinned by schisms and excommunications, power...
For Once, Thomas Frank Gets It Right. Commenting on Joe Barton’s description of Obama's demand for an escrow fund, WSJ columnist Frank wrote : “And this, in turn, is merely an expression of the permanently upside-down political universe of the right, in which the law is criminal, cynicism is a form of idealism, and bleeding-heart liberals are really soulless monsters in love with the power of the state for the same reason that gangsters are fond of their Uzis: because it is the weapon that allows them to plunder and loot the productive members of society.” I could disagree with a word choice here or there: For “law” substitute “politician’s arbitrary demand” and for “cynicism” substitute “the virtue of selfishness.” But other than that, yeah: basically correct.
I do not think I am indulging in the broken window fallacy to call attention to this story by Nicole Norfleet of Associated Press regarding the improved prospect that the Gulf oil spill has brought to non-Gulf shrimpers. The broken window fallacy says that destruction is economically advantageous because it gives work to those who must restore the former infrastructure. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, the broken window fallacy would be involved if one cited the economic benefit now being given to those employed in stopping the oil leak and cleaning up its consequences.
UK “Office of Fair Trading” to investigate IPO offerings. According to a story by Erik Larson (of Bloomberg.com): “Britain’s antitrust regulator plans to investigate fees charged by investment banks for arranging initial public offerings and rights offers, work that generated 2 billion pounds ($2.9 billion) for securities firms last year. “The probe, which will start later this year, will include fees, rights issues and other types of equity-raising following complaints of “dissatisfaction” from corporations, the U.K. Office of Fair Trading in London said today in a statement. “
Were there compelling factors—other than improving aviation security—at work in the passing of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) of 2001? Yes, says attorney James Slepian, who as a law student in 2003 penned the first legal analysis of three key sections of the act, including the little-known “Section 108.” (James is the son of Charles Slepian.) The responsibility for federalization fell to the newly-formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). By 2003, some $12 billion had been spent on the hiring and training of 60,000 new federal workers. Slepian observes that by setting the hiring bar low, individuals who worked as screeners before 9/11 could be re-hired under the supposedly elevated standards.
Apparently, the SEC has been investigating certain financial relationships between Dell Computer and Intel Corp. All that is being reported (by Miguel Helft of the NYT ), and his sources are mostly anonymous, is that the matter relates to “how Dell accounted for payments and rebates that it had received from Intel.”
Brooke Sopelsa (CNBC) writes that “about 6,000 claims have now been filed against BP since its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and hundreds of them have been filed by Robert Gordon, chief trial lawyer for Weitz & Luxemberg, on behalf of fishermen affected by the spill.” Gordon is quoted as saying: “It may be a generation before they’re able to go out and fish the way they were before.”
Royalist Trust-Busting Annually on this date, the Justice Department honors the founder of the FBI: Charles J. Bonaparte--yes, those Bonapartes (he was the great-nephew of Napoleon I). As Attorney General under Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte was an ardent trustbuster. This anti-business alliance of American and French aristocracy reminds us of the truth the anti-bourgeois movement is very often a movement ostensibly for plebians but led by patricians. Surprise: Demonizing business is bad for business Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institue takes note of a Washington Post editorial that seems to flirt with the concept of “regime uncertainty.” That is the view that says: When you h
When forced to assume [self-government], we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had entered little into our....
"The twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot," head of the totalitarian....
You asked “Are we any safer?” I have to ask you, safer from what? If we are talking about a repeat of the 9/11 incident, I think we are.....
I’m never impressed by those studies that come out every so often showing that some large percentage of the American citizenry “does not
What she came up with may give you the giggles. But the plastic horn-shaped device, dubbed a “ SheWee ,” has become a hot commodity for...
I concur in the conclusion of the Scholars Commission: the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave....
Independent Review has published an article by Bruce Yandle on the cause of the financial meltdown. The Gulf Spill An excellent article by Richard Epstein, as usual, on why punitive damages and criminal prosecutions are undesirable in the BP case.
Having recently learned about the show American Greed , I thought it worthwhile to make one general point about that concept, “greed.” It is a complete red herring. It implies that the pursuit of money is what makes many bad actions bad, and conversely that the pursuit of money is capable of making otherwise good actions morally dubious. And that is just not true. Money is not a moral pollutant of action. MINAMPOA! (Pronounced min-am-PO-ah.)
The Only Safety is Absolute Terror From an NYT article by Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The [credit-rating] agencies have a long history of getting it wrong. Enron, WorldCom, Penn Central—the ratings agencies always seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Yet since the 1970s, the ratings agencies have been imbued with a special government status—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, they’re called—and a whole body of regulation has been written that revolves around ratings. Mutual funds, to cite one example, can hold only securities that have the highest investment-grade ratings.
Ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began on April 20, commentators have been playing the game of “what if?” What if George W. Bush were in office: Would criticism of the president be harsher? The answer is: of course. Most commentators and analysts understand that President Obama embodies that elite intellectual class—“the adversary culture,” in Lionel Trilling’s term—that despises commercial and industrial civilization. Consequently, people reasonably presume that he neither has nor will cut BP any slack—indeed that he will not even deal with it justly. Were President Bush in office, the opposite presumptions would prevail, and rightly so.
Death by Rigidity The FTC is attempting to curb a sales pitch for Rice Krispies. And the effort involves an interesting syndrome. One of the more insidious methods of attacking capitalism is to take a theoretical model of how it “should” work and then force actual capitalists to operate “by the book.” The most egregious instance of this is the absurdity known as “perfect competition,” which declares how capitalist competition “should” work and then serves as a Procrustean ideal that allows bureaucratic regulators to torture actual competition. Nearly as absurd is the apparent model of “perfect advertising” that the enemeies of capitalism have tried to foist on the system. In a capitalist exchange, they say, the seller informs the buyer of what he has for sale and the buyer then determines if he values that product more than the money it would cost. Thus, an example of “perfect advertising” would be one of those unreadable sheets of miniscule print that comes with a prescription medicine.
Attorney-Client Privilege under Attack in Manhattan The new Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., via his assistant Daniel Alonso, has just issued guidelines for charging businesses and other organizations with crimes because of the behavior of individuals who work for those organization. (Hanging over the guideliness, of course, is the memory of Judge Lewis Kaplain’s rebuke to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in the KPMG case.) At “White Collar Crime Prof Blog,” Ellen Podgor notes that Vance keeps open the door to demanding a company waive the attorney-client privilege if it wants credit for cooperationg. By contrast, footnote 7 in the DA’s document observes: “A particularly sensitive issue was whether an organization’s willingness to waive the attorney client privilege and work product protection should be considered under the rubric of cooperation. In 2006, through what is known as the McNulty Memorandum, DOJ modified, but did not eliminate, a federal prosecutor’s authority to demand or seek such privilege waivers as a factor of cooperation. DOJ’s latest word on the subject, issued in August 2008 by Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, barred federal prosecutors from seeking privilege waivers from organizations (emphasis added).
For as long as there has been an Objectivist movement, its ranks have periodically been thinned by schisms and excommunications, power...
For Once, Thomas Frank Gets It Right. Commenting on Joe Barton’s description of Obama's demand for an escrow fund, WSJ columnist Frank wrote : “And this, in turn, is merely an expression of the permanently upside-down political universe of the right, in which the law is criminal, cynicism is a form of idealism, and bleeding-heart liberals are really soulless monsters in love with the power of the state for the same reason that gangsters are fond of their Uzis: because it is the weapon that allows them to plunder and loot the productive members of society.” I could disagree with a word choice here or there: For “law” substitute “politician’s arbitrary demand” and for “cynicism” substitute “the virtue of selfishness.” But other than that, yeah: basically correct.
I do not think I am indulging in the broken window fallacy to call attention to this story by Nicole Norfleet of Associated Press regarding the improved prospect that the Gulf oil spill has brought to non-Gulf shrimpers. The broken window fallacy says that destruction is economically advantageous because it gives work to those who must restore the former infrastructure. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, the broken window fallacy would be involved if one cited the economic benefit now being given to those employed in stopping the oil leak and cleaning up its consequences.
UK “Office of Fair Trading” to investigate IPO offerings. According to a story by Erik Larson (of Bloomberg.com): “Britain’s antitrust regulator plans to investigate fees charged by investment banks for arranging initial public offerings and rights offers, work that generated 2 billion pounds ($2.9 billion) for securities firms last year. “The probe, which will start later this year, will include fees, rights issues and other types of equity-raising following complaints of “dissatisfaction” from corporations, the U.K. Office of Fair Trading in London said today in a statement. “
Were there compelling factors—other than improving aviation security—at work in the passing of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) of 2001? Yes, says attorney James Slepian, who as a law student in 2003 penned the first legal analysis of three key sections of the act, including the little-known “Section 108.” (James is the son of Charles Slepian.) The responsibility for federalization fell to the newly-formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). By 2003, some $12 billion had been spent on the hiring and training of 60,000 new federal workers. Slepian observes that by setting the hiring bar low, individuals who worked as screeners before 9/11 could be re-hired under the supposedly elevated standards.
Apparently, the SEC has been investigating certain financial relationships between Dell Computer and Intel Corp. All that is being reported (by Miguel Helft of the NYT ), and his sources are mostly anonymous, is that the matter relates to “how Dell accounted for payments and rebates that it had received from Intel.”
Brooke Sopelsa (CNBC) writes that “about 6,000 claims have now been filed against BP since its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and hundreds of them have been filed by Robert Gordon, chief trial lawyer for Weitz & Luxemberg, on behalf of fishermen affected by the spill.” Gordon is quoted as saying: “It may be a generation before they’re able to go out and fish the way they were before.”
Royalist Trust-Busting Annually on this date, the Justice Department honors the founder of the FBI: Charles J. Bonaparte--yes, those Bonapartes (he was the great-nephew of Napoleon I). As Attorney General under Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte was an ardent trustbuster. This anti-business alliance of American and French aristocracy reminds us of the truth the anti-bourgeois movement is very often a movement ostensibly for plebians but led by patricians. Surprise: Demonizing business is bad for business Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institue takes note of a Washington Post editorial that seems to flirt with the concept of “regime uncertainty.” That is the view that says: When you h
When forced to assume [self-government], we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had entered little into our....
"The twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot," head of the totalitarian....
You asked “Are we any safer?” I have to ask you, safer from what? If we are talking about a repeat of the 9/11 incident, I think we are.....
I’m never impressed by those studies that come out every so often showing that some large percentage of the American citizenry “does not
What she came up with may give you the giggles. But the plastic horn-shaped device, dubbed a “ SheWee ,” has become a hot commodity for...
I concur in the conclusion of the Scholars Commission: the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave....
Independent Review has published an article by Bruce Yandle on the cause of the financial meltdown. The Gulf Spill An excellent article by Richard Epstein, as usual, on why punitive damages and criminal prosecutions are undesirable in the BP case.
Having recently learned about the show American Greed , I thought it worthwhile to make one general point about that concept, “greed.” It is a complete red herring. It implies that the pursuit of money is what makes many bad actions bad, and conversely that the pursuit of money is capable of making otherwise good actions morally dubious. And that is just not true. Money is not a moral pollutant of action. MINAMPOA! (Pronounced min-am-PO-ah.)
The Only Safety is Absolute Terror From an NYT article by Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The [credit-rating] agencies have a long history of getting it wrong. Enron, WorldCom, Penn Central—the ratings agencies always seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Yet since the 1970s, the ratings agencies have been imbued with a special government status—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, they’re called—and a whole body of regulation has been written that revolves around ratings. Mutual funds, to cite one example, can hold only securities that have the highest investment-grade ratings.
Ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began on April 20, commentators have been playing the game of “what if?” What if George W. Bush were in office: Would criticism of the president be harsher? The answer is: of course. Most commentators and analysts understand that President Obama embodies that elite intellectual class—“the adversary culture,” in Lionel Trilling’s term—that despises commercial and industrial civilization. Consequently, people reasonably presume that he neither has nor will cut BP any slack—indeed that he will not even deal with it justly. Were President Bush in office, the opposite presumptions would prevail, and rightly so.
Death by Rigidity The FTC is attempting to curb a sales pitch for Rice Krispies. And the effort involves an interesting syndrome. One of the more insidious methods of attacking capitalism is to take a theoretical model of how it “should” work and then force actual capitalists to operate “by the book.” The most egregious instance of this is the absurdity known as “perfect competition,” which declares how capitalist competition “should” work and then serves as a Procrustean ideal that allows bureaucratic regulators to torture actual competition. Nearly as absurd is the apparent model of “perfect advertising” that the enemeies of capitalism have tried to foist on the system. In a capitalist exchange, they say, the seller informs the buyer of what he has for sale and the buyer then determines if he values that product more than the money it would cost. Thus, an example of “perfect advertising” would be one of those unreadable sheets of miniscule print that comes with a prescription medicine.
Attorney-Client Privilege under Attack in Manhattan The new Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., via his assistant Daniel Alonso, has just issued guidelines for charging businesses and other organizations with crimes because of the behavior of individuals who work for those organization. (Hanging over the guideliness, of course, is the memory of Judge Lewis Kaplain’s rebuke to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in the KPMG case.) At “White Collar Crime Prof Blog,” Ellen Podgor notes that Vance keeps open the door to demanding a company waive the attorney-client privilege if it wants credit for cooperationg. By contrast, footnote 7 in the DA’s document observes: “A particularly sensitive issue was whether an organization’s willingness to waive the attorney client privilege and work product protection should be considered under the rubric of cooperation. In 2006, through what is known as the McNulty Memorandum, DOJ modified, but did not eliminate, a federal prosecutor’s authority to demand or seek such privilege waivers as a factor of cooperation. DOJ’s latest word on the subject, issued in August 2008 by Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, barred federal prosecutors from seeking privilege waivers from organizations (emphasis added).