The Republic of Dissent

Political entrepreneurs

Daniel Henninger argues in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's economic policies (particularly the jobs bill) will lead to the rise of political entrepreneurs and to the decline of market entrepreneurs who have made America America:

Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world's dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama's ideas.

I suspect that Daniel Henninger's dislike for the intervention of the state within the economy and his idolization of what he believes to be real entrepreneurship are narrowing his perception of reality. Nevertheless, reading his arguments forces one to wonder whether entrepreneurship in itself is always a good for a country and should be privileged over anything else whether it is based on politics or on the market. To put it differently, I wonder whether in an age where a lot of entrepreneurs can go wherever they want to innovate, governments have real policy choices if they believe in entrepreneurship as a good in itself.
In any case, to come back to Henninger's strong distaste for "political entrepreneurs," I wonder if his problem is more with the politics that they are following rather than politics itself. To phrase it differently, I wonder if Henninger would be saying the same time if Obama were Bush or the venerated Ronald Reagan.

Guys, love, and stuff

I don't know about you but watching two guys men talk about love just make me realize that romance, love, relationships are the new spirituality tools to make people avoid facing the scary reality existence is absurd and that sex can be satisfying, valuable in itself. I find the religionization, the merchandization of love, sex, relationship creepy. Something tells me that very soon there will love classes in colleges.

Warren Buffett and Success

Michael Lewis reviews Alice Schroeder's autobiography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life:

There has never really been a bad time in the last fifty years to be Warren Buffett, but just now would seem to be less favorable than most. If Buffett still measures his life by the book value per share of Berkshire Hathaway, then for the first time in forty years he must feel like a wasting asset. His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500. He railed against derivatives as weapons of mass destruction, and now turns out to have been sitting on a $68 billion pile of credit default swaps and exotic put options on various stock market indexes. And having vowed never again to become entangled in a big Wall Street investment bank, he has gone and sunk $10 billion into Goldman Sachs, a virtual re-enactment of his investment in Salomon Brothers -- cash for reputation. The difference this time is that he has gotten himself a sweeter deal than not merely ordinary shareholders, but also the U.S. Treasury.
On the surface at least, he seems like a guy who has spent the last few years ignoring all of his own best advice. What does Schroeder make of this? By September of last year, when Berkshire's share price began to collapse, The Snowball was already in bookstores. Its final chapter has a rushed, panicky feel to it, as if the author sensed that she was going to watch some meaningful part of her story unfold after she told it. If so, she was right: Buffett's role in the current crisis is likely to be as interesting as any episode of his career.
Still, while Schroeder could not have foreseen the sensational reversal in Berkshire's fortunes, she offers, inadvertently, an explanation for it: the impulse to grasp for things before they all slip away. Susie Buffett, diagnosed with cancer the year before, died in 2004. "Before 2003," writes Schroeder, "Buffett's need for attention had been satisfied by a few interviews a year and the shareholder meeting. He had always been careful and strategic in his cooperation with the media (if not always forthcoming about just how cooperative he had been). But starting around the time of Susie's illness, for whatever reason, he had begun to need the mirror of media attention, television cameras especially, almost like a drug. The intervals he could tolerate without publicity were growing shorter. He cooperated with documentaries, spent hours talking to Charlie Rose, and became such a regular on CNBC that it started to prompt puzzled queries from his friends."
Thus she leaves open the possibility that Buffett might have gone a bit soft in old age. "Basically, when you get to my age," she quotes him telling a group of business school students, "you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them." Where there was once only the time value of money, there is now also the time value of love. My God, he's even given his fortune away!

The last paragraph catches my attention because it shows how single-minded Americans (I share that single-mindedness) are about measuring success in the sense that Buffett is considered to be a successful and genius because he was once the richest man in the world. What I have been wondering if how if he would have been judged if he had never made it to the top of the mountain or if he had just made a couple of million dollars. In other words what I'm wondering is whether all self-made billionaires the most successful and the most gifted people?

Fear entrepreneurship

Quote of the day from Frank Furedi on the recent swine flu and what it tells us about fear entrepreneurs:

The protagonists in today’s market of fear have forcefully sought to demonise flu as a threat to the world, as something that might even be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology now advertises a course on ‘Pandemics and Bioterrorism’. It claims that ‘swine flu is only the most recent of the challenges posed by threats of bioterrorism and global pandemics’. The casual manner in which the threat of bioterrorism is introduced into the discussion of swine flu, by one of the most respected scientific institutions in the world, provides disturbing evidence that fearmongering has become a respectable pastime and pursuit.
Today, fear entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are moral crusaders who genuinely believe that the very fabric of society is threatened by evil forces. At the other end of the spectrum are the salespeople and hustlers of the market of fear.

Bossnappings

The Guardian has an article on the current wave in France of Bossnapping, which is the kidnapping of bosses by workers in attempt to avoid firings or to solve other crisis in the enterprise:

France is braced for a wave of such "bossnappings", as desperate staff take desperate action. Mass layoffs blamed on the financial crisis have seen the protest movement splinter into spontaneous hostage-taking at plants and factories around the country. Chief executives arriving from Paris to announce redundancies find themselves barred from leaving. It is "our only remaining bartering tool" one union leader said.
France has a history of bossnappings dating back to May 1968 and the 1970s, when executives were held hostage in the struggle for rights. Today's demands are more mundane: hostage-takers range from single mothers to the nearly retired - they want jobs, proper pay and no brutal layoffs. The two "bossnappings" this month are the latest examples in a rise in radical gestures that has seen members of the public stage commando "picnics" in supermarkets, feasting from the shelves in revenge against multinationals, shouting "we will not pay for your crisis".

Bossnappings are able to happen in France because the French look at entrepreneurs and other's rich people who are at the head of a business with suspicion because to them, they aren't as honest and as hard working as their workers who are doing the real work, which is enabling them to get rich. The point is that in France, an successful entrepreneur is more often than not viewed as a opportunist who has been able to exploit his workers by taking full advantage of the fruits of their labor. The bosses who are the victims of these bossnappings will not be viewed as victims, but rather as people who are the causes of their employees' despair.

It is still not just Globalization, stupid!

Peter Thiel (one of the co-founders of PayPal) has an essay on Globalization on the Hoover Institution website, which is a good read because it makes interesting, but limited points about globalization and our times. Sugary except:

Classic investment strategies no longer work in a world where ordinary economic cycles are broken. The limits of a George Soros or a Julian Robertson, much less of an ltcm, can be attributed to a failure of the imagination about the possible trajectories for our world, especially regarding the radically divergent alternatives of total collapse and good globalization.

Seven years later, the markets have come full circle. The retreat towards tactical cleverness hides a lazy agnosticism about the most fundamental questions of our age. Because we find ourselves in a world of retail sanity and wholesale madness, the truly great opportunities exist in the wildly mispriced macro context — rather than in the ever-diminishing spreads on esoteric financial markets or products. Indeed, one could go even further: What is truly frightening about the twenty-first century is not merely that there exists a dangerous dimension to our time, but rather the unwillingness of the best and brightest to try and make any sense of this larger dimension.

[…] In every possible future, all of today ’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history.

The waning of globalization in the near future will be a reaction to the excesses of the recent past.  Bubbles have begun to implode across the globe, laying bare the fraudulence of “China,” “technology,” “hedge funds,” and their like. As the world's economy weakens, so will support for the globalist orthodoxy, the political tenability of which rests heavily on the ability of the doctrine to literally deliver the goods. Some policymakers seem to sense this already, with the most immediately obvious of these being the Fed. In this view, the Fed ’s morally hazardous accommodations are best understood not as a perplexing and facile sop to bankrupt homeowners but as a desperate effort to stave off a recession that will end the debate on globalization for years to come.

Globalization became a buzzword applied to all things and used to reinforce the idea that there were no alternatives to a particular worldview and set of policies, which created both wealth and extreme inequality. The point is that few understand that in spite of the fact that globalization isn’t new; it is still relevant because it makes policy and investors’ choices even more essential than ever before because it is clear that markets aren’t fair and the invisible right seldom creates fairness and social justice.

Culture as an Industry

Time magazine had a cover article two weeks ago written by Don Morrison which made the grandiose claim that French culture was dead because it doesn't sell anymore:

Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace. That is an especially sensitive issue right now, as a forceful new President, Nicolas Sarkozy, sets out to restore French standing in the world. When it comes to culture, he will have his work cut out for him.

Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English. That's about the same percentage as in Germany, but there the total number of English translations has nearly halved in the past decade, while it's still growing in France. Earlier generations of French writers — from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre, Camus and Malraux — did not lack for an audience abroad. Indeed, France claims a dozen Nobel literature laureates — more than any other country — though the last one, Gao Xingjian in 2000, writes in Chinese.

I didn’t discuss it because I couldn’t take it seriously and because I thought that it was just another critical article on France written by a person who doesn’t know the meaning of culture and who doesn’t understand France. Agnès Poirier did take seriously and rebuts some of the arguments made by specifically that there is a difference between culture and industry. Sugary excerpt:

In France, 30% of all books published are translations, with a strong contingent of Anglophone authors. The reasons? The excellence of Anglophone literature as a whole and the curiosity of French readers for the outer world. In cinema, the French prove as eclectic an audience; they love a good American thriller as much as a three-hour drama by its latest enfant prodige, Abdelatif Kechiche. It's called diversity, the opposite of chauvinism.

Usually, the case against France turns to the subject of subsidies which make French culture weak as "they ensure mediocrity". Sure, French artists, if they can prove having worked for 507 hours in 10 consecutive months, are eligible to benefits which won't force them to slave in bars at night while preparing for auditions during the day. This generous system may sustain a few mediocre artists but it allows most to perfect their craft. Besides, this public bonus, helped by quotas, is regularly dealt to foreign artists. Masterpieces by directors such as Krzysztof Kieslowski and the Coen brothers would never have reached world screens without these art subsidies sans frontières.

In the end, these investigations have little to do with the fantasised death of French culture; they merely show the American inability to distinguish art from entertainment, culture from industry. It also barely disguises the American bitterness at Unesco's agreement two years ago, voted by a majority of 148 votes to two, on the right for any country "to protect and promote the cultural diversity of cultural expressions on their territory".

Targeting French culture, rejoicing over its apparent decline and glossing over its obvious achievements is in fact taking aim at a much broader villain: dissidence

The urge to fight the power and the Viacom vs. Youtube case

Paul Kedrosky argues that the issue in the Viacom’s case against Google because of YouTube’s alleged infractions of intellectual property rights is consumer rebellion. Sugary excerpt:

Consumers have spoken, and they don't like the way that electronic media--whether music, television or movies--is being packaged and sold to them. A decade ago they rebelled against being forced to buy entire CDs when they only wanted the few good tracks, and thus spawned Napster. Today, using YouTube, they are rebelling against being forced to watch entire programs when they only really want the 20-second part of American Idol last night where the contestant forgot the song lyrics and broke down in tears. Or a hockey fight. Or whatever.

Seeing that digital media can be sold to them in the equivalent of six-packs, sips and pint bottles, consumers no longer want to buy it by the truckload. And they resent being told by companies like Viacom that they can't have it, or that if they want it they have to go a different site for every clip owner. Consumers don't mind specialty stores, but they also want online Wal-Marts of media, mega-stores where they can buy whatever they want, without having to go to Viacom for this, ESPN for that, CNN for the next thing, and so on.

I agree with Kedrosky. I like YouTube a lot less since it sold its soul to Google and became less edgy and visionary. I think that the people who loved YouTube precisely because you could watch CBS and Comedy central programs freely and for free without commercials and without following the rules. Consumers are rebelling against the system, which is trying to control a big part of their lives by having them watch shows a given time and a specific way. YouTube worked because it made TV free by putting the consumers at the center of it by allowing to decide what to see and when to see it.

Being a gay man and a great boss

Stylemens argues in a post that gay men makes the best bosses because they don't usually have an ego problem and they have acquired essential interpersonal and problem solving skills by having to deal, conceal or explain their homosexuality throughout their life. In other words, gay men make the best bosses because their unique experience as gay men have made them understand that it isn't necessary to be abusive to get the best out their employees. Sugary excerpt:

So what makes gay bosses different? It may have to do with the way they survived high school. "Gay people are constantly having to dodge and weave and assess how and where they're going as they grow up," says Snyder. "And that manifests itself as three huge skills: adaptability, intuitive communications, and creative problem-solving." In other words, your boss is cool with your leaving a little early one day a week to pick up your kid from school, or happy to offer a learning experience that helps you close a crucial deal.

Gay executives note that the reflection and candidness required for coming out mean that by the time they get to the workplace, gay men are often secure in their identity and don't feel the need to abuse people in order to boost their ego. "It makes you really honest with yourself and everyone around you," says Chris McCarthy, a vice president at MTV Networks who came out 10 years ago. He believes the experience has allowed him to tap into the individual needs of his seven team members, including two discontented employees whom he recently helped find new positions within the company. "I think it's really important that you give people the opportunity to have self-respect, even if that means helping them leave a job in the way they want to," he explains.

I wonder if it’s true of lesbians as well, do lesbians make the best bosses or the worst bosses because their sexuality accentues or lessens the problem created by their gender? I wonder if a lesbian could get away with being a tough and ruthless without being called a bitch.

Churches' internal struggles

Jay Akasie writes in the New York Sun about the global battles, which several churches such as the Anglican church and the Episcopal church are facing about ideoligical issues, which create tensions between its members from different countries and oppose again America to the rest of the world. Sugary excerpt:

What's really going on is a global shift in American power and influence over the rest of the world. In this case, it's being played out in the context of a church.

The world is fortunate that America remains the only superpower. But if this Inter-Anglican controversy stands as any example, it's that Americans often live up to their image as bullies. Like it or not, the tremendous clout that our nation and its institutions currently enjoy on the world stage rests on how mindful we are of how others perceive us in the future.

Many Anglicans in other parts of the world, including those in the Church of England, have cringed at the in-your-face attitude of their American counterparts. A few years ago, the Episcopal Church approved the consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop.

Explaining the fact that Europeans economies are behind the one of the United States

Edmund Phelps argues that  Western European countries (he focuses on France, Germany and Italy) don't have an entrepreneurial culture and that this explains why their economies lag behind the one of the United States. In other words, Europeans aren't pro-business; it isn't within their genes to be so. Sugary excerpt:

Perhaps many would be willing to take it for granted that the spirit of stimulation, problem-solving, mastery and discovery has impacts on a country's dynamism and thus on its economic performance. In countries where that spirit is weak, an entrepreneurial type contemplating a start-up might be scared off by the prospect of having employees with little zest for any of those experiences. […] The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. "A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself," the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.

Assuming that Phelps is right, the question, which his conclusions lead to, is whether economic performance is the sole measure of a society's health. In other words, does Western Europe have to be like the United States in order to be better society or can it remain itself and remain a healthy society? Reading Phelps, one has the feeling that Europe is becoming a continent on the decline and that it will soon be unable to live within its own means and to provide a high quality of living to its inhabitants. It is possible to argue that it is the United States' way of life, which is unsustainable despite of its economic dynamism precisely because it doesn't live within its means and because it borrows more than it saves.

Food for thought: Immigration, protectionism, and American jobs

“Titled "American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness," the report found that "Over the past 15 years, immigrants have started 25 percent of U.S. public companies that were venture-backed." These businesses employ some 220,000 people in the U.S. and have a current market capitalization that "exceeds $500 billion, adding significant value to the American economy." The authors surveyed smaller, private venture-backed companies as well and discovered that nearly half of the founders also were immigrants. Protectionists insist that immigrants "steal" jobs from native workers, but this survey found evidence that these newcomers are more likely to expand the job pool. "Almost two-thirds (66 percent) of the immigrant founders of privately held venture-backed companies have started or intend to start more companies in the United States," according to the report.”  Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs, new evidence that newcomers create jobs and wealth”

Google + Youtube = Microsoft

I have many misgivings about the acquisition of YouTube by Google or over a billion dollar. The first reason for my uneasiness is that Google is getting too big too fast and is concentrating a lot of power. Mark Cuban thinks that Google is crazy and I agree with him except that I think that their madness is created by Gates-like ambition. Google is well on its way to become the Microsoft, which everybody loved to hate in the mid-nineties because it sought to control everything. The second reason is that one of the things that I used to like about YouTube and about Google was the fact that they didn't seem to product and that the first goal of their creators was to give the consumer something that would be both useful and enjoyable. I am afraid that this "fresh" quality will disappear because by acquiring YouTube for that much money, Google is sending the clear and resounding message that it intends to make a lot of  money with it and that YouTube can no longer be just about the consumer and not about the bottom. I guess that soon or later in the business world as in the real world, we become what we hate and Google is fast becoming Microsoft by trying to googlefied the world. I thought that the mantra of this new era was that Small was the new big, oh well some things just never change. Om Malik has a post of the winners and losers of this list (Mark Cuban is among the losers).

Hiring illegal immigrants

I have mixed feelings about the hiring of illegal immigrants. On the one hand, I feel that businesses should be allowed to take advantage of illegal immigration, but on the other hand, I know that many illegal immigrants will do everything to work and that sometimes people agree to hire them because they want to help.

1. The Washington Post has an article this morning about this issue that shows that the hiring of illegal immigrants is rarely punished. I think that illegal hiring is a complex issue and it is going to be impossible in my opinion to have one inflexible approach to it.
2. There are different kinds of illegal hiring. There are people who hire illegal immigrants to help them out and those who do it to take advantage of their difficult situation.  Not making a distinction between these two different type of illegal hiring would be not only unfair, but also a mistake. 
3. It might be fairer to penalize severely business who make it a practice to hire illegal immigrants, rather than a person who is trying to help someone or a small business who hired an illegal immigrant due to negligence. I think that the focus ought to be on those who exploit illegal immigrants and who willingly make the choice to hire them so that they can cut costs and increase their profits. Illegal hiring is in my opinion not a business issue, but a justice and a social issue.
4. The most important  questions that have to asked and answered when choosing how to approach this problem are the following: who benefit from Illegal hiring? Are all forms of illegal hiring the same or are some more outrageous than others? And, finally, on whom should the responsibility be placed to avoid this problem?

Desperately seeking Good customer service

I had a problem with my computer yesterday so I had to go to Best Buy and to see if their Geek Squad could help me and I was extremely disappointed with the service I received.

1. My computer’s fan was acting up so I thought that I needed to replace it, so I called Best Buy (I bought my laptop there) and asked if they were selling fans and they told me that they did so I rushed over there.
2. When I got there, a young man looked at me disdainful as though he was evaluating merchandise he didn’t like. He told me that Best Buy didn’t sell fans and his tone implied that I was stupid for thinking that they did.
3. I asked him about what he thought that I should do, he advised me to call Toshiba to ask them to send me a new fan, and then to come back and that then they may be able to replace it for me.
4.   Throughout the conversation, I kept thinking about the fact that I was a customer and that I was being treated a spoiled child who was asking for too much.
5. Is asking for good customer service really a luxury nowadays? My fear is that we might be living in a world where there is no other alternative than to accept poor customer service.
6. My fan is still acting up by the way, but I have decided to live with up until it dies on me.