Re: David Faber Report : Putting 2 and 2 together

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:25:22 -0600, John Galt wrote:

Mike wrote:
On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:35:54 -0600, John Galt wrote:

Mike wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:28:30 -0600, John Galt wrote:

Mike wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:37:01 -0600, John Galt wrote:

Mike wrote:
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:25:39 -0600, John Galt wrote:

Mike wrote:
So, they respect the industrialists, while we either ignore
(choosing to read People instead) or revile them. Forget all
the other stuff -- that's one of the main reasons why we may
end up a fifth rate economy in half a century. We (well, you)
pretend that the have no real skills that qualify them for
those positions, preferring the fantasy that their abilities
are no different from the guy on the shop floor. Success in
business is now politically incorrect.
that's the second time you've falsely claimed that it is my
position that workers are the equals of top execs. i've never
said anything of the sort. what i have said is that a top exec
is not worth $billions more than an average worker, which is a
far cry from saying that they are equals.
I'm pretty sure that I agreed with that. I just pointed out that
none of these guys are getting "billions" -- for the sake of
accuracy.
yes, they are getting $billions. i didn't say that was their
annual salary. but over a period of several years they get
$billions.
They tend not to last that long. The billionaires are, in general,
the ones who found their companies and stay with it for decades.
You don't make that much money by going to work for somebody.
that never was my point. as i said, the billionaires use
corporations in a variety of ways to extract their $billions,
founding them and milking them over time, playing the strip & flip
game of the corporate raiders (or whatever they call them these
days, private equity i guess) or in the case of the recent banking
crisis, as a source of nearly unlimited debt which they invested
and used the gains to pay themselves $billions but lost the
principle. but you'll never find a $billionaire who provided
products/services that wouldn't have been provided by others who
would have done it for a lot less had they not been shut out by the
anti- competitive practices of the $billionaires.
My point was that the billionaires are usually the founders of their
company. They become billionaires not by "extracting money", but by
virtue of the fact that they owned thousands of shares on the day
they went public, and the value of those shares increased as their
company succeeded over time. In this way, successful companies
possibly creates a billionaire, but also creates hundreds of
millionaires for every billionaire.

and you just want to ignore msft's 25 year track history
No, I don't want to ignore anything. I think they are a horribly
behaved company, and I say that from the perspective of being both a
supplier to them and a competitor against them at various times in my
career. And if they are brought to charges for that behavior, I'll be
with you on the sidelines, holding up the same signs you do.


won't do any good, msft has already been convicted of antitrust
violations (which were so blatantly obvious that despite the govt's
best efforts to look the other way there was just no way to avoid
finding them guilty) yet the gov't did nothing of any consequence to
remedy the situation, business as usual...


HOWEVER, Gates owns personal property called "shares in his company",
and according to the laws of the land, you cannot attach the personal
property of an individual for the behavior of his corporation. Those
laws exist because they are just, not because they lead to results
that are necessarily popular.


you know, this discussion might come to a conclusion a lot sooner if
you'd stop trying to ascribe to me a position i'm not taking..

Good. If you lack respect for personal property, you'd be a crackpot.

. (or it
might end because i get tired of repeating my position which is that
i'm not for taking anything away from anyone, only for preventing the
imbalances from occurring in the first place)


So, I reiterate. Although you and I both agree that Gates really has
accomplished nothing in life but being the most astute manipulator of
the various "systems" be that from his acquisition of the original DOS
assets, to the IBM dealmaking, to the plagarization of the Apple
interface (which itself was plagarized from Xerox), it worked out for
him, BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that he is typical of the "billionaire
businessman."


on that point we agree, gates, imo, is by far the worst of the bunch,
in fact i'd say he pretty well encapsulates everything that's wrong
with corporate america... unfortunately, what he has done has raised a
bar that should have never been allowed to be lifted in terms of
corporate excesses and exploitation of the system (and for that i fault
the gov't regulators, not necessarily gates)>

of blatantly
violating just about every antitrust law on the books (and
"innovating" a few new ways to violate antitrust along the way, like
for one, lying to a federal judge about browsers not being separable
from the operating system (apparently gates never heard of
firefox...)) which is documented ad nauseum and everyone knows it (as
in common knowledge) but since you've take the convenient position
that "all regulation should be abolished" (although you cite
regulations to support your arguments so apparently you only like
regulation when it suits you). so maybe you're willing to ignore the
entire history of msft's clearly established business strategy that
relies almost exclusively on anti-competitive behavior, but the rest
of the population is not so your position is somewhat limited in the
number of people that support it and is becoming a smaller minority
with each passing year as the majority get more and more sick and
tired of getting screwed by corporate scams...

in the case of msft, your position is that of using monopoly "tax"
revenue to create millionaires, that's brilliant, maybe obama will
pick up on your idea and raise tax high enough so that the gov't can
hire us all to make us all millionaires...

so how many of those hundreds of thousands of sales & clerks &
cashiers at walmart became millionaires?
I doubt any, since WM was not a business that required the
distribution of stock options to mitigate risk. But, in technology,
tens of thousands of people who were not in upper management became
millionaires because of timely entry into their companies, all the way
down to secretarial and administrative personell. That is well known,
but no longer occurs, since the government decided to force companies
to expense all stock options.
let's see how many "millionaires" some of the more prominent robber
barons were worth (in inflation adjusted dollars):

John D. Rockefeller 318B -> 318,000 millionaires

but that's not how many were created by JD, that's how many
millionaires never got to be millionaires because of the great black
financial hole of JD rockefeller...

here's some more:

Andrew Carnegie: 298B -> 298,000 millionaires (that never were)
Andrew W. Mellon: 188B -> 188,000 millionaires (that never were)

and the list goes on...

numbers from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richest_man_in_history


I don't see how that process, played over and over again during many
expansion cycles over the last 30 years, fits into your view of the
process, particularly with the term "extract", and I have no idea
how you are seeing the process as "anti-competitive", since it is
actually a VERY competitive process at its core.

A share of stock is owned property, and it is that stock that
creates the millionaire and, on occasion, the billionaire. Are you
suggesting that there should be some sort of ceiling on the value of
a person's personal property? If so, how do you square that with the
concept of personal property rights?

no, absolutely not, i've never said anything of the sort that there
should be arbitrary "ceilings" on anything (income or wealth), that
is just your misinterpretation of what i am saying which is that
properly regulated capitalism will not produce such huge distortions
in wealth distribution and that the main reason we currently have
such distortions is because of the govt's failure to enforce
regulation.
I am misinterpreting nothing.


yes, you do. you keep making arguments against things that have
nothing to do with my position.

They logical extrapolations of what I'm reading. I asked you if you were
suggesting X, you said you weren't, then got pissed because I followed
through with my thought. That's not a "misinterpretation" to ask you
what you meant to say.


You are generating a heavy amount of wrath towards the most successful
people in society for the quantity of riches they have accumulated,


nothing whatsoever to do with anything i'm saying. which part of: "i
blame lack of adequate regulation" do you not understand?

Perhaps if you lighten up on the emotive adjectives like using "exploit"
as a synonym of "employ" we'd understand each one better. The latter is
a matter of fact; the former is a matter of opinion. When you use
emotive adjectives, one has no choice to assume that you're making
arguments on an emotive basis.


i can't use the word "employ" when the "exploit" i'm talking about is
much broader. as i've said several times, there are many ways the robber
barons "exploit" corporations, exploiting the employees is just one of
them (there were others i described, but i'm tired of repeating myself so
go back & reread the thread if you need to refresh your memory). and i
suppose you'd prefer i use the term "captains of industry" instead of
"robber barons", however, as both types exist (i didn't create the term
"robber baron", you know) and i've been talking specifically about the
latter i think i'll stick to the terms i've been using.




so I assume that you have some sort of political solution in mind,

stop assuming. you get it wrong every time you assume you know where
i'm coming from (despite my best attempts to make it clear).

See above. You play it very loose with the english language.



and am trying to get to it. You've now provided a bit of a framework
(in the above paragraph) as to what you are thinking, although it's
clear from history (which you've cited some of) that there (1) has
never been any regulation -- or taxation structure -- that has
prevented the massive accumulation of wealth, so (2) the problem
cannot be the goverment's failure to enforce anything, since you can't
fail to enforce something that has never existed.


no, what happens is that the laws get put out there right after the
exploitation pendulum swings so far that public outrage against
corporate excesses rise to the point that politicians do what needs to
be done to limit the exploitation (like what's going on now).

You think the broad public is pissed at the broad spectrum of corporate
management? LOL. They're pissed at a dozen CEOs from Wall Street.


since you apparently didn't read the very next part of my reply which
addresses that very issue i'll repeat (quoted from my previous reply 3
lines down):

"and it's not necessarily an all-encompassing thing either, the "pendulum
cycle" occurs in different industries at different times."


then over the
subsequent years/decades, the corporations begin to get the laws
changed to benefit themselves and the whole cycle starts over. and
it's not necessarily an all-encompassing thing either, the "pendulum
cycle" occurs in different industries at different times.


Further, i have serious doubts about the ability of government to
prevent massive accumulations of wealth in a global economy. In fact,
I don't believe it is possible.


"massive accumulation" is a relative thing. with regard to the
pendulum cycle describe above, "massive accumulation" is maximized
right before public outrage reaches sufficient level to drive the
pendulum back the other way (and much smaller right after).

Never seen it change due to government action. Seen it change as the
maturity of the economy developed, but not due to government actions.


you probably never heard of the "trust busters" & the "corporate robber
barons" either.






i don't know about your statement: "they tend not to last that
long". that may be true and if so it's probably because because
they either give the money to charity or to heirs (that never have
the business mind of the parent) who just lose/blow it.
No. THEY don't last that long. CEO's are not usually CEOs for long
periods of time. Founders may be, but for most CEOs who are hired or
rise through the ranks, they reach that position sometime in their
50's, and so even if they avoid trouble and don't get fired, they
maybe get a decade in the position before they retire.

never said they did and the group i'm talking about is not limited to
ceo's. i'm talking about $billionaire corporate robber barons in
whatever form they exist to extract wealth from corporations. you've
not not offered any other source of the great wealth obtained by the
"world's richest billionaires" so apparently we agree that
corporations are the source of the wealth, just disagree as to how
well unregulated capitalism works at distributing the wealth.
Not even that. Unregulated capitalism will always wind up with a
massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. That's not
controversial. That's pure Adam Smith.


yes, but there's no need for it to be so "massive" that it eliminates
the middle class.

That's what Smith warned of, however.


to sum up our differences on this point if i may (another of my mini-
recaps):

you are satisfied that unregulated capitalism will fairly distribute
wealth, my position is that unregulated capitalism will create a
completely bipolar living standard where all the wealth is in the
hands of a few corporate robber barons and all the workers are in
poverty (and i know i'm repeating but it's the most important point
i've been trying to make)
Nope. I said multiple iterations ago that unregulated capitalism is
the best way to create massive amounts of wealth. That's good, becuase
it gives government the largest pool of money possible form which to
fund redistributive policies. Regulated capitalism results in pools of
wealth which are less massive, and thus the redistributive policies
must be more modest.


99% of the population doesn't care if the pool is larger if their share
of it is smaller in absolute terms.

99% of the population doesn't care that a billionaire is a billionaire,
either,


no, they care about the money being sucked out of their wallet by the
billionaire corporate robber baron black-holes in the form of lower pay &
higher prices. you claim they can suck an infinite amount of $ out of
the system with no adverse effect on the rest of us but you've provided
no evidence to support that and everything i've ever learned or read
about economics says the exact opposite. but i've got an open mind so
enlighten me, exactly how can the $billionaire corporate robber barons
suck an infinite amount of $billions out of the economy and not drive
down the wages of workers and raise prices for consumers in the process?
and if you're going to say increasing the money supply is the answer,
please explain how that won't adversely affect the working class by
wiping out the value of their savings (well, if they had any savings
which right now apparently few do, but that's beside the point)


although you insist above that the disturbance over it is so
acute that the government moves to lower the wealth gap (although you
give no examples how).


only need one: enforcement of antitrust law

the example was msft, convicted of violating antitrust for which they got
a slap on the wrist, a nod & a wink and back to business as usual, same
old non-level playing field, market distorting, $billionaire black hole
money sucking leech that it is.


in other words, the working class
doesn't care whether the billionaires have more or less $billions, they
only care about their own piece of the pie. and while we agree that
unregulated corporations will generate more profits, it's my position
that the additional profits come from further exploitation (because
we're talking about the additional profits obtained from removing the
so-called "profit limiting" regulations that were put there to prevent
exploitation in the first place)

....and which I don't agree exist.....


you've said a number of times that all regulation reduces profits. now
you're saying that regulations don't reduce profits? which is it? once
again i can't pin down your stand as you seem to be on both sides of the
issue. (and if you're going to nitpick my use of the word "limiting" let
me say that in that context it can also mean "reduce" which is the way i
meant it (and i've already made it abundantly clear that i'm against
putting limits on income or wealth))



hence i fail to see the logic that shows how a bigger
pie translates into more $ for any but the wealthiest.

...because we disagree one the above underpinning of your argument.


in the case of charity, people are
quick to give praise, but why should one person be in charge of
distributing to charity the wealth that was created by hundreds of
thousands of workers?
Because it's theirs.

only because they were able to exploit an unregulated capitalistic
economy. my point is that with proper regulation the distortion of
concentrated wealth into the hands of an individual would never have
occurred in the first place.
And that helps the worker guy.....how? It doesn't help the worker a
bit if the rich guy is less rich. He didn't get the money. It was
never earned by the company in the first place, because of the regs.


there you go again, from one extreme to the other. my answer to this
(that i've said several times already) is that all the products &
services will get produced just the same

Disagree. There will always be differences.


please identify what products/services would not be available to us that
can only be provided by billionaire corporate robber barons and why it
wouldn't be possible for anyone to produce such products/services without
their obtaining $billions for producing them.



and with just as many jobs
because for every black-hole billionaire running a company there are
others capable of accomplishing the same for a lot less.

But, even if so, won't.


yeah right, the PC never would have happened had not some corporate
robber baron sucked tens of $billions out of the economy. for those that
don't get sarcasm, newsflash: the PC would have happened regardless of
whether or not any one individual was able to suck tens of $billions out
of the economy.


Whoever takes the place of the existing guy will
do so with the same intent in mind -- to get rich.


and again you're arguing against a point i'm not making. i have no
issues with "captains of industry" making as much money as they possibly
can. it's enforcement of antitrust law that makes the difference between
my position and yours.



and before you
go accusing me of claiming that i'm equating top execs to workers,
that's not what i'm saying at all. geez, it only takes one other
person with the opportunity (as in not shut out by anti-competitive
tactics)

Which we disagree exist.


so now you're denying that msft shuts out competitors with anti-
competitive tactics? i thought you agreed to that already?

pick a side:

1. msft uses anti-competitive tactics (which contradicts your above
statement)

2. i'm in denial of the whole msft antitrust conviction thingy



to
create sufficient competition in a market to start to squeeze out the
excess,

thus proving that Windows is not a monopoly....


not even close, but you're jumping ahead of the flow of the thread,
response to that coming up...



and while that's an improvement, the ultimate goal is true
competition with lots of competitors which will completely eliminate
those $billionaire black-holes. don't see too many billionaires
running pizza shops now do you?

No, but the founders of the major chains are. Monaghan of Dominos had an
estimated net worth of 950M back in 06.

(although that could change if one of these
chains gets large enough to put all the local shops out of biz, what do
you suppose the odds of that happening are without running afoul of
some antitrust laws? (well what difference would that make as they're
not enforced anyway...))





and as to heirs, from a purely economic standpoint, there's no
justification for them to have it (not saying $billionaires don't
have a right to give it to their kids, they do. what i'm saying is
that the system is flawed that allows $billions to be accumulated
by one person in the first place)
And that's back to where we were above. How would you, in a society
and a system that is needs people to take risks and build companies,
incent them to do so if there exists a formal or informal deterrent
from profiting from it?

not recommending any deterrents, again that's your misinterpretation
of what i'm saying, covered this above already.

So you continue to say.

Well, if they make less, that's a deterrent. :-) Given a choice
between two jobs that in all other things are equivalent, would you
choose the one that pays less?


and why would anyone think they were making less? if the system worked
as i'm describing there never would have been any billionaires in the
first place (and nobody would have thought there should have been any
either), but the top execs would still be making way more than workers
(just not the ludicrous discrepancies in pay that we have now). your
argument is basically saying that for all the goods & services
available we are reliant on people, some of which who will only do it
if they are compensated $billions and i'm saying we can have all the
goods & services with no $billionaires required.

That's not my argument at all. People start businesses because they have
an idea and the temperament, and they generally do so to attain
financial security, however they define it. Some of them overachieve.




I'm trying to get a grip on this. I form a company, hire some
people, it's key to the company's success to maintain a tight
ceiling on compensation so we survive and continue to grow. So,
everyone gets stock and the hope for future reward. We're
successful. We go public. All my employees profit nicely, some
handsomely, some hugely, and I'm suddenly a wealthy man. I continue
to run the company, working hard, succeeding against my competition.
As a public company, I can't give away options like I did before,
because of the financial implications. I hire a lot of people, I'm
successful, the value of the stock goes up, I become a very rich
man, possibly a billionaire, if enough time goes by.

OK. At some point in that process, in your view, I magically
transmuted from a good guy to a bad guy. Why? How? What is the
rational basis for determining the transition?
all
billionaires come from involvement with corporations, either
directly or indirectly (inheritance), there's no other way to get
that kind of money. it comes in the form of salary, stock
options & a host of other avenues (if you want to get fancy we
can talk about how private equity firms extract wealth from
corporations by a process called "strip & flip") but it's all
value extracted from the corporations one way or another:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth

dice the pie however you want, in the end corporate fat cats wind
up with all the $billions and workers get the scraps.
Eh. Cost of a constitutional democracy and free market system. A
few guys get big buckloads of money. Compared to that, even
somebody making 250K a year is "scraps."
The highest paid CEO in 07 (08 numbers aren't in yet) was
Ellison of Oracle. An annoying character who spends
ostentatiously, chases young chickybabes at work (rumor has it
that they have an HR person who follows Larry around all day,
and if he's observed asking some sweet young thing out, they
quickly shift her job around so she's not in a quid pro quo line
of fire) who took in 192M last year. Well, he started the damn
company with nothing, so there's that, at least.
#3 on above list, net worth $27 billion


10th was Simpson of XTO. 72M

20th was Berkley of Berkley (:-)) 54M

25th was Hess of Hess (see the pattern?) 47M

50th was Hassey of Allegheny Technologies. 32M

100th was Farrell of Dominion Resources 17M

(I don't what at what point you think comp is excessive.
Personally, when I see over 10M, it seems highly irrational,
over 5M irrational.)
i don't look at it like that. the wealth these people obtain is
incidental to the real problem which is that without proper gov't
regulation there is not a level playing field and the players
take advantage of that by attaining monopoly (or near monopoly)
status at which point they literally just coin money for
themselves, their cronies (which are the top execs that i was
talking about before when i said that half of them would be
booted to cut costs to survive if the company actually had to
compete) and the stock investors, but mostly for themselves.
Don't see it that way. All these companies are subject to major
competition, particularly from abroad. They are not monopolies in
any sense of the word I am familiar with.
it doesn't take being a monopoly (which is why i add "or near
monopoly" in many cases) to achieve sufficient market power to be
able to strong arm the competition (often in violation of antitrust
which hasn't been enforced in at least as long as bush was in, not
that i've seen anyways) such that market distortions occur and the
playing field becomes unbalanced and $billionaires start to form
(sort of like black holes forming in space -> $billionaires sucking
money out of the economy). as far as global competition goes,
corporations are global so it's not like it's strictly "us" against
"them" and global "near monopolies" are forming up as we speak.
I don't see it. Monopolies are bad because they destroy the pricing
power of competition. I see fierce competition in every business.

i can't seem to pin down your stand on this, which of these is it:

1) you don't accept one of the basic tenets of economics which is
that corporations will evolve into monopolies in the absence of gov't
regulation.
I fully acknowlege this.
or

2) regulations are an essential component of capitalism which prevent
monopolies from forming (which conflicts with your stand that all
regulation should be eliminated)
Perhaps you should stop thinking in terms of anti-monopolistic laws as
being "regulations." They really aren't. Different animal.


tell you what, decide what word you would like to use to refer to both
regulations and laws and we'll use that from now on.

Defined below.



They have to compete and win every
day. It is hardly a simple process of "coining money."
but it is (for the "near monopolies"). microsoft should really be
a division of the u.s. mint as every dollar they make is "coined"
money. they add no value whatsoever, spend years & tens of
$billions to produce a product nobody wants (vista) and if it
wasn't for the microsoft "tax" levied on the vast majority of PCs
sold everywhere in world, the company wouldn't be making a dime.
Good example. The consumer of the PC's has complete and total power
over MSFT. All they have to do is buy one of the many machines that
comes without MSFT. Dell offers systems with Ubuntu, all of the
netbooks come with Linux.

I don't see the problem. I have a Linux netbook sitting in my closet
that I travel with.
oh please, give me a break, msft has had the pc market locked up for
two decades, and don't even think about trying to refute that claim
until it's possible to order any model computer with any
configuration from dell with no operating system installed for at
least $100 less that the same model/config with windows on it.
Sorry, but that's not how monopoly laws work. They work by looking at
market OPTIONS, not market BEHAVIOR (as a primary matter). There are
hundreds of options out there if you don't want Windows, and entire
corporations and even countries have standardized on Linux as their
environment of choice. As long as multiple purchasing options can be
listed, and multiple large organizations have availed themselves of
those options, you don't have a monopoly situation.


look, i'm the linux advocate here and i know exactly how that market is
divided and much as i'd like your claim to be true, it isn't.
corporations mainly use linux on servers and those units are vastly
outnumbered by desktops and the linux market share on desktops is very
small (much to my chagrin).

I am well aware of that.

microsoft has been using the linux excuse
for years to avoid being branded a monopoly, but at this point that's
still all it is, an excuse.



As much as I hate to defend MSFT, you are omitting (or overlooking
intentionally) the concern of the corporation towards the cost of
retraining and lost productivity in the interim. As the interfaces on
Linux improve, we both know that this is FUD, but MSFT isn't holding a
gun to anyone's head on this one. And, the fact that you are aware that
Linux servers are now relatively common proves that the companies know
how to buy non-MSFT, and they know not to be afraid of MSFT.


no, you're overlooking (intentionally?) the microsoft "tax" on the vast
majority of corporate desktops sold. you do understand the difference
between "desktop" and "server", do you not? and do you also understand
that the PC linux server market is very small in terms of the number of
units compared to the desktop market? (not to mention the fact that most
of those linux servers were probably originally purchased with windows
licenses to begin with) in terms of the overall number of corporate PCs
sold (which are mostly desktops) the number of linux servers is very
small in terms of market share, hence msft still levies its monopoly
"tax" on the vast majority. for evidence just look at msft quarterly
revenue, it's all msft "tax".


now back to my original point, the fact of
the matter is almost all corporate desktop computers sold include the
cost of a windows license. you cannot order a PC from any of the major
computer companies and get the cost reduced by $100 by telling them you
don't want to pay for a windows license because you're going to put
linux on it.


Sorry. My company does. From Lenovo. This laptop is still Windows, but
we support our entire corporate application suite on Red Hat, and as our
laptops get refreshed on a four year cycle, we'll be off MSFT. The
company no longer approves purchase orders for Windows or Office, nor
purchases machines with licences for those products resident.


well that's just dandy, and at some point, hopefully in the not too
distant future, some usenetter will appropriately put me in my place for
claiming that the vast majority of the market has not yet escaped the
msft "tax" on desktops/laptops, but that time has not yet arrived. as
i've said before, there's nothing that would make me happier than if it
were true right now, but it's not.


this is "lock in" by microsoft and it's highly anti-competitive
(i mean, come on you have to buy a license for an operating system you
don't even want, how messed up is that?), try to spin it however you
like... oh, and don't give me the bologna about some computer vendor
selling a linux model, dell's got probably 100,000 possible model/
configuration combinations and a subset of a couple of choices (which
constitutes .00002% of the product line) for pre-installed linux (that
cost as much as one with windows to boot) does not qualify as choice.



the oil companies will be coining money again as soon as oil prices
start going back up, right now the only reason they're not coining
money is because of the massive recoil from the huge run up in oil
prices last summer, but when the market finally gets straightened
out oil prices will be going higher and they will be printing money
again. and they won't be using the profits to increase oil
production either (as they haven't been doing for years).
But they provide value. Oil doesn't just jump up out the ground and
say "stick me in the barrel."

only said msft provides no value. oil companies provide value but
they're no longer using the bulk of profits to expand supply, so at
this point they're mostly just exploiting the market imbalances
they've created by taking advantage of an inadequately regulated
economy to line the pockets of the fat cats (the guy at the top & his
cronies most of which are just corporate "pork"). it's almost funny
to see the oil companies getting hammered as of late because the
backlash from the scam run by wall street to manipulate oil prices
(ie. the huge oil price drop) has thrown a serious monkey wrench in
the scam the oil companies have going, but no worries, as i said
before they'll be coining money soon enough when oil prices head back
up...(and the oil robber barons know it or else you'd see those whiny
idiots jumping ship faster than cockroaches run for cover when you
turn the light on)

Boy, you see evil everywhere. :-) Do you even bother with evidence, or
do you just fall back on that old tired "isn't it obvious" candard?


just telling it like it is... what, you didn't like my snipe at the
oil companies? fine, i rescind it (kinda like when the judge says:
"the jury will disregard those remarks!")




Ask the CEO of
Caterpillar if he thinks he has a "monopoly" with Terex and Deere
and Kubota and Mahindra running around the world.
i'm not saying there currently is a monopoly in every major
industry, that was just the logical outcome of the scenario of no
regulation at all.
Obviously, but free marketers acknowledge the need for government to
create a level playing field to insure adequate competition. That's
not in debate.

it is in debate if it is your position is that all regulation should
be eliminated, well since i covered this above i'll wait for response
as to your position before continuing...
Monopoly laws aren't regulations.


well once again let me attempt to pin down where you stand.

pick one:

1) against corporate regulations but for corporate laws

2) against both corporate regulations and corporate laws

3) for both corporate regulations and corporate laws

4) for corporate regulations and against corporate laws

More complicated than that. Government needs to maintain a level playing
field for the participants in the free market. Thus, you need to prevent
monopolistic practices AT LEAST. Depending on situations, you may need
an occasional regulation to accomplish any of the following:

1) Maintain the level playing field, as ambiguous as that concept is. 2)
Insure that corporations carry the risk for all their decisions 3)
Arbitrate matters of standardization where the natural process might
impede GDP.

JG


complicate it however you like, you're playing both sides of the field.
half the time you don't want the gov't involved and the other half you do.








However, MOST regulations do not exist to disrupt monopolies.

ever heard of ANTITRUST regulations?
Regulations tell organizations how to conduct their daily operations.
Antitrust laws set limits on their interactions with their
competitors.

JG



and while it seems there currently is no regulation (because the
gov't stopped enforcing it) there was enforcement before (years
ago) so the market hasn't yet deteriorated into the complete
monopoly scenario. so, yes, there still are some competitive
industries.



with your stand that corporations don't need to be
regulated, taken to it's logical conclusion, there will be a
monopoly in every major industry with all the wealth in the hands
of a few corporate robber barons and all the workers at poverty
level.
If it wasn't for Taft Hartly and such laws, sure. Monopolies are
anathema to free markets, which is why we prevent them from
forming.
well are you against all regulation or not? seems to me that your
above statement contradicts being against all regulation, i mean if
you're against it you can't use it to support a point you're trying
to make.
No free marketer supports monopolies, and acknowledges the role in
the government in preventing them to form.

JG

again the thing with not seeing where you stand with your position,
will wait for response to above...




JG


177 was Valee of Avnet, making 10.2M. So, 177 CEO's behaving
highly irrationally. 301 was Martin of Pitney Bowes. 5.04M, so
that many CEO's behaving irrationally.

It's interesting to see who DOESN'T behave irrationally,
although they could if they chose to. Charles Schwab made 4.66M
in 08, August Busch of Aneuser Bush took 3.93M, Brock of
CocaCola took a relatively paltry 2.99M (makes me want to buy
the stock), Blake of Home Depot 2.41M (after the fiasco of the
previous CEO, who is now running Chrysler), Michael Dell 2M,
Davis of US Bancorp 1.72M (one of the largest regional banks who
is noted for avoiding subprime investing -- the guy performed,
big time), Bezos of Amazon.com 1.28M, Eric Schmidt of Google
480,000, and Warren Buffet of course fixes his own salary at
100K.

JG







.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: David Faber Report : Putting 2 and 2 together
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