Well for the second time this year I have seen just how frivolous our state governments are in handing out money to private businesses.

Last March I was in another state attending the groundbreaking of a new business.  The state governor, the various state politicians, US Senator, and US Reps were there to all claim credit for how they came up with the scratch to help "the small businessman" get a shot at creating jobs.  Being an associate of this "small businessman's" USA representative, I was rather surprised to hear him described this way, as he is one of the wealthiest people in Great Britain, worth several billion dollars.  Nevertheless, the state coughed up $5 million. My guess is they never did their homework at all, to understand who they were throwing tax dollars at.  :-X

This week I was sitting in on a planning session for another project, in yet another state in which the existing Governor is gonna get the boot come January.  Again, all the poo-bah local state government wanks were there.  One of them (who is not in the same political party as the soon-to-be ex Guv) said "You know, Governor Lameduck still has some economic development money available that we might be able to get a piece of, maybe $2 million or so".  The project developer, a fairly well-known and wealthy muckity-muck, then exclaimed in a loud voice:  "Not a word of this project to that a**####! I don't want his F****** money! I'll spend my own money before I'd let that m*****f##### take any credit for this F&&&&&&& project!".  :o  The politicians then agreed to keep the matter quiet (from the Guv) until the new guy comes into office, and then try to score some economic development dollars from the 'right guy'.  ::)

So there we have it  These politicians just observed the developer stating that he has enough money to do the project without state help, and even emphatically turning down a shot at the most quickly available money, out of vanity.  Then they agree to go try and cash in on the State Treasury when the new Guv comes in.  The nature of the deal is such that it is obvious to all that the developer's deal will go through, with or without Government corporate welfare.

After the meeting ended, the developer put his arm around one of the pols and said "You know, after we get this thing going, I want to do a fundraiser for you... really for all you guys.  We can do it as one event or separately if you'd like.  I'm a big supporter, you know."

I was surprised that these guys did not kiss his ring, because he is filthy rich and is never stingy with campaign contribution money.  They were fawning over him and intimidated at the same time.  Made me want to puke.  8-P

Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.  And both parties were in on this.  Remember this the next time some politician is crying out for "economic development dollars"...  8-P

Oh c'mon, LB!  You're a man of the world.  You know what goes on. You know who plays the fiddle and who dances the dance.  You can't tell me you're honestly OUTRAGED.

"I am shocked...SHOCKED...to see gambling in this establishment!

;D

Oh c'mon, LB!  You're a man of the world.  You know what goes on. You know who plays the fiddle and who dances the dance.  You can't tell me you're honestly OUTRAGED.

"I am shocked...SHOCKED...to see gambling in this establishment!

;D


Oh I am always outraged when somebody wastes my hard earned money. 

Oh I am always outraged when somebody wastes my hard earned money. 


That's like getting outraged whenever somebody takes the name of the Lord in vain (the name of the Lord and hard-earned grace being more precious than money, of course).  Somebody's always going to do it...so you can always feel outraged if you so choose!  Of course, you could become a lobbyist -- a great waster of other people's money!
;D

"It took every scrap of her energy to keep trains running through the sections where they were still needed, in the areas that were still producing. But on the balance sheets of Taggart Transcontinental, the checks of Jim's subsidies for empty trains bore larger figures than the profit brought by the best freight train of the busiest industrial division.
(...)
Listed as profit, on the glossy pages of his report to the stockholders, was the money hey had not earned - the subdidies for empty trains; and the money he did not own - the sums that should have gone to pay the interest and the retirement of Taggart bonds, the debt which, by the will of Wesley Mouch, he had been permitted not to pay."

Nobody professed to understand the question of the frozen railroad bonds; perhaps, because everybody understood it too well. At first, there had been signs of a panic among the bondholders and of a dangerous indignation among the public. Then, Wesley Mouch had issued another directive, which ruled that people could get their bonds "defrozen" upon a plea of "essential need": the government would purchase the bonds, if it found the proof of the need satisfactory.  There were three questions that no one answered or asked: "What constituted proof?" "What constituted need?" "essential - to whom?"  Then it became bad manners to discuss why one man received the grant defreezing his money, while another had been refused.
( ... )
One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused, sold their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who posessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty-three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar; or about a new profession practiced by bright young boys just out of college, who called themselves "defreezers", and offered their services "to help you draft your application in the proper modern terms."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

The text is from Atlas Shrugged.  

The little cartoon explains the quantitative easing (this is our second round of it), is from yesterday, and contains a couple of the naughty words.

The Rand may have needed an editor, but I'm willing to overlook it because she had the time machine.

...And more and more it seemed to the boy who didn't like Ayn Rand because he didn't like her followers* that her followers** were the very people Ayn Rand warned would cause the downfall of capitalism.  Certainly, whether Ayn Rand had set pen to paper or not, capitalism made fascism by the collusion of the international industrial/financial bourgeoisie would destroy itself sooner than anyone expected.

*present company excepted.
**such as Alan Greenspan.

Ex Red Sox Player and Republican anti-tax, anti-big goverment shill, Curt Schilling, is moving his video game business out of Massachusetts to Rhode Island because he believes Massachusetts isn't friendly enough for business.  Where as Massachusetts would not guarantee him a 75 million dollar bond guarantee, Rhode Island was open to the proposition.  If the company goes under the state(i.e. tax payers) is responsible to the bond holders. He has a great friend in Republican soon to be ex-Governor Carcieri and stumped for him during the election.  This is how these guys roll.

"In return, 38 Studios has promised to employ 450 people in Rhode Island by late 2013 and pay back the loan over a 10-year period. If the company doesn't have the cash to cover its payments, the governor is required to ask for taxpayer money to make investors whole".


http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/edc-closes-on-75m-curt-schilling-loan

Ex Red Sox Player and Republican anti-tax, anti-big goverment shill, Curt Schilling, is moving his video game business out of Massachusetts to Rhode Island because he believes Massachusetts isn't friendly enough for business.  Where as Massachusetts would not guarantee him a 75 million dollar bond guarantee, Rhode Island was open to the proposition.  If the company goes under the state(i.e. tax payers) is responsible to the bond holders. He has a great friend in Republican soon to be ex-Governor Carcieri and stumped for him during the election.  This is how these guys roll.

"In return, 38 Studios has promised to employ 450 people in Rhode Island by late 2013 and pay back the loan over a 10-year period. If the company doesn't have the cash to cover its payments, the governor is required to ask for taxpayer money to make investors whole".


http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/edc-closes-on-75m-curt-schilling-loan




Yep... politicians from both major parties play this game.  8-P

Yep... politicians from both major parties play this game.   8-P


Free market for you, political cronyism for me!
:)

...And more and more it seemed to the boy who didn't like Ayn Rand because he didn't like her followers* that her followers** were the very people Ayn Rand warned would cause the downfall of capitalism.  Certainly, whether Ayn Rand had set pen to paper or not, capitalism made fascism by the collusion of the international industrial/financial bourgeoisie would destroy itself sooner than anyone expected.


You're getting it, even without having read the book.  (Pirate yourself a copy already! :)

In the same manner as most "Christians" are acting in a manner that would likely make the historical Christ vomit, most people who call themselves "capitalists" are happy to gorge themselves at the government trough.  (I'm guilty of investing in the stocks of such companies myself.)  

Rand had her problems with "moochers", (voluntary charity to causes you deem worthy is a great idea, but mandated "donation" coerced at gunpoint are immoral), but she saved her strongest vitriol for the "looters".  (a guy who invents a mousetrap and convinces people to voluntarily purchase his product is earning his money, but the guy who convinces a government to force people to buy his mousetrap is a looter.  Got a great way to make airline travel safer?  Sell it to the airlines.   Got a dick-measuring machine that costs gazillions, and just happen to have the former HomeSec secretary on your board of directors?  You're a fracking looter, Rape-a-scan, and even if it means all of us have to get photographed naked or physically molested every time we fly, hey, I'm opting for the pat-down, because at least I'm not supporting Chertoff's looting, and I get to "empathize" with the TSA guy that I only have to get groped once, rather than having to handle people's balls all day for $10/hr.)


*present company excepted.


Not entirely.  Like I said, I've made profit from looting.  Ain't proud of it, but I've done it, and I'll do it again if the opportunity presents itself.  Every time I buy stock in a company that takes a government contract, I'm part of the problem.

(She actually hated libertarians a lot more than she hated most of her detractors.  Personally, I'd love to have a time machine just so she and I would have a knock-down drag-out fight on intellectual property.  The more violent the disagreement, the more likely it'd end with me getting laid in truly freaktactular fashion, so I'd have that going for me too... She was weird like that.)


**such as Alan Greenspan.


I still stand by the thesis that Alan Greenspan styled himself as the real-world version of the fictional Francisco D'Anconia.  The guy who wrote this in 1966 went on to run the Federal Reserve.  And he grinned and walked away with a smile shortly before the - "check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs" - bounced, marked account overdrawn.  

^  In a Socratic manner -- Where does libertarianism end and Objectivism begin?  Is Objectivism atheistic or is it devotion to the physical world? 

Taking the name of the Lord in vain!

Maybe you heard your Aunt Gertrude shout at you when you shouted "Goddammit!"

To me, taking the name of the Lord in vain is deeper than what your Aunt Gertrude thought.  It means to use the name of God for ungodly ends.  Religions inevitably take the name of the Lord in vain when they mix their usual cocktail: 1 part politics + 1 part church = Self-justified looting. 

The Pastor - Politician - Businessman - Believer circle jerk didn't go completely commando until the 1970s with Jerry Fartwell and the so-called Moral Majority. That's why our favorite '80s Industrial bands used televangelists in their sampling.  The hypocrisy was pornographic. 

I say so as a Christian myself.  Catholic or Protestant, seek the hypocrisy in your church and you shall find it.  My parents saw the hypocrisy as a signal to renounce tangible faith.  So did I --  until just a few years ago. 

I'm still a big fan of Bill Maher.  I just don't agree with him on spiritual issues.  Man fights wars over religion.  In the absence of religion, man still wages war.  The Maoist Chinese and the Soviet Russians worshiped Lenin and Mao instead of God or Buddha (inasmuch as a Buddhist "worships" the Buddha).  Human beings need to believe in a higher power than themselves.  It's in our nature as humans.  Why I chose Christianity has to do with ancestral and cultural heritage, as well as heartfelt belief in Christ.  I'm not in the evangelizing business.  The evangelists delayed my will to believe, which we must find or not for ourselves regardless of our upbringing. 

More money than God, as they say.

One problem.  God does not have money.  Money is man's filthy device.  Don't get me wrong.  The Catholic church loves its money too!
::)

We need a means of exchange.  Barter of goods and services in kind was the original exchange.  We still have some hunter-gatherer cultures who cooperate as such.  A precious metal such as gold works as a symbolic value in more complex economies.  Paper money representing gold is a tertiary value.  But now our greenbacks are not backed by gold, just the idea of gold.  The charade does not work anymore. 

Who are Rand's vaunted "producers"?  Philosophical question.  I could make a case that Bill Gates is not really a producer even though I am sending this message on a PC using Windows.  Plastics, metals, glass, rubber, silicon, and various minerals enable the technology, but technology enables us to consume more of what others produce...

I'll stop there before I start tying myself in logical knots!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/12/hiding.gif

I don't know who Rand's producers are, but mine is the working class, the proletariat, those who add value to things through their labor

I don't know who Rand's producers are, but mine is the working class, the proletariat, those who add value to things through their labor


I was alluding to exactly that.  The workers control the means of production.  Management devises schemes to seize control from the workers.

Less than 7% of the private sector workforce is unionized in the U.S. and yet Glenn Beck would have you believe labor unions are the devil incarnate.  There is an awesome volume of rage in this country and it is the result of what Wall Street parasites did to the working classes.  Glenn Beck's paymasters know it is vital for their own safety that the proletariat maintain a circular firing squad amongst themselves.  The post-industrial bourgeoisie has every reason to be terrified of the American working class.  We are dispossessed and enraged.  Many of us also own firearms, though I do not. 

One of the devices management used was to trick workers into thinking of themselves as "capitalists" if they had a little money to invest in the stock market.  The workers entrusted their pensions to Wall Street crooks who promptly stole it all.  Now they want your social security. 

Sorry, Gordon Gekko.  Greed is not good.  Greed does not work.  Greed is not right.

^  In a Socratic manner -- Where does libertarianism end and Objectivism begin?  Is Objectivism atheistic or is it devotion to the physical world? 


Yes and yes.  Per Rand herself, she was vehemently atheistic.  Made Dawkins look like a moderate.

When Buckley published Whittaker Chambers' review of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, he was actually being pretty kind.  Objectivists don't have much of a sense of humor, and that was pretty much where they split from the conservatives.  The feud between the National Review and the Randroids has continued to to this day.  (For the sake of balance, here's a Randroid's take on the Rand/Buckley feud.)


The Pastor - Politician - Businessman - Believer circle jerk didn't go completely commando until the 1970s with Jerry Fartwell and the so-called Moral Majority. That's why our favorite '80s Industrial bands used televangelists in their sampling.  The hypocrisy was pornographic. 


Bingo.  And while we're at it - it bemuses me to no end to see religious fundamentalists claiming Rand's mantle. 


I don't know who Rand's producers are, but mine is the working class, the proletariat, those who add value to things through their labor



Who are Rand's vaunted "producers"?  Philosophical question.  I could make a case that Bill Gates is not really a producer even though I am sending this message on a PC using Windows.  Plastics, metals, glass, rubber, silicon, and various minerals enable the technology, but technology enables us to consume more of what others produce...


No, you're both hitting on the central issue.

Rearden was viewed as a producer because he invented a better form of steel than his competitors.  But central to the story was the fact that Rearden paid his nonunion workers better than the unionized plants.  Everyone that worked in his mills worked for him, not a middleman.  And they worked freely; no contracts, you walk in, you do your job, you get paid.  Don't like it?  Stop working for him.

I'm biased on account of I'm in the software industry.  I really do own the means of production.  My employer's production machinery walks out the door every day.  Smart people figure out how to arrange transistors to make computers and RAM.  Smart people figure out how to make transistors even smaller, so you can put more of them on the same die.  Smart people figure out the magical spells that make the transistors dance.  Smart people figure out higher-order magical spells that - when cast upon dancing transistors - make transistors do higher-level dances.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/abstraction.png

After at least 20 (let's see... bare silicon, photolithography, VHDL, VLSI, packaging, routing, PCB fabrication, microcode, BIOS, bootloaders, ring 0, the kernel, the OS, the presentation layer, a network stack, an IDE, a compiler, a linker, huge libraries of objects, GUI frameworks/toolkits, business analysts, UI designers, application programmers, and optionally a layer of marketroids and salesweasels on top of that) layers of abstraction, I can shoot zombies on a cell phone that's as powerful as a supercomputer was 20 years ago.

I mean no disrespect to the armies of linemen who lay the fiber and built the communications towers (nor to the armies of process engineers who turn sand into computer chips), but things are a small part of the equation when it comes to value-add.

Rand would argue for a MAFIAA-style intellectual property foundation - if you want to use Rearden's metal, you pay him royalties for the right to make his steel.  If you want to use my code, you gotta pay for it.  If you wanna laugh at my funny posts, you gotta pay me for the privelege of reading 'em. 

I disagree hugely on that.   I believe the current copyright system (and for that matter, software patent system) is a huge hindrance to innovation.  But I'm willing to compromise on patents and copyrights, say, by reducing copyright from "75 years after the death of the author" to the same 14-year limit offered in the patent system.  Computer algorithms are nothing more than mathematical expressions.  You can no more patent the idea of "program a computer to sell an item to a user with a single mouse click" than you can patent 1+1=2.  And if Walt Disney didn't make his money back on 1928's Steamboat Willie by 1942, he should damn well let someone else try.  (If he wants to make money off Mickey Mouse, his company's free to make more Mickey Mouse cartoons, but he should at least Free Willie :)

And isn't it silly that Steamboat Willie is still under copyright, whereas if someone developed a cure for cancer tomorrow, it would go off-patent and become free to every generic drugmaker within 14 years? 

I'm not completely opposed to intellectual property law.  The justification for it is written into the US Constitution itself:

"The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

But from where I sit, the comparatively short patent expiration times (I'd like to shorten that period too, but 14 beats the hell out of 75+life-of-creator, so let's call it a starting point) on patents are a pretty good incentive for chemists to figure out the fastest, cheapest, and safest way of mass-producing the medicines that matter the most.  I utterly fail to see how copyright for 75-years-after-death-of-the-creator has incentivized Walt Disney's corpse to do any new animation.  (Or, for that matter, Rand's.  Her estate is still banking coin off the sales of her books, but it's failed to incentivize her corpse to write anything new.)

Rand's stance on intellectual property was an artifact of its time.  Much like Marx's labor theory of value, both presumed that things were the source of value, rather than (as Norbert Weiner and Jon von Neumann accurately guessed in the early postwar era) bits.