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Zulu Elephant
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Nice to see the threads doing ok. This is probably my most popular one of all time
*quick celebration*
Economic: -4.25
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -5.90
Hmm, not sure Im THAT economically left wing. The test makes me out to be a socialist on the level of Tony Benn, which I definitly not.
Boddington - Yeah, Im still in contact with Chris.
At the risk of seeming more authoritarian that the test tells me I am, I'd like to try to direct the thread byasking those of you who have stated that they are right wing "because the right is the better supporter of individualism" why you hold individualism in such high regard and what you class as individualism.
That is not to say I am advocating wholesale destruction of individualism for the purpose of the collective good.
Do you consider higher taxes (within reason) as an assault on individualism.
Do you consider property rights as absolute? (which I may start a new thread on - I think this is the main difference between the US and Europe - but thats for another time)
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:21
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quote:
Originally posted by red_jon
But firmly established mulitnational corporations are going to destroy smaller businesses every time. How can new companies be created in areas where there are corporations already in place?
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I don't agree. Check out this column a friend of mine sent me today for a more articulate and better researched take than I could come up with on the spot:
Globalization, argues New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, is "making it possible for . . . corporations to reach farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper around the world" and is fostering "a flowering of both wealth and technological innovation the likes of which the world has
never before seen." To David Korten, a former Ford Foundation official and now a prominent globalization critic, it is "market tyranny . . . extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money." The careful listener to this by-now-familiar debate can actually discern a striking point of
agreement: Both sides assume, one with euphoria and the other with fear, that global-scale business is the wave of the future. Yet there's mounting evidence that multinational firms may be less capable of delivering competitive products than national or local firms.
AT&T stunned financial analysts in October 2000 when it announced that it was carving itself up into four, more versatile, companies. In May 2001, British Telecom unveiled a plan to spin off its wholesale arm, part of its wireless business, and numerous assets in Asia. Other
self-initiated split-ups and slim-downs seem likely to follow. These developments are important reminders of a point all but forgotten in the globalization debate: Scale matters.
Any first-year economics student learns that firms can lower average costs by expanding, but only up to a point. Beyond that point (according to the law of diminishing returns to scale), complexities, breakdowns,
and inefficiencies begin to drive average costs back up. The collapse of massive state-owned enterprises in the old Soviet Union and the bankruptcies of Chrysler and New York City are notable reminders of a lesson we should have absorbed from the dinosaur: Bigger is not always better.
A telling example in economic life is commercial banking. Despite all the headlines about mergers, researchers at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis have concluded that "after banks reach a fairly modest size [about $100 million in assets], there is no cost advantage to further
expansion. Some evidence even suggests diseconomies of scale for very large banks." The Financial Markets Center, a financial research and education organization, has found that, compared to banks with far-flung portfolios, those that concentrate lending in a geographic region were typically twice as profitable and wind up with fewer bad loans. While the press has diligently reported national and global mergers, it has
largely ignored the recent proliferation of community banks, credit unions, and microloan funds.
Banking, it turns out, is not the only exception to the rules of globalization. Five factors are playng a significant role in shrinking the economies of scale for a wide range of industries.
1. First, it turns out that global-scale industry is surprisingly inefficient at distribution. In 1910, for every dollar Americans spent for food, 50 cents went to farmers and 50 cents to marketers and providers of inputs like seeds, energy, and fertilizer; now 9 cents goes to farmers, 24 cents to input providers, and 67 cents to marketers. The marketers' 67 cents are largely unrelated to the end product that consumers really want. They're wasted on packaging, refrigeration,
spoilage, advertising, trucking, supermarket fees, and middlemen.
When farmers can link more directly with nearby consumers, they can cut out these inefficiencies. This explains the spread of community-supported agriculture (CSA), pioneered initially in Japan and then Switzerland, now growing by leaps and bounds across North America. It works like this: A farmer is supported by 60 or 70 households, each of which pays a fee to receive a weekly supply of vegetables. More than 600 community-supported agricultural or horticultural operations now
operate in 42 states, with 100,000 members.
2. A second factor exacerbating the inefficiency of global-scale distribution is the rising cost of shipping. In the past two years the per-barrel price of oil has quadrupled. And with expected increases in global population and per capita consumption, the U.S. Energy
Information Administration projects that demand for oil worldwide will grow by 20 million barrels a day, a third more than current consumption levels. Improving technologies for petroleum recovery may ease upward
pressures on oil prices a bit. But political pressures, including attempts to levy "green taxes" and political instability in oil regions like the Middle East and Central Asia could drive up prices. Until other fuels are substituted for oil, global shipping probably will become more expensive.
3. A third challenge facing global businesses is the
difficulty of managing information. Conservative economist Friedrich Hayek once argued convincingly against state socialism by noting that knowledge is too complex, too subjective, and too dependent on particular circumstances of time and place for even the best-intentioned national-scale bureaucracies to grasp it. The exact same problem afflicts multinational corporations.
In principle, a global producer can wield its resources to produce different products for different local tastes. But in practice, a local producer is better situated to intuit, design, manufacture flexibly, and deliver just-in-time products. Consumers can better communicate their
needs to local producers, either directly or through local retailers. General Foods probably will never be able to convince New Yorkers to replace their locally baked bagels with Minnesota-made generics. Microbrewers have flourished throughout the United States and the United Kingdom because each of them caters to highly specialized tastes. The desires of Bay Area food shoppers wanting more varieties of locally grown fruits and vegetables, have expanded the region's agricultural economy by 61 percent over the past decade, which translates into $915 million of additional agricultural income in the local economy each year.
4. A fourth trend is the transformation of the U.S. economy from manufacturing goods to providing services. The main reason for this shift, according to MIT's Paul Krugman and Harvard's Robert Lawrence, is
that technological advances have brought down the prices of many manufactured goods. As Americans spend less to acquire the same refrigerators and toasters, they spend more on services. These changes,
Krugman argues in Pop Internationalism (MIT Press, 1997), are moving the U.S. economy inexorably toward what he calls localization: "A steadily rising share of the workforce produces services that are sold only within that same metropolitan area." For most services--whether it is health care, teaching, legal representation, accounting, or massage--consumers demand a personal, trusting relationship.
5. A fifth difficulty facing large-scale business is the information revolution. Global corporations are still amassing huge networks of factories, technology centers, and experts at a time when profitability
is increasingly uncoupled from size. Small companies can now fit what used to be busy departments overseeing accounting, management, taxes, communications, and publications neatly onto a desktop computer. The
Internet has given even home-based businesses the ability to compete against established, large-scale players in practically everything, including books and CDs, stocks and bonds, airline travel, and hotel rooms.
Even for industries like automobiles, where large economies of scale still make sense, the communications revolution is making it possible
for small firms to achieve the same advantages through collaborations and partnerships. In northern Italy, locally owned firms involved in flexible manufacturing networks have become world-class exporters of
high-tech products like robotic arms. A network typically forms temporarily to create a specific project for a well-defined niche market. Once the project is complete, the network disbands. Following successful models in Europe, more than 50 flexible manufacturing networks have been set up in the United States.
These five trends do not mean that all goods and services can be produced cost-effectively in every community. (The economics of any company or industry depend on how the new diseconomies of large scale
balance against the old economies of scale.) At a minimum, however, they suggest that much of the hype from globalization's fans--and its enemies too--is overblown. If smaller businesses wind up being the most efficient producers and suppliers of many goods and services to nearby markets, then neither the utopian nor the nightmare scenarios of globalization
will come to pass. Indeed, global trade may simply become a relatively minor part of most economies, as it is for ours right now (exports are responsible for less than 10 percent of our national income)--provided,
of course, that politicians resist the temptation to bail out global businesses doomed by inappropriate scale.
The next wave of economic development--local, national, and global--may turn not on the rise or fall of any grand concepts like globalization, but on the slow, steady creation of appropriately scaled businesses. As
the poet Wendell Berry once remarked, "The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling. . . . Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous."
-- Michael Shuman
Michael H. Shuman, an attorney and economist, is co-director of the Institute for Economics and Entrepreneurship for the Village Foundation,
a Washington, D.C.
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Asher
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Calgary, Alberta
Nov 1999
time: 22:21
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quote:
Originally posted by MrFun
Corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily enact regulations that would protect the environment. |
Unless, of course, it was an environmental corporation. 
quote:
Corporations will exploit workers beyond reason without government legislation and regulations. (but what about government officials who pig out on corporate fundings/bribes??) |
Not all corporations will. Actually, many large corporations give employees very ample pay and profit sharing.
quote:
There are many more corporations that take away from society, than there are that contribute some of their wealth back to society. Did I say that there are NO charitable corporations?? No, I did not say that. |
There are also more people who take away from society than contribute to it.
The problem with all of this anti-corporation rhetoric, is someone could replace "corporation" with "people" and it'd be the same argument. Not all corporations are corrupt, not all people are murderers. Not all corporations are greedy bastards, not all people are greedy bastards.
Corporations are simply groups of people who make a product/service and get money for it, they're not inherently evil or anti-environmental. And I wish the lefties would stop mistaking that. 
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Adam Smith
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Maryland, USA
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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Economics of Charity
Charity is a classic example economists call a "market failure", in this case known as a "public good". If you and I both want to do something for the poor, and I am willing to give money, then there is less reason for you to do so. Given this tendency to shirk, privately run charities will never provide the appropriate amount of help for the poor. The economy will be better off if government provides this service and compels all taxpayers to pay.
On a separate topic, if you wonder why many right-wingers distrust government, this recent editorial from the Washington Post provides an example.
Who Repays Ms. Orshansky?
Saturday, August 17, 2002; Page A16
THE SCALES of justice tipped in the direction of Mollie Orshansky this week when the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that a Superior Court judge had abused her power by ignoring Ms. Orshansky's wishes and putting her under the care of court-appointed lawyers. But justice has come at a steep price, and it is the innocent Mollie Orshansky who is being made to pay.
Ms. Orshansky, an elderly woman now suffering from dementia, had made it plain before her illness that when she became too old or sick to care for herself, she wanted to live under the care of her New York relatives in a Manhattan condominium she had bought for that purpose. The evidence of that was there to see: a trust she created in the 1990s giving her sister authority to write checks and pay bills for her retirement, and reports from neighbors and relatives indicating she wanted to move to her New York condo a few floors from her sister when the time came. When Ms. Orshansky was found incoherent on the floor of her D.C. apartment, however, the city's Adult Protective Services had her placed in a D.C. hospital. Enter Judge Kaye Christian, whose contribution to the mess in the life of Mollie Orshansky became the focus of the appeals court ruling.
Learning that her aunt, Ms. Orshansky, was hospitalized, Jane Pollack took her out of the hospital to have her live in New York with full-time help. Ms. Orshansky could afford it with her $2 million estate. Judge Christian, however, would have none of it.
The judge called an emergency hearing and appointed a lawyer to bring Ms. Orshansky back to the District and to oversee her care and money. Over the past eight months, $44,000 of Ms. Orshansky's estate has been eaten up by lawyers' fees, and the lawyers could have claimed even more. Just about everything connected with the judge's rulings was wrong, said the appeals court. Besides the judge's ignoring or rejecting pieces of evidence, there was the fact that the court-appointed lawyer never met or spoke with Ms. Orshansky -- though the law requires that -- yet the lawyer waived her client's presence at a hearing, stipulated to her client's incapacity and presented no evidence of her client's wish to go to New York. Another court-appointed lawyer made snap decisions about what was best for Ms. Orshansky without evidence. The case was so badly handled by Judge Christian and the lawyers that the higher court overturned all of the judge's orders and rulings.
That represents justice for Mollie Orshansky. But only up to a point. Her estate is out $44,000 to lawyers who failed to represent her interests. Her family is out more than $60,000, spent on lawyers to defend Ms. Orshansky's wishes. And Mollie Orshansky, a retired economist famous for creating the federal poverty line more than 40 years ago, is, through no fault of her own, all the poorer. Where's the justice in that?
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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27-08-2002 06:27
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