Lefties do not believe that wealth is created. They've certainly never done it. Whenever the Community Organizer needed some money, he phoned someone up and they sent it over. He thinks that's how it works.

His imagination truly is that foreshortened.

He really thinks that all the value that could ever exist is already in the world. If Tweedledum is poor, it's because someone else, maybe Tweedledee, is a sneak who stole Tweedledum's share of the pie.

The fact that 'Dum may never have made himself useful to any other human being is not a consideration to people who think this way.

Crid, I was reading a bit last night on mercantilism, a subject that I don't know a lot about. One thing that struck me is that mercantilism appears to be the first economic philosophy that formalized the notion of the worldwide economy as a fixed sized pie. Unlike Marxism, mercantilism was all about how to get the biggest slice for one's own nation, but they seem to have the same concept of the fundamental nature of trade. It seems odd to us now, but it appears that nobody prior to Adam Smith or John Locke ever recognized that labor adds value. Marxism gives lip service to labor, but when you examine what Marxism teaches about wealth creation, it's clear that it doesn't really recognize the value-adding nature of labor.

(Note that by "labor" I'm not necessarily talking about physical labor, although that's part of it. I'm talking about work in general, any effort that goes into the creation of a product or service.)

This leads back to my single biggest critique of Marxism -- it was already an anachronism at the time Das Kapitol was written. Marx spent his entire career addressing conditions that had ceased to exist a century or more before he was born. He puts industrial-era lip gloss on it, but it's clear that he regarded the Industrial Revolution and the entire 19th century as merely an extensions of the Middle Ages. Marxism is a "solution" to a problem that never really existed.

CD and Crid have it right. The labor of everybody creates more pies. It doesn't take someone else's slice of the pie.

The only time you are just divvying up slices of the pie are when your market is limited. The reason for the market to be limited is when you are crafting for a limited subset of users (you only have a few tens/hundreds/etc.) in the market, you have a dying market (buggy whips), or you are limited by some outside force -- such as government.

We are so hosed.

The one blessing is that Obama's anti-business rhetoric is so crude and atavistic that it discredits him, and the Democrats generally. Moderate Liberals are left trying to claim that he's just pandering, but it's apparent that he really believes what he's saying, and he's surrounded himself with people who believe the same. It's like we're being ruled by a bunch of radical community college professors who'd gotten sucked into a lava lamp in 1973 and emerged in 2010.

Indirectly related to Amy's post is this absolutely hilarious one by Iowahawk. Imagine that Barack Obama were playing a Computer Simulation Game about running the United States. Let the fun begin!

Iowahawk is one of my favs!

Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase

I don't know what rules Langone is referring to here. Startups in Silicon Valley use options all the time; there's even a substantial secondary market in them that allows some liquidity before an acquisition or IPO.

Perhaps I'm biased because I follow tech and energy more closely than other industries, but I simply don't see the sort of doom and gloom mentality expressed in this piece in the people who are actually creating new companies; I see enthusiasm and excitement, both from founders and investors. I hear lots of talk about changing the world and making life-changing amounts of money; not much about onerous regulations or Obama's wagging finger. Companies with good ideas are being funded, often at appealing terms, and while the IPO market is still weak, M&A is strong. There are incredible opportunities out there, and it's an exciting time to be an entrepreneur, VC, or startup employee.

This is not to say that I agree with everything that is being done right now. I'm concerned about the financial regulation bill's stricter definition of "qualified investor" and how that may affect seed rounds by small angels, and I'd think that liberalizing the rules around H1B visas would be good for the economy, among other things. But I simply don't see Obama's rhetoric and policies having the chilling effect that is assumed in this piece.

It's my understanding that stock options are mostly going away now. At least for anyone below the highest levels of management in most companies. Even my company, that's been quite generous with them, has switched to RSUs (Restricted Stock Units). Has to do with changes in the last few years about how options are recorded on the books and how tax liabilities are effected.

Christopher, Miguelito...what he seems to be referring to re options is the FASB rule that requires options to be expensed. FASB is not part of the government, although the SEC has delegated it the authority to establish accounting standards for public companies.

I don't think there's much question that the expensing rule has reduced the level of options issuance, at least for public companies. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of this rule: my own view is that financial reporting requirements had already encompassed enough information to give investors a reasonable fix on option-caused dilution and that assigning a specific dollar amount to "options expense" is false precision.

David, thanks for the clarification. But if what Langone is referring to are accounting requirements for publicly-traded companies, then this doesn't support his argument that he couldn't have granted options to early employees, since those requirements don't apply in pre-IPO situations.

I think part of what is scaring business people is not only the new health care bill but the idea of cap and trade and who knows what else Obama wants to slam us with next? All in the name of helping people.

The housing mess - some of the people involved say they were trying to do good, to help people who get a house who couldn't afford it. Nonsense! If you want to give someone a house, use your own money, don't encourage the person to go bankrupt getting a loan that the person can't afford. So basically, they did bad things to people in the name of trying to help them.

If I had to choose between having a house a little earlier and going bankrupt or renting a few extra years, I'd pick renting.

> I simply don't see Obama's rhetoric and
> policies having the chilling effect that
> is assumed in this piece.

It's enough for me that they should tamp the enthusiasm which less-intellectual people feel for thoughtful capitalism. The fact that some majority –perhaps a slender majority– of spirited intellectuals in the Silicon Valley might not be too offended at this hour is irrelevant.

Boyfriend Barry is shitting on the American dream. There'll be Hell to pay.

Boyfriend Barry is shitting on the American dream. There'll be Hell to pay.

For the first time, I am really scared of the future. I thought the Bushmen were terrible, but Barry is a jackass. Never thought I'd agree w/ Rush.

He isn't doing it alone. Price-supported farmers, the coddled technocrats and academics, the artificially sustained Eurobots... It sometimes seems that at its best, Western Civ generates ever-more deathless Frankensteins.

The last person I'd listen to about how great the service is at their business is a Home Depot founder. There is no service at HD at all, as sevicing the customer requires an employee, and those 325k bodies must be wearing cement overcoats as they are certainly not above ground in Home Depot.

> There is no service at HD at all, as sevicing
> the customer requires an employee, and those
> 325k bodies must be wearing cement overcoats
> as they are certainly not above ground in
> Home Depot.

Now, I am not Mr. Saw & Hammer. My girly-man hands grasp nothing heavier than a computer mouse. They're soft as a baby's butt, though not as fragrant...

...But in the MINIMAL comparison shopping I've done for hardware and the like over the years, an important component of Home Depot's attraction has the prices. The terms "Home Depot" and "big-box store" entered my consciousness in the same hour several years ago. It's not enough to call them popular: Their prices are the baseline by which all competitors –including the Mom-&-Pop shops five times their age– are judged. (See also, United and Delta vs. Southwest.)

It's just not fair to compare them to a high-service outlet... It's like complaining about the tablecloths at McDonald's. Yes: A teenager stacks a burger, wraps it in paper and throws it at your head. But you're only paying a dollar! That's what you wanted. It will end your hunger and not make you sick and you don't have to do the dishes.

A few years ago I need a single, small screw for something, I fergit what. The owner of the local store spent about seven minutes helping me out. And then I went to buy it, and it was like seven cents. So I started wandering the aisles... Don't need a new broom, don't need a new clothes iron, got plenty of paint in the basement, don't need a window fan... Eventually the guy figured it out and said "No problem, think of us next time." I did, too.

And try to understand how both standardization and quality have exploded in America over the last few years. HoDep has a STUNNING array of choices... Gazillions of colors and sizes and designs.

And almost all of them are packaged with the do-it-yourselfer in mind. If the instructions for installing these hardware products strike you as arcane, I'd argue that almost all software is similarly confused: Americans aren't very good at devising abstract operational procedures for people they'll never meet.

And this last point is really important: The quality of almost everything in there is tremendously high. You might think of most of it as useless or gauche, but when Americans buy stuff nowadays and use it correctly, it lasts and lasts. Cars, clothes and just about everything in your home has a durability that I wouldn't have dreamt of when I was a little boy, or even a teenager. (Clothes, especially, just don't wear out, even with my clumsy-bachelor standards of care.) This woman's writings often consider this in detail.

I know nothing about the history of that company. But I think of all the people who were involved in building the things sold in that store, and the people who sell them there, and the people who bought them for others or for themselves and then came back the next weekend for more, and I think your reflexive mockery of their enterprise is tragically typical of American thinking today. We expect every kind of elegance for the absolute bottom dollar for no reason but that... Well, for no reason at all.

Friends, there's an economic crisis happening. A lot of people are about to learn exactly what it takes to make a talented person rise from a chair... And a lot of people are about to have their talent carefully measured. Bear that in mind when you speak cynically.

...Imagine that Barack Obama were playing a Computer Simulation Game about running the United States. Let the fun begin!

Posted by: Robert W. (Vancouver) at October 16, 2010 10:02 AM

You creep me out. Are their other boundaries in life that you peer over this way? The operations the Catholic church, maybe? The Russians? The Canadians? Anybuddy?

Self-checkout at Ralphs is one the great innovations in contemporary commerce. The only problem is that when I buy one of those teentsy little bottles of sake, it has to send over a clerk to check my age. But I'm middle-aged and it couldn't be more obvious. If Google can drive cars without drivers, why can't someone sell hooch without clerks?

Too bad you're befuddled by technology Amy, as Ralph's self-checkout is easy, while people are befuddlers. I suspect it's a lot tougher to make humans compute rather than make technological devices do what they should do. That's why you're an advice columnist as you can potentially make someone do what they should do.