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NYT: IBM PC Division Sold To Advance China's Goals
theodp writes "Back in 2005, Wharton's Michael Useem speculated that IBM's sale of its PC Division to Lenovo was more about ingratiating Big Blue with the Chinese government than getting top dollar for the assets. 'Government relationships are key in China,' Useem explained. Now, a NY Times article on outgoing IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano seems to confirm that Useem's analysis was spot-on. From the NYT article: 'In 2004, I.B.M. sold its PC business to Lenovo of China. Mr. Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.'"
There's a book by Roger L. Martin called Fixing The Game which argues that the problem with large businesses today is that they are focused on the expectation market--maximizing shareholder value--as opposed to the real market--making good products and increasing customer satisfaction. For example, Enron was so focused on shareholder value that they manipulated revenues to increase stock price, while Apple was so focused on products that Steve Jobs was infamously dismissive the importance of his company's shareholders and joked that the one thing that kept him up at night was shareholder meetings.
Fiscal policy is one way to direct growth in the economy. Infrastructure projects, especially, provide the most bang for the buck in terms of value for money. The only problem is that infrastructure tend to require maintenance which means future funding is in essence commited. Social programs are also useful to ensure what is most fairly termed as equality of opportunity, to help alieviate the inherent unfairness of wealth distribution. It is not fair, as a matter of fact, to deny opportunity of advancement due to ones situation at birth. This is why we spend money on things like education so that we have a more inclusive society where advancement is based on merit, and not solely on whether you have the means to pay for advancement.
Monetary policy is another way to direct growth although it tends to result in bubbles when the interest rates are very low levels to spur investments mainly fueled by debt. When money is essentially cheap, banks and investers tend to do stupid things with all this surplus cash flowing around - like making mortgages to people who they know can't afford it (and then selling the mortgages off at a profit to relieve themselves of any risk), or private equity making leveraged buyouts incurring a large debt on the target company which brings on unsustainable interest payments when the money markets dry up.
Back to fiscal policy, the problem with the US is not that it is spending too much (compared to other advanced economies). It is mosty because public spending in the US is notoriously poor value. For example, the US spends ~8% of GDP on just Medicare and Medicaid, covering only a small proportion of the population. In total the US spends nearly 16% of GDP on heathcare. The UK for example, spends only 8% on its healthcare system that covers everybody, at all ages.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Ah, this old piece of copypasta. I've seen this one before. It's been circulating on conservative blogs for years, and sometimes even making its way to a news site. There is a small problem though: It's utterly false. Nothing but a piece of self-serving propaganda written to tell a target audience exactly what they want to hear: Communism makes people so lazy they'll starve, while a free market fixes all. The story actually originated in a publication called 'The Free Market' in 1985.
For one thing, it fails the common-sense test. In a colony on the edge of starvation, so you really think people are going to just laze around and not bother raising crops just because someone else might get to share them too? People are not that stupid, and most of them dislike starving to death. Like all really good pieces of propaganda, it is half true. The Plymouth colony was indeed founded on an initial seven-year collective-property system - that was a standard practice at the time, a simple practical way to deal with the extreme supply shortages in a new colony. After all, you can't run a farm if the owner of the plough refuses to let another use it, and you can't hope to build individual houses for every colonist before winter sets in and kills everyone. It was usual to share all non-trivial property long enough to get everyone settled in, houses built, tools made and industry established. Similarily, there was an initial food shortage. The mistake is in attributing the latter to the former. The actual reason was rather less interesting: European farmers, most of them not even very experienced, with unfamiliar crops and weather far worse than anticipated.
Look at the numbers. The great die-off was in the winter of 1620-1621, during which 45 died from a population of 102. That is the event of which your account speaks. Yet the ship only arrived in december 1620 - if, as you claim, the problems were caused by the use of a temporary collective ownership leading to a lack of hard work than the effects should not have been felt until the following harvest, rather then immediatly upon arrival. Unless you wish to suggest that people were standing around in the snow refusing to build housing because they wouldn't fully own it afterwards, which strikes me as unrealistic.
And of later events? Wikipedia has some figures on the growth of the colony:
December 1620, 99
April 1621, 50 (The first winter of which we spoke)
November 1621, 85
July 1623, 180
May 1627, 156
As you can see, once that first winter passed the colony florished - growth was rapid, and no food shortage around. In fact, this was a florishing economy: In november 1921, almost exactly one year after the arrival of the Mayflower, the Fortune arrived with more settlers - and departed with a trade goods exported to pay off the investors who funded the settlement. Doesn't sound like a communist nightmare to me.
The final damning line comes from your own testament: "The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years." Several years. Yet the colony was already passed the intitial winter deaths and running successful exports after only a single year from the arrival of the mayflower - which means that, by the account you use, that great success was achieved *before* the abolition of collective ownership!
So while socialism may not have been the perfect solution for Plymouth, it wasn't an utter disaster either. It worked, for a time, well enough to get them established, growing and exporting.