So, government being bigger than any company means it is the only sector of the economy that is growing?
- USA government is nearly 50% of economy. If it's not growing in one particular day at the same rate that it is growing in the overall sense, over years, then it doesn't change the fact.
Just the Federal government in USA has expanded its balance sheet by 5 Trillion dollars over 4 years. Apple market cap is 638 Billion in total and that's the largest company (in terms of market capitalization).
You don't like the facts?
Here is a page on the growth of government, I'd quote it here, but it's too large, it has data from 1934 until now and into the projected future (to 2015). Yes, government is the largest growing sector.
As to manufacturing - in USA manufacturing is shrinking, not growing. The pathetic little bit of growth that registered in the last 2 months is in assembling, not manufacturing, they don't grow manufacturing in USA and assembly is not the same thing.
Yes, it's true, the service sector is growing in USA, that's just like government, it adds to the trade deficit and worsens the economic conditions and it lives on the promise of government bail outs and stimulus (well, I consider the Federal reserve to be an arm of the government).
Can you understand that? Majority of businesses are not Enron, why is this so difficult to comprehend? There are literally millions of businesses just in USA alone, how many of them are size of Enron and how many can afford a 'golden parachute'? Do you think that your local restaurant, a gas station, your local mechanic, even a local cement company (if there is a local one where you are) can afford a 'golden parachute', especially if it goes under? When MOST businesses fail (and I don't know how to make the word "most" any more accessible to you here), there is not much left after all the debts and various taxes and fees, including various legal fees are paid.
If a company doesn't pay your the salary that it owes you for a month of work you are not obligated to stay there. At most you are going to lose that month of work (if you are not silly enough to stay beyond that one month if they are not paying).
This is absolutely different from starting a business and risking your savings and credit, not just your time.
Maybe you should read that again, it's not about selling your own labour, it's about achieving efficiency by not having human labour do the production but instead automating production away. A successful business does not have to hire employees, it does so because there are not enough automated solutions for all things that must be done.
In a more realistic scenario a successful business can be built with automation and contractors and without employees and this has nothing to do with "selling your own labour".
A government is a parasite on the economy, given a choice today between the government that exists and no government at all, no government at all would provide much better results. Government shouldn't be producing transportation infrastructure by the way, nor any other infrastructure, government shouldn't be in businesses of any kind.
Government should be a system that preserves most freedoms in the market, protects individual liberties thus assuring a level playing field. That should be the role of government in a functioning Republic, not any type of infrastructure, wealth redistribution and militarism. Protecting individual liberties comes at a price, thus government should be able to collect taxes based on consumption but not on production, thus income taxes, corporate, payroll, death, dividend, capital gains taxes are all bad for the economy, they reduce amount of productivity. Consumption taxes on the other hand only affect usage, consumption, leisure but not productivity and not individual freedoms. Consumption taxes allow people to avoid paying for government by modifying behavior, work related taxes do not, work, production, income related taxes require people to actively submit to the rule of government, which turns the purpose of government around from being protector of liberties to being a ruler of people.
I have written extensively on this phenomena, it is the result of the money pyramid that is being executed by the Federal reserve and the government, it's about inflation and artificially low interest rates. Low interest rates for government bonds prevent competition from the private sector bonds so few companies end up paying dividends. This, coupled with various bail outs and 'stimulus' packages turns the equity market into a casino, people are not looking to gain by participating in a successful business, so they are not looking for dividend payments (and it's nearly impossible to get anything from dividends anyway, given the huge inflation that is proportionate to the real interest rates, which are suppressed), thus basically people are not treating stocks and bonds as investments but instead are treating them as a roulette table in a casino. Put on black, put on red, wait a round, change the bets, hope for a big pay off.
Couple that with inheritance taxes (which destroy family businesses and promote faceless corporations), couple that with regulations that help monopolies and destroy competition, couple that with taxes that also help monopolies and large companies and prevent smaller companies from succeeding, couple that with regulatiosn around becoming a public company, so prevent new companies from raising capital in IPO before actually becoming profitable, eventually you are getting a system where large companies are very large and small companies are too small for most investors.
So what happens then is that large companies are ran by a board of directors that doesn't actually care about most 'investors', because they are not investors, they are gamblers and it's a 2 way street. Basically the monitory and fiscal policy that is set by government destroyed the viable real economy in USA and most of Europe and really hurt Japan as well. In these conditions the big companies are really big and can allocate huge sums of money towards the top and as bribes to the political elite, they don't have to compete, so they don't have to be efficient.
Taking a job with a startup is also risk, so an employee can take a risk for a promise of a greater future payout if (and that's a big IF and in most cases it never materializes), again if the company is successful at some point and the employee stays with it to becoming successful through the good and bad. It doesn't mean that the employee is necessarily more productive than some other employee at another company, however it does mean that the company is becoming successful as a result of the concerted effort and part of the effort is willingness to take a lower paying position as opposed to a better paying one for a prolonged time period.
FYI, your "fact" that "the only growing sector of the economy is government" Is utter bullshit.
- it is a fact. The government is spending more money than any company, the government has more employees than any company, the government has more contractors than any company, the government is entangled in more businesses than any company.
Government should be vilified, every pay raise anybody in government gets is a pay cut for people in the private sector, because they are paying for those pay raises with taxes paid out of actual production.
Government today is nearly half of the US economy, government is crowding out ALL of the credit and prevents borrowing for private businesses. Actually it's not only a USA problem, it's a problem around the world. Nobody can get a business loan while governments are in more debt than ever. Just the federal government in USA has 16 Trillion debt on the books. 222Trillion in debt is in unfunded liabilities.
- yet somehow all the business today is defined by what you call a 'vast minority'. It's not a coincidence, what I mean to say is that it's not random that businesses today are getting all this bad publicity by the elected and unelected government officials, given the fact that the only growing sector of the economy is government. Government profits by vilifying businesses, because businesses pay government's salary and it's much easier to extract that money from businesses by turning the masses (who are mostly employees or unemployed) against all businesses, and the fact that only a tiny proportion of all businesses are somehow benefiting from government ties becomes irrelevant.
Which is why when a company keels over, the risktakers get golden parachutes, and the employes not taking any risks from their salaried positions get a foot up their arse.
- in most cases if a company dies then there is not much left over for any kind of 'parachute' and while it sucks for the employees, they always got paid. The employees now have to find other jobs, but no employee would stay in a company that didn't pay him his salary every month, while the actual owner / operator of the business has only what is left over after all the bills (including taxes) are paid.
An employee is only an employee as long as he gets his monthly salary, a business owner has to stay with it until the logical conclusion, which is most often not a good one.
You wouldn't be making ball bearings if there were no other businesses in the first place, because ball bearings, while are useful, are not directly useful for survival in a pre-business economy.
Being efficient at making ball bearings is a good business model in a world where there is enough productivity such that ball bearings make other businesses more efficient. Ball bearings are used in machines and people use machines to be more productive than they otherwise would be, but without businesses there would be no machines built at all, or if somebody did manage to build a machine in his spare time (time he takes away from his subsistence and other activities), then again, he wouldn't be able to mass produce it, that's unlikely, it would be a wonder but it would be a one off.
In order to be able to mass produce something it takes a long chain of businesses, most likely starting with black smiths, who produce metal tools for farmers, who would buy those tools and become more productive than they otherwise would be and then they could become businesses that would drive more production of more complex machines, eventually ball bearings would be needed. Some business would produce a machine that used ball bearings but eventually there would be a better, cheaper supplier in the market, who'd produce ball bearings in a more efficient, less costly manner.
--
As to rudimentary businesses, of-course people had some trade before capitalism, no question. But capitalism became the main factor in the real push towards industrialization, and that's what really turned the economy into a much more productive one, so majority of people stopped being farmers, hunters, gatherers, fishers altogether, those professions became much more efficient with industrialization providing the machines, tools to allow just a few percent of people to produce enough food for everybody. Capitalism is our most important invention in the last few hundred years.
I'd go further than that. All people that I personally know that started and run their own businesses are nearly insanely productive or at least are trying to be insanely productive. All of them had to work their asses off for at least 3 years to get somewhere, before the business would turn even 0.6% of return on the yearly investment. The problem with the majority of people is that they never even thought about running their own business, they are not thinking in those terms, they think they can hold a job and it's an equivalent of starting from scratch and actually making some venture into a profitable one. Another problem of-course is that today 'business' is nearly a dirty word, which is propaganda pushed by the establishment with political power. Businesses actually create everything we buy and use, businesses distribute everything we buy and use, businesses hire all the people *outside of government*, businesses create all the wealth (products, services).
Of-course it's not a surprise that the majority of the population is so completely on the wrong side of it, they never actually tried to run their own real business.
Somebody put together the capital, somebody got the tools, somebody gives direction, somebody is doing all of the figuring that is necessary to be successful.
Nowhere in my comment did I say that a business is always started by one person, on the contrary, often businesses are a shared venture.
Bullshit, the people who put in the REAL risks are the ones on your fishing boat, building your skyscraper, replacing your roof, logging for the wood your business needs, the ones on your loading docks, the guy who empties your dumpster, the people who actually fucking WORK.
- you don't understand what I am talking about.
Risking your life for salary is not something extraordinary, at least you are guaranteed compensation for your effort and risk. Your risk as an employee is priced by the market, you will get higher compensation if your job is more dangerous for example, if your job requires special knowledge and training, if you are more experienced.
If you are less experienced, if your knowledge is not specialized, etc., you will get lower compensation.
But I am not talking about that risk, I am talking about risk of NOT knowing if you are going to get compensated. Spending years developing a business, not seeing any profit from it for the first 5 years for example is a very common occurrence in business, you are burning your effort, burning through your savings (or maybe loans, but it's still savings, and people who are loaning to you are also taking part of that risk), burning through your time.
How do you know if you are not better off just working for somebody else, who already has a working business?
It's much less risky to be hired as a salaried employee rather than starting your own business, otherwise everybody would do it, but most people do not.
Money is not 'just money', it's time, it's cost of opportunity, it's effort. Try and build something for 3-6 years before you get to find out if your business will actually make a return that was worth the effort.
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from having other people do something that the market wants.
- pure nonsense.
In fact if a businessman can do everything that needs to be done in order to make profit on his own without hiring A SINGLE OTHER PERSON he would do it, he'd make more money if it was possible not to hire anybody at all. If the businessman has enough capital to automate all of the production, then all he needs to do is to buy the machinery and get some contractors to install it, put it into operation, he pays them for the job and he starts producing.
Unfortunately for us (all of us) it's not possible to automate every job, otherwise it would make for the most efficient and productive economy.
Absolute unabashed bullshit. People have "produced" since before we came down from the trees.
- of-course people produced before they were hired, but they didn't OVERPRODUCE. So you are completely missing a point of running a business, which is not to produce just for yourself. A business gives to everybody, a businessman starts a business not just to produce enough for himself, he has to overproduce, he has to produce more than one person can consume, otherwise it's not a business, it is just subsistence.
but his actual direct role amounts to nothing more than that of a parasite.
- this is political nonsense, it has nothing to do with the reality. The reality is that no business will survive without direction, without management that provides that direction. No business can stay profitable by not knowing which way to go. Apple computers could have easily died a number of times if it wasn't for a very good manager (whether he is lucky or good is not really relevant and it is also indistinguishable just by looking at the results).
A parasite is what is created by the government, the government itself is a parasite, it produces nothing, it takes from producers, it promises to give to people who didn't produce part of wealth created by the people who do produce.
We made it to all seven continents, to the top of the food chain, and discovered beer before "business" started taking a cut. Far enough for ya?
- business doesn't "take a cut", business creates what wasn't there before.
Beer is as much about business as any other product. Discovering something is not necessarily business in itself, but turning it into something that anybody can then consume does take business. It takes productivity, it takes engineering, it takes trade, it takes accounting, it takes very good management, because all of the above cannot survive if the components do not fit together, if the bills are not getting paid, if the costs are higher than revenues.
- take that for example, should the people who were hired by a successful startup and were promised something in case the company succeeds get more than those, who take more salary upfront?
What about various Google employees who became millionaires, do you think they were not "productive"? They got pretty wealthy as a result of "options".
or getting a golden parachute sure is a huge risk
- I don't see how this is relevant. Most people who become wealthy do not become wealthy by "getting a golden parachute", that's almost as useful as talking about lottery winners.
Yes, some people become wealthy by chance, but most people do not, so what's the point there?
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from doing something that the market wants.
Of-course in the absence of free market there are other possibilities, like buying influence from politicians to establish yourself as a monopoly.
Your "definition" doesn't cut it at all. Workers don't produce out of nowhere, they have to be hired and told what to do and before they can be hired there has to be a case made to hire them, savings have to be allocated to hire them, tools have to be acquired so that the workers can be productive. Throw a bunch of 'workers' together without any purpose, capital, tools and management and see how far that takes you in terms of productivity.
People who take the most business risk are not those who accept salaried positions for jobs that somebody thinks to be necessary to make more profit, it's people who take the risk in terms of putting in their own savings, capital, time and effort into a venture that nobody ever guarantees to be a winner.
Ron Paul got to say plenty. He said he'd stop the wars and bring all troops home. He said he wanted to cut a Trillion dollars in the first year, eliminate 5 departments and balance the budget by the year 3. He said he wanted to eliminate IRS and audit the Fed and eventually eliminate the Fed. He said he wanted to legalize freedoms, so that no federal government bureaucrat could tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, ingest or who to marry or how to run your business.
He said plenty, he wasn't received well by most Republicans or Democrats for it.
Freedom will not be given to those, who are unwilling to fight for it. The government will take away as much of your freedoms from you, as it can get away with.
Yeah, good luck then trying to pass the FDA and similar obstacles on your way. Either it could never be advertised for that purpose or hundreds and hundreds of millions if not some billions would have to be spent proving that it's not a curling iron but a robot that can be used for some medical applications.
Shut down and stop distorting the market. Those who have legitimate good ideas should use contracts, non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets instead of patent trolling. That's it, problem solved.
No no, what am I talking about, I am actually looking at the root cause of the real problem, they are not interested in that, they want to keep their jobs.
Precisely. Every time a government uses an 'anti-trust' law, the reality of it is that the people who end up gaining are some competitors who cannot compete in real life, so they buy government officials to destroy the economy of scale for them.
The people who truly end up hurt are the clients, users, customers, consumers. The government doesn't care about those people, they are not the ones giving the bribes, and of-course in case of a successful lawsuit by gov't, there is a huge windfall there, the gov't gets all that money, it goes around and around, the politicians can't resist that type of a temptation.
AFAIC it's very clear what Google should do. Either it has to play by their 'normal' rules and bribe the officials or they should hire a small army of mercs to remove a few high profile political targets that are pushing this agenda and put an end to this nonsense by setting the proper example. EU is trying to kill Google, it's about survival.
Slashdot Mirror
So, government being bigger than any company means it is the only sector of the economy that is growing?
- USA government is nearly 50% of economy. If it's not growing in one particular day at the same rate that it is growing in the overall sense, over years, then it doesn't change the fact.
Just the Federal government in USA has expanded its balance sheet by 5 Trillion dollars over 4 years. Apple market cap is 638 Billion in total and that's the largest company (in terms of market capitalization).
You don't like the facts?
Here is a page on the growth of government, I'd quote it here, but it's too large, it has data from 1934 until now and into the projected future (to 2015). Yes, government is the largest growing sector.
As to manufacturing - in USA manufacturing is shrinking, not growing. The pathetic little bit of growth that registered in the last 2 months is in assembling, not manufacturing, they don't grow manufacturing in USA and assembly is not the same thing.
Yes, it's true, the service sector is growing in USA, that's just like government, it adds to the trade deficit and worsens the economic conditions and it lives on the promise of government bail outs and stimulus (well, I consider the Federal reserve to be an arm of the government).
As I said: "in most cases".
Can you understand that? Majority of businesses are not Enron, why is this so difficult to comprehend? There are literally millions of businesses just in USA alone, how many of them are size of Enron and how many can afford a 'golden parachute'? Do you think that your local restaurant, a gas station, your local mechanic, even a local cement company (if there is a local one where you are) can afford a 'golden parachute', especially if it goes under? When MOST businesses fail (and I don't know how to make the word "most" any more accessible to you here), there is not much left after all the debts and various taxes and fees, including various legal fees are paid.
If a company doesn't pay your the salary that it owes you for a month of work you are not obligated to stay there. At most you are going to lose that month of work (if you are not silly enough to stay beyond that one month if they are not paying).
This is absolutely different from starting a business and risking your savings and credit, not just your time.
Maybe you should read that again, it's not about selling your own labour, it's about achieving efficiency by not having human labour do the production but instead automating production away. A successful business does not have to hire employees, it does so because there are not enough automated solutions for all things that must be done.
In a more realistic scenario a successful business can be built with automation and contractors and without employees and this has nothing to do with "selling your own labour".
A government is a parasite on the economy, given a choice today between the government that exists and no government at all, no government at all would provide much better results. Government shouldn't be producing transportation infrastructure by the way, nor any other infrastructure, government shouldn't be in businesses of any kind.
Government should be a system that preserves most freedoms in the market, protects individual liberties thus assuring a level playing field. That should be the role of government in a functioning Republic, not any type of infrastructure, wealth redistribution and militarism. Protecting individual liberties comes at a price, thus government should be able to collect taxes based on consumption but not on production, thus income taxes, corporate, payroll, death, dividend, capital gains taxes are all bad for the economy, they reduce amount of productivity. Consumption taxes on the other hand only affect usage, consumption, leisure but not productivity and not individual freedoms. Consumption taxes allow people to avoid paying for government by modifying behavior, work related taxes do not, work, production, income related taxes require people to actively submit to the rule of government, which turns the purpose of government around from being protector of liberties to being a ruler of people.
I have written extensively on this phenomena, it is the result of the money pyramid that is being executed by the Federal reserve and the government, it's about inflation and artificially low interest rates. Low interest rates for government bonds prevent competition from the private sector bonds so few companies end up paying dividends. This, coupled with various bail outs and 'stimulus' packages turns the equity market into a casino, people are not looking to gain by participating in a successful business, so they are not looking for dividend payments (and it's nearly impossible to get anything from dividends anyway, given the huge inflation that is proportionate to the real interest rates, which are suppressed), thus basically people are not treating stocks and bonds as investments but instead are treating them as a roulette table in a casino. Put on black, put on red, wait a round, change the bets, hope for a big pay off.
Couple that with inheritance taxes (which destroy family businesses and promote faceless corporations), couple that with regulations that help monopolies and destroy competition, couple that with taxes that also help monopolies and large companies and prevent smaller companies from succeeding, couple that with regulatiosn around becoming a public company, so prevent new companies from raising capital in IPO before actually becoming profitable, eventually you are getting a system where large companies are very large and small companies are too small for most investors.
So what happens then is that large companies are ran by a board of directors that doesn't actually care about most 'investors', because they are not investors, they are gamblers and it's a 2 way street. Basically the monitory and fiscal policy that is set by government destroyed the viable real economy in USA and most of Europe and really hurt Japan as well. In these conditions the big companies are really big and can allocate huge sums of money towards the top and as bribes to the political elite, they don't have to compete, so they don't have to be efficient.
Taking a job with a startup is also risk, so an employee can take a risk for a promise of a greater future payout if (and that's a big IF and in most cases it never materializes), again if the company is successful at some point and the employee stays with it to becoming successful through the good and bad. It doesn't mean that the employee is necessarily more productive than some other employee at another company, however it does mean that the company is becoming successful as a result of the concerted effort and part of the effort is willingness to take a lower paying position as opposed to a better paying one for a prolonged time period.
FYI, your "fact" that "the only growing sector of the economy is government" Is utter bullshit.
- it is a fact. The government is spending more money than any company, the government has more employees than any company, the government has more contractors than any company, the government is entangled in more businesses than any company.
Government should be vilified, every pay raise anybody in government gets is a pay cut for people in the private sector, because they are paying for those pay raises with taxes paid out of actual production.
Government today is nearly half of the US economy, government is crowding out ALL of the credit and prevents borrowing for private businesses. Actually it's not only a USA problem, it's a problem around the world. Nobody can get a business loan while governments are in more debt than ever. Just the federal government in USA has 16 Trillion debt on the books. 222Trillion in debt is in unfunded liabilities.
They're in the vast minority.
- yet somehow all the business today is defined by what you call a 'vast minority'. It's not a coincidence, what I mean to say is that it's not random that businesses today are getting all this bad publicity by the elected and unelected government officials, given the fact that the only growing sector of the economy is government. Government profits by vilifying businesses, because businesses pay government's salary and it's much easier to extract that money from businesses by turning the masses (who are mostly employees or unemployed) against all businesses, and the fact that only a tiny proportion of all businesses are somehow benefiting from government ties becomes irrelevant.
Which is why when a company keels over, the risktakers get golden parachutes, and the employes not taking any risks from their salaried positions get a foot up their arse.
- in most cases if a company dies then there is not much left over for any kind of 'parachute' and while it sucks for the employees, they always got paid. The employees now have to find other jobs, but no employee would stay in a company that didn't pay him his salary every month, while the actual owner / operator of the business has only what is left over after all the bills (including taxes) are paid.
An employee is only an employee as long as he gets his monthly salary, a business owner has to stay with it until the logical conclusion, which is most often not a good one.
You wouldn't be making ball bearings if there were no other businesses in the first place, because ball bearings, while are useful, are not directly useful for survival in a pre-business economy.
Being efficient at making ball bearings is a good business model in a world where there is enough productivity such that ball bearings make other businesses more efficient. Ball bearings are used in machines and people use machines to be more productive than they otherwise would be, but without businesses there would be no machines built at all, or if somebody did manage to build a machine in his spare time (time he takes away from his subsistence and other activities), then again, he wouldn't be able to mass produce it, that's unlikely, it would be a wonder but it would be a one off.
In order to be able to mass produce something it takes a long chain of businesses, most likely starting with black smiths, who produce metal tools for farmers, who would buy those tools and become more productive than they otherwise would be and then they could become businesses that would drive more production of more complex machines, eventually ball bearings would be needed. Some business would produce a machine that used ball bearings but eventually there would be a better, cheaper supplier in the market, who'd produce ball bearings in a more efficient, less costly manner.
--
As to rudimentary businesses, of-course people had some trade before capitalism, no question. But capitalism became the main factor in the real push towards industrialization, and that's what really turned the economy into a much more productive one, so majority of people stopped being farmers, hunters, gatherers, fishers altogether, those professions became much more efficient with industrialization providing the machines, tools to allow just a few percent of people to produce enough food for everybody. Capitalism is our most important invention in the last few hundred years.
I'd go further than that. All people that I personally know that started and run their own businesses are nearly insanely productive or at least are trying to be insanely productive. All of them had to work their asses off for at least 3 years to get somewhere, before the business would turn even 0.6% of return on the yearly investment. The problem with the majority of people is that they never even thought about running their own business, they are not thinking in those terms, they think they can hold a job and it's an equivalent of starting from scratch and actually making some venture into a profitable one. Another problem of-course is that today 'business' is nearly a dirty word, which is propaganda pushed by the establishment with political power. Businesses actually create everything we buy and use, businesses distribute everything we buy and use, businesses hire all the people *outside of government*, businesses create all the wealth (products, services).
Of-course it's not a surprise that the majority of the population is so completely on the wrong side of it, they never actually tried to run their own real business.
Somebody put together the capital, somebody got the tools, somebody gives direction, somebody is doing all of the figuring that is necessary to be successful.
Nowhere in my comment did I say that a business is always started by one person, on the contrary, often businesses are a shared venture.
Bullshit, the people who put in the REAL risks are the ones on your fishing boat, building your skyscraper, replacing your roof, logging for the wood your business needs, the ones on your loading docks, the guy who empties your dumpster, the people who actually fucking WORK.
- you don't understand what I am talking about.
Risking your life for salary is not something extraordinary, at least you are guaranteed compensation for your effort and risk. Your risk as an employee is priced by the market, you will get higher compensation if your job is more dangerous for example, if your job requires special knowledge and training, if you are more experienced.
If you are less experienced, if your knowledge is not specialized, etc., you will get lower compensation.
But I am not talking about that risk, I am talking about risk of NOT knowing if you are going to get compensated. Spending years developing a business, not seeing any profit from it for the first 5 years for example is a very common occurrence in business, you are burning your effort, burning through your savings (or maybe loans, but it's still savings, and people who are loaning to you are also taking part of that risk), burning through your time.
How do you know if you are not better off just working for somebody else, who already has a working business?
It's much less risky to be hired as a salaried employee rather than starting your own business, otherwise everybody would do it, but most people do not.
Money is not 'just money', it's time, it's cost of opportunity, it's effort. Try and build something for 3-6 years before you get to find out if your business will actually make a return that was worth the effort.
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from having other people do something that the market wants.
- pure nonsense.
In fact if a businessman can do everything that needs to be done in order to make profit on his own without hiring A SINGLE OTHER PERSON he would do it, he'd make more money if it was possible not to hire anybody at all. If the businessman has enough capital to automate all of the production, then all he needs to do is to buy the machinery and get some contractors to install it, put it into operation, he pays them for the job and he starts producing.
Unfortunately for us (all of us) it's not possible to automate every job, otherwise it would make for the most efficient and productive economy.
Absolute unabashed bullshit. People have "produced" since before we came down from the trees.
- of-course people produced before they were hired, but they didn't OVERPRODUCE. So you are completely missing a point of running a business, which is not to produce just for yourself. A business gives to everybody, a businessman starts a business not just to produce enough for himself, he has to overproduce, he has to produce more than one person can consume, otherwise it's not a business, it is just subsistence.
but his actual direct role amounts to nothing more than that of a parasite.
- this is political nonsense, it has nothing to do with the reality. The reality is that no business will survive without direction, without management that provides that direction. No business can stay profitable by not knowing which way to go. Apple computers could have easily died a number of times if it wasn't for a very good manager (whether he is lucky or good is not really relevant and it is also indistinguishable just by looking at the results).
A parasite is what is created by the government, the government itself is a parasite, it produces nothing, it takes from producers, it promises to give to people who didn't produce part of wealth created by the people who do produce.
We made it to all seven continents, to the top of the food chain, and discovered beer before "business" started taking a cut. Far enough for ya?
- business doesn't "take a cut", business creates what wasn't there before.
Beer is as much about business as any other product. Discovering something is not necessarily business in itself, but turning it into something that anybody can then consume does take business. It takes productivity, it takes engineering, it takes trade, it takes accounting, it takes very good management, because all of the above cannot survive if the components do not fit together, if the bills are not getting paid, if the costs are higher than revenues.
getting rich via options
- take that for example, should the people who were hired by a successful startup and were promised something in case the company succeeds get more than those, who take more salary upfront?
What about various Google employees who became millionaires, do you think they were not "productive"? They got pretty wealthy as a result of "options".
or getting a golden parachute sure is a huge risk
- I don't see how this is relevant. Most people who become wealthy do not become wealthy by "getting a golden parachute", that's almost as useful as talking about lottery winners.
Yes, some people become wealthy by chance, but most people do not, so what's the point there?
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from doing something that the market wants.
Of-course in the absence of free market there are other possibilities, like buying influence from politicians to establish yourself as a monopoly.
Your "definition" doesn't cut it at all. Workers don't produce out of nowhere, they have to be hired and told what to do and before they can be hired there has to be a case made to hire them, savings have to be allocated to hire them, tools have to be acquired so that the workers can be productive. Throw a bunch of 'workers' together without any purpose, capital, tools and management and see how far that takes you in terms of productivity.
People who take the most business risk are not those who accept salaried positions for jobs that somebody thinks to be necessary to make more profit, it's people who take the risk in terms of putting in their own savings, capital, time and effort into a venture that nobody ever guarantees to be a winner.
Ron Paul got to say plenty. He said he'd stop the wars and bring all troops home. He said he wanted to cut a Trillion dollars in the first year, eliminate 5 departments and balance the budget by the year 3. He said he wanted to eliminate IRS and audit the Fed and eventually eliminate the Fed. He said he wanted to legalize freedoms, so that no federal government bureaucrat could tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, ingest or who to marry or how to run your business.
He said plenty, he wasn't received well by most Republicans or Democrats for it.
Freedom will not be given to those, who are unwilling to fight for it. The government will take away as much of your freedoms from you, as it can get away with.
Yeah, good luck then trying to pass the FDA and similar obstacles on your way. Either it could never be advertised for that purpose or hundreds and hundreds of millions if not some billions would have to be spent proving that it's not a curling iron but a robot that can be used for some medical applications.
its called job security
Oh, come on, trace the comments all the way to the top and then read again, you are talking about a couple of boy scouts there.
It's called a typo.
I have an IDEA for them right here: shut down.
Shut down and stop distorting the market. Those who have legitimate good ideas should use contracts, non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets instead of patent trolling. That's it, problem solved.
No no, what am I talking about, I am actually looking at the root cause of the real problem, they are not interested in that, they want to keep their jobs.
If I can describe how to install my software to a production support team, then the software release isn't ready for production
- BOFH, is that you?
Precisely. Every time a government uses an 'anti-trust' law, the reality of it is that the people who end up gaining are some competitors who cannot compete in real life, so they buy government officials to destroy the economy of scale for them.
The people who truly end up hurt are the clients, users, customers, consumers. The government doesn't care about those people, they are not the ones giving the bribes, and of-course in case of a successful lawsuit by gov't, there is a huge windfall there, the gov't gets all that money, it goes around and around, the politicians can't resist that type of a temptation.
AFAIC it's very clear what Google should do. Either it has to play by their 'normal' rules and bribe the officials or they should hire a small army of mercs to remove a few high profile political targets that are pushing this agenda and put an end to this nonsense by setting the proper example. EU is trying to kill Google, it's about survival.