Seriously, you have to remember how far we've come and how fast. My college age kids might remember dial-up modems but probably not. Today one plans her outings around whether there's free public WiFi. That was an unimaginable luxury 15 years ago.
And we're saying that a lot of people do a lot of things out of necessity and get paid less than they'd like for it.
"Like" is Randian wankery, a non-response to the issue of people working below the poverty line to pay seven figure salaries to a few executives, and a few billion in profits to investment banks.
And executive pay and corporate profit is a misguided progressive knee-jerk red herring. Can we stop hurling insults now?
Let me try to address your points, even the ones I don't think are relevant.
I've never brought up Rand. I've never even read her books. If anything, I'm a fan of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics.
I agree people living in poverty is unfortunate. As a compassionate person, I'd like to see everyone (world-wide) live in sound housing, have enough to eat, and access to medical care. I'd prefer everyone could live rich, fulfilling lives. I don't think we'll achieve that until the second coming of Jesus but that's the goal. Can we agree we want to make forward progress?
To keep things in perspective, very few people in the US live in the abject poverty you can find outside the US. I do see homeless people around my home in San Jose and think it's desperately sad. I know I should do more to help them and honestly, I don't. And remember, anyone driving for a ride sharing service owns a car which probably puts them in the global top 50%.
Many people have addressed executive pay and profit. It doesn't actually matter. Every time anyone does the math, it turns out to be irrelevent. You can take all the executive pay and all the corporate profit and it turns into a trivial raise, tens of dollars a month, for the rank and file. IMHO, worrying about it is just envy and resentment.
Unless, of course, you're in favor of universal housing, universal health care, and a universal annual income, so working a shit job is an actual choice and not a responsibility if you want to get by. And want your taxes raised accordingly.
What's wrong with having an individual responsibility to get by? Someone needs to be responsible. If you say it's all of us, well, the 1/300,000,000 of my attention I spend on you isn't worth much. Practically speaking, I just don't think that works well.
I think being a bit desperate, a bit scared of your future is a tremendous motivator. I think being able to reap the rewards of your skills, gifts, and efforts is also a tremendous motivator. The magic of a free-market, capitalistic systems is that in order to satisfy my own material needs, I have to provide value to you. We both wind up rewarded and wealthier than before. It's a positive sum game. It's also a pretty happy game if you focus on your own choices and outcome and disregard the fact that others are doing better. It's not a race, it's not a competition, it's a cooperation.
So, no I don't want to pay the necessary taxes to provide universal housing, food, income, and health care. I think that would make us substantially poorer in the long run. I don't think anyone has a right to a non-shit job. I don't think anyone has a right to any job. You get a job because your employer and customers value your output more than you value your time. You keep a job because it's better than your other alternatives, the real ones, not the ones you wish you had.
Ride sharing drivers have a point: driving for Lyft, Uber, etc. doesn't make them much money. No kidding, they're doing something people aren't willing to pay much to have done for them. Driving just doesn't add that much value. The question is, who and how to address that. We can pass a destructive minimum wage law but that will make us in aggregate less well off than not passing the law. Or, we can be more constructive and try to help people with low skills acquire better skills so they can move out of a shit job to something less shitty. That's something I could get behind.
I'm saying that a lot of people do it out of necessity, not that Uber should make the job more enjoyable.
And we're saying that a lot of people do a lot of things out of necessity and get paid less than they'd like for it. What makes ride sharing drivers special?
In my perfect world, I'd have a Star Trek replicator and could spend my time hiking in the mountains. In the real world, I'm about to head to a dull base-touching meeting because that's what my boss pays me to do. I see a difference in numbers but not in kind.
I feel for people who have few things going for them other than being able to drive and owning a car. I'd like for everyone to earn enough to afford a safe place to live, enough food, medical care when they need it, decent clothes, and the like. Many people are not able to do that by themselves (e.g. my teenage daughter and elderly parents) and need help. It's unreasonable to expect either of them to independently support themselves on a 40-hour a week job.
Obligatory observation: Lessig is right, the Constitution doesn't say anything about how electors should vote. Each state has their own laws constraining their electors. Nebraska and Maine don't use a winner-take-all system.
I would love for California to instruct its electors to vote proportional to the popular vote in the state, or by the winner in each electoral district. The Democratic party would never let this happen because they'd give up gimmie electoral votes. To get it through, one would have to convince the state powers that getting the attention of the presidential candidate is worth the wrath of the national party. Not gonna happen.
California gives on the order of $60 billion more every year to the federal government than they get back
I certainly hope so. I hope a lot of other states do the same. Giving taxes to the federal government just to have the cash given back is inefficient and pointless. Otherwise, we'd be better off lowering the tax rates and letting the money stay here (I live in California).
It's the same as getting a tax refund in April. If you get one, that means you withheld too much and should plan your taxes better next year.
I thought you meant a government sponsored licensing board. Must be regulated by government. No other way. And yes I know they can become corrupt to but so does anyone.
I don't think it matters if it's a government or industry sponsored licensing board. In both cases, companies have a strong interest in lobbying and influencing the board while customers have a much weaker interest in making sure proceeding are all above board. Look up the history of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It was the first agency intended to regulate railroads, yet within a few years, the railroads had captured the board and used it to drive competitors out of the market. The same story plays out over and over again.
Usually it's going to be a licensing board. It's to easy for a business to fake credentials without one.
The problem with licensing boards is they have a conflict of interest. My understanding is it is quite common for licensing boards to be composed of or heavily influenced by members of the profession (look up regulatory capture).
So, what are the interests of the board? To protect their businesses. They do this in two major ways. One is to protect the business reputation. That's what we, the consumers, want. I want the board to give me assurance the practitioners are good, honest, and qualified, and that bad actors are shut down. But you have to trust they'll actually do this, as opposed to trying to sweep issues under the rug in the hopes no one finds out about it.
They also have the selfish interest of preventing competition. We see this in licensing regulations which are way, way more stringent than are required for quality assurance and safety (for example, training requirements for interior decorators and hair braiders).
As a result, I don't entirely trust licensing boards. All the way from the most mundane (interior decorators) to the most safety critical (e.g. the American Medical Association). Their interests are not aligned with mine and so I believe they will always make decisions which aren't entirely in my best interest.
That's not to say a licensing board is entirely fraudulent. They can provide useful input. It's just not sufficient. As consumers, we need to be aware of this and treat their conclusions with a grain of salt. It's not entirely caveat emptor but we do need to be skeptical and responsible.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
It's less of a faith position to say that a well-informed third party can deduce value than to claim that a mass of uninformed individuals can.
Well, that's a difference in judgement. I don't think either of us can prove that point. All I can say is I believe there are way, way more cases where depending on individuals to jointly, through a free market, can come to a decision on an optimal balance than there cases where a central authority will come to a better answer.
I once visited the famous tourist beauty spot of Biarritz in France. Beauty spot? It is ugly as all sin. The problem is that the mass of tourists have destroyed everything. You have clifftop walks which originally had planned paths, set out in concrete. Tourists didn't want to follow those paths, and walked across the grass. The authorities in Biarritz apparently took the view that you couldn't argue with the crowd, and they reinforced the new paths the tourist created.
That's a shame. I don't know anything about Bairritz but I've got to wonder who was making the decisions and what their incentives are. If the decisions where to put paths was made by some city agency, it doesn't sound like they did such a great job. Certainly you have an incentive problem in that tourists have no incentive to stay on the paths and protect the natural surfaces.
You may have heard of "the tragedy of the commons" -- I don't like the term: where common grazings are still in operation, they are run in planned cooperation between locals who know each other, but the idea is sound: individuals all pursuing self-interest and self-gratification do not act in ways that aim to the common good.
I've totally heard about tragedies of the commons. It's the classic first justification for government regulation. The case you cite, where the individuals using the commons self-regulate, is exactly the sort of solution I'd prefer. The individuals involved regulate themselves in their own enlightened self interest as a way to maximize their common good.
So what's weird here is I think we agree with each other more than we disagree. You point out one instance of what looks like government regulation failure and another instance of what looks like private regulation. Do we disagree with each other?
My wife has had lymph nodes out and if she goes to a salon and they use cuticle pushers incorrectly and break her skin she could be in deep trouble. So yes, there needs to be a minimum ounce of safety even for salons.
OK, you just hit on a really deep and subtle point.
Absolutely, yes, there needs to be some quality standard for manicurists, drivers, engineers, and nuclear power plant operators.
Now, here's the hard question: how best to arrange that? The safety standards aren't free. If they were, I'd ask that each manicurist have an MD so they can properly treat your wife should she get an open wound. So, clearly to me, we can't have all the safety precautions we can imagine. So the question is, what's the right level? And the answer to that is a very personal decision. I hope you and your wife are quite wealthy and can afford to go to a salon with very high standards (seriously, I do hope that). My teenage daughter doesn't need that level of security and she isn't willing to pay for it.
The hot answer these days for things like manicurists is reputation. Don't go to a salon with a 1.5 star rating on Yelp. That's how ride sharing and home sharing services also regulate their quality. And companies are really, really serious about maintaining their reputation.
So the question we need to always ask is which we trust more: a licensing board (who doesn't actually have any skin in the game if something goes south) or the company providing the good or service (who has a lot to lose)? The answer will be different in different circumstances but don't assume government regulation is the only or best option.
Would you say the job requirements and barriers for being an engineer is the same as a taxi driver? (All engineering jokes aside.)
Of course not.
Would you believe that one is self limiting by nature and one is not and need external limiting?
Nope, I don't believe that. I think they're only different in degree, not in kind. If you gave out Engineer Medallions and limited the supply, I think engineer salaries would skyrocket and it would be really, really hard to hire engineers. The only real difference between the two is it takes longer to get trained to be an engineer versus becoming a reasonable driver so the RC constant is larger. Although, now that I think of it, the barrier to entry for software development is a $500 laptop, internet access, and I dunno, a year or two of consistent effort. It probably takes a year or two of driving to be good enough to be a ride sharing driver.
There's a reasonable argument that there's a right number of Taxis.
No, I don't think there is. The number is very fluid. It changes from minute to minute and from location to location, and from person to person. I personally have no idea how you'd go about figuring it out. I don't even know how you'd decide one value is better than another because that's a judgement call, not an objective fact.
Free marketers would say that the market would find the right level. But that's religion, not reality. A free market finds A level, not necessarily the right level.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
Somehow we need to come up with the number of available taxis right now. I'm a rabid free marketer, just so you know my biases. I have no idea how many people need rides right now, how congested the streets are, how many drivers have cars and nothing to do, how much money they'd need to give up their next best alternative. It's a really, really complicated problem and I think it's uncomputable. There's no way a taxi commission or taxi company can come up with a single "right" number of taxis.
Even assuming you were omniscient and could measure everything, you'd still have to make a subjective judgement. I may be a cheapskate who doesn't mind congestion. You might be Daddy Warbucks who really likes being whisked through deserted streets. The guy reading this post might be Scrooge McDuck who likes crowded streets because it screams "profit opportunity". Who gets to make the call and why should be believe him or her?
Regarding poverty wages, I think it's a little arrogant to say what wages someone should be allowed to accept. I don't think many ride sharing drivers do that as their only source of income. Many people (I'd believe most but I can't prove it) drive around a bit to get a little extra spending cash. Do you really think you know their circumstances so well that you can confidently say it's not worth their time? How can you possibly know that?
Regarding congestion, how about we wait for that to be a problem before we act? My inclination is every ride sharing car probably reduces congestion and at least they don't drive around aimlessly looking for rides like traditional taxis do. Fun fact, a UCLA professor did a study of traffic in Westwood (I think) where they found most of the city street level congestion was people circling the block looking for parking. Just sayin'.
Thise taxes are paid by someone, either the customer through higher prices (which includes improving production efficiency and not passing the lower costs to the consumer), or through lower profits.
You make an important point. Who pays the tax (that is, who writes the check to the government) and who bears the burden (that is, who ultimately bears the cost) are not the same. Generally the burden will be borne by some combination of the investors (lower profits), customers (higher prices) or employees (lower wages and benefits). There may be other parties but those are the biggies. How exactly it works out depends on other factors, mostly how competitive the investment, product, and job markets are.
The problem comes when you see people in the company start to use the company as their credit card....One guy I knew took a 30K a year salary as President of his own company... But he didn't tell most people that the company rented a 2 bedroom apartment in a tower downtown for "out of town" clients that he happened to live in for free, and the company vehicle was his vehicle, and the reason he would take staff out to dinner to chat was so the company would pay for dinner as a business expense, business trips to Europe coincidentally were in cities near Alps ski resorts, etc.
IANAL (but I'm married to a tax accountant). That sounds an awful lot like tax fraud. If a company gives you a benefit like free use of an apartment, I believe you're supposed to pay taxes on the fair market value of that benefit. If you charge something as a business expense (e.g. a dinner), there better be a legitimate business purpose. Auditors also look at the general pattern of behavior and just have to make a case for it walking and quacking like a tax-fraud duck.
The IRS takes a dim view on these things. For example, if you use a room as an office and write off the price, you better not use that room for anything else.
Corporations are the best way we've yet found to really scale this up and generate enormous amounts of wealth for everyone.
Somebody sure drank some good flavored sugar water.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Maybe I wasn't clear.
Let's go back to first principles. You and a few buddies have an idea for a new product. Why would you decide to incorporate? You don't need to. You could all work on your parts of the project, buy your own equipment, write your own code, etc. If you had some shared expense, each of you could chip in your share each time you needed something. When a widget sells, each of you gets a share of the proceeds. Easy peasy. Well, actually, it sounds like a pain in the rear. There's a lot of overhead to do anything. If you want to buy a fridge for your Red Bulls in the garage, each of you has to get out your wallet. There's no single bank account, if one of you leaves, you have to figure out how to sell his share of the fridge and the remaining drinks, and on and on and on.
Now try scaling that up to an organization with 100 people. You'd never get anything done. Now scale to 100,000.
So all I'm saying is that at its core, a corporation is about reducing the friction of having a bunch of people sharing assets so they can work together. If I remember my history correctly, limited liability came later and that's the second important feature.
I'm not saying every corporation is perfect or that corporate law is optimal. All I'm pointing out is that we don't "tolerate" corporations because we want taxes from them. We tolerate (encourage, celebrate) them because they help us be productive.
What I think the OP probably meant was there are some large, well known examples of corporations which s/he thinks are bad actors and the bad behavior of those corporations are tolerated because they pay a lot of taxes. Could be, I'm guessing, and we'd have to go into specifics. I disagree with the blanket implication that all corporations fall into this bucket. I believe that's an inaccurate and simplistic view.
The one thing that the "liberals" forget is that the rich aren't people. They are corporations.
Uhh, how do you figure that? Every corporation is owned by someone. Think about it: if a company had a single share outstanding, how much would the company have to pay to buy that one share back? Answer: the entire value of the company and it's future earnings. It can never be possible.
So if you eliminate corporate tax, you eliminate tax on the rich. They incorporate, and pay nothing.
Yeah, that's just not true. There's no Bill Gates Inc. which holds title to Bill Gate's assets and pays all his expenses. At best he's got his assets in a trust. Every time the fund gives money to the Billster for another jet, that's taxed as Bill's income. All incorporating or putting in trust does is change when the income is recognized and tax paid. The IRS takes a very dim view (*caugh*Clinton Foundation*caugh*) on using a corporation or foundation to convert personal expenses into untaxable corporate expenses.
They are created by law and they let the shareholders hide behind the corporations and not have any personal liability for anything they do in the name of the corporation. This is expensive for society. Still society allows it in return for the money they get from corporations as corporate taxes.
I'm getting off topic but that's not the point of corporations.
Corporations are formed because sometimes it's often easier to work as a group without the friction and transaction costs of trying to coordinate a group of independent actors. In theory, Apple could just hire 10,000 independent contract programmers working out of their houses to develop iOS. That would generate an enormous amount of overhead. At some point it's much cheaper and simpler to create a single legal entity with shared assets, cash flows, processes and the like. That's why people form corporations. Books have been written about this.
We don't tolerate corporations because we can skim taxes off them. Yes, that's a way to finance government but it's not the main point. The real win for society is corporations product products and services we gleefully and willingly buy. That transaction is mutually beneficial (what party will participate if they think they're losing value in the process) so both the buyer and the seller are made better off. Corporations are the best way we've yet found to really scale this up and generate enormous amounts of wealth for everyone.
There's a slew of ways to form a corporation: sole proprietorship, S-corp, C-corp, LLC, and probably others. IANAL so I can't tell you why you choose one over the other. But the whole idea was to make it safe for people to participate in a company and protect some of their personal assets. We as a society decided it was better to let people form corporations and take risks if they didn't have to worry about losing their house when their business idea flops. Most businesses do fail. The ones which succeed produce more value than all the failures lost. We want to make it safe to try crazy things on the off chance it is the next Apple, Google, Newman's Own, whatever.
(I'm trying to remember when limited liability corporations were invented. I think it was in the Netherlands in the early 1600's--some of early Europeans explorers were financed by these funky new LLCs like the Dutch East India trading company. That's about the time you see Europe starting to become very wealthy compared to the rest of the world. The industrial revolution a century and a half later really took advantage of this.)
Hear, hear. The title should be "Workers lose right to be contract employees, set own hours and working conditions."
I wonder if the whole employee/contractor thing is a red herring. As near as I can tell, the key to ride/home/tool/bike/whatever-sharing businesses is they don't have to bring capital to the table. Yeah, it would be more expensive to pay benefits to drivers, but that's not the real win. The real win is the drivers bring their own cars so Uber doesn't have to buy them.
Note this is a win all around. Customers win (low prices), the companies win (low capital structure), the drivers/loaners win (incremental income from idle assets). The only one who loses is the competition.
My cynical understanding is we still have pennies because the zinc manufacturers lobby Congress to keep them around
I just did a little research. Globally, most zinc is used to galvanize steel and make other metal alloys. Coinage accounts for a few percent of global zinc usage. If lobbying is what's keeping zinc coins around, that's really lame. The zinc industry doesn't need pennies to keep themselves afloat.
Hell consider the lowly penny. It costs more to make it than it's worth but it still exists, at least in the US. Canada killed the penny only recently and that's just 1 lowly coin of almost 0 value.
My cynical understanding is we still have pennies because the zinc manufacturers lobby Congress to keep them around. Is it cynical or realistic to assume every nonsensical government program can be explained in terms of distributed cost/concentrated benefit?
Lose the penny. Lose the nickle. I don't even know if dimes are worth it any more.
"I have a bonus target that kicks in when I cut our labor tab by $2 million, this will easily help me get there by eliminating a bunch of Teamster hacks and their pension contributions," Sembrot added.
If they keep cutting costs, maybe Bud will get cheap enough to be worth drinking. Nope, thought about it, it won't.
ESPN is a channel (it's also a company with a zillion channels but that's not what I'm talking about). They distribute a single show at a time at a pre-arranged starting time. I watch what they're showing when they show it. If I don't like their choice, I'm out of luck. Netflix is a catalog. I pick what I want out of a large list. The catalog has thousands of times more pieces of content than a channel does.
DVRs try to turn a set of channels into a catalog. I'd rather skip the intermediate step.
How about no commercials on the channels that I pay for.
What is this "channel" thing of which you speak?
If I had a magic wand, the first thing I'd retire is the concept of a TV channel. The streaming services have the right idea, there's a sea of recorded content I watch on demand. Live events are just content which I can only fast forward to a certain point (which moves forward 60 seconds every minute.)
The second decree would be something to keep me from having to have accounts on a zillion streaming services. That's what made iTMS so great, you could buy everything there. I'd really rather not have a Netflix account for some content, an Amazon account for other stuff. The way it's going, I'm concerned we'll have 500 streaming services and still nothing will be on.
Slashdot Mirror
Cue the Four Yorkshiremen. Or Louis CK's classic rant.
Seriously, you have to remember how far we've come and how fast. My college age kids might remember dial-up modems but probably not. Today one plans her outings around whether there's free public WiFi. That was an unimaginable luxury 15 years ago.
And get off my lawn, you pesky hoodlums! Dagnabit!
"Like" is Randian wankery, a non-response to the issue of people working below the poverty line to pay seven figure salaries to a few executives, and a few billion in profits to investment banks.
And executive pay and corporate profit is a misguided progressive knee-jerk red herring. Can we stop hurling insults now?
Let me try to address your points, even the ones I don't think are relevant.
I've never brought up Rand. I've never even read her books. If anything, I'm a fan of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics.
I agree people living in poverty is unfortunate. As a compassionate person, I'd like to see everyone (world-wide) live in sound housing, have enough to eat, and access to medical care. I'd prefer everyone could live rich, fulfilling lives. I don't think we'll achieve that until the second coming of Jesus but that's the goal. Can we agree we want to make forward progress?
To keep things in perspective, very few people in the US live in the abject poverty you can find outside the US. I do see homeless people around my home in San Jose and think it's desperately sad. I know I should do more to help them and honestly, I don't. And remember, anyone driving for a ride sharing service owns a car which probably puts them in the global top 50%.
Many people have addressed executive pay and profit. It doesn't actually matter. Every time anyone does the math, it turns out to be irrelevent. You can take all the executive pay and all the corporate profit and it turns into a trivial raise, tens of dollars a month, for the rank and file. IMHO, worrying about it is just envy and resentment.
Unless, of course, you're in favor of universal housing, universal health care, and a universal annual income, so working a shit job is an actual choice and not a responsibility if you want to get by. And want your taxes raised accordingly.
What's wrong with having an individual responsibility to get by? Someone needs to be responsible. If you say it's all of us, well, the 1/300,000,000 of my attention I spend on you isn't worth much. Practically speaking, I just don't think that works well.
I think being a bit desperate, a bit scared of your future is a tremendous motivator. I think being able to reap the rewards of your skills, gifts, and efforts is also a tremendous motivator. The magic of a free-market, capitalistic systems is that in order to satisfy my own material needs, I have to provide value to you. We both wind up rewarded and wealthier than before. It's a positive sum game. It's also a pretty happy game if you focus on your own choices and outcome and disregard the fact that others are doing better. It's not a race, it's not a competition, it's a cooperation.
So, no I don't want to pay the necessary taxes to provide universal housing, food, income, and health care. I think that would make us substantially poorer in the long run. I don't think anyone has a right to a non-shit job. I don't think anyone has a right to any job. You get a job because your employer and customers value your output more than you value your time. You keep a job because it's better than your other alternatives, the real ones, not the ones you wish you had.
Ride sharing drivers have a point: driving for Lyft, Uber, etc. doesn't make them much money. No kidding, they're doing something people aren't willing to pay much to have done for them. Driving just doesn't add that much value. The question is, who and how to address that. We can pass a destructive minimum wage law but that will make us in aggregate less well off than not passing the law. Or, we can be more constructive and try to help people with low skills acquire better skills so they can move out of a shit job to something less shitty. That's something I could get behind.
I'm saying that a lot of people do it out of necessity, not that Uber should make the job more enjoyable.
And we're saying that a lot of people do a lot of things out of necessity and get paid less than they'd like for it. What makes ride sharing drivers special?
In my perfect world, I'd have a Star Trek replicator and could spend my time hiking in the mountains. In the real world, I'm about to head to a dull base-touching meeting because that's what my boss pays me to do. I see a difference in numbers but not in kind.
I feel for people who have few things going for them other than being able to drive and owning a car. I'd like for everyone to earn enough to afford a safe place to live, enough food, medical care when they need it, decent clothes, and the like. Many people are not able to do that by themselves (e.g. my teenage daughter and elderly parents) and need help. It's unreasonable to expect either of them to independently support themselves on a 40-hour a week job.
The current winner-take-all plus electors system
Obligatory observation: Lessig is right, the Constitution doesn't say anything about how electors should vote. Each state has their own laws constraining their electors. Nebraska and Maine don't use a winner-take-all system.
I would love for California to instruct its electors to vote proportional to the popular vote in the state, or by the winner in each electoral district. The Democratic party would never let this happen because they'd give up gimmie electoral votes. To get it through, one would have to convince the state powers that getting the attention of the presidential candidate is worth the wrath of the national party. Not gonna happen.
California gives on the order of $60 billion more every year to the federal government than they get back
I certainly hope so. I hope a lot of other states do the same. Giving taxes to the federal government just to have the cash given back is inefficient and pointless. Otherwise, we'd be better off lowering the tax rates and letting the money stay here (I live in California).
It's the same as getting a tax refund in April. If you get one, that means you withheld too much and should plan your taxes better next year.
I thought you meant a government sponsored licensing board. Must be regulated by government. No other way. And yes I know they can become corrupt to but so does anyone.
I don't think it matters if it's a government or industry sponsored licensing board. In both cases, companies have a strong interest in lobbying and influencing the board while customers have a much weaker interest in making sure proceeding are all above board. Look up the history of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It was the first agency intended to regulate railroads, yet within a few years, the railroads had captured the board and used it to drive competitors out of the market. The same story plays out over and over again.
Usually it's going to be a licensing board. It's to easy for a business to fake credentials without one.
The problem with licensing boards is they have a conflict of interest. My understanding is it is quite common for licensing boards to be composed of or heavily influenced by members of the profession (look up regulatory capture).
So, what are the interests of the board? To protect their businesses. They do this in two major ways. One is to protect the business reputation. That's what we, the consumers, want. I want the board to give me assurance the practitioners are good, honest, and qualified, and that bad actors are shut down. But you have to trust they'll actually do this, as opposed to trying to sweep issues under the rug in the hopes no one finds out about it.
They also have the selfish interest of preventing competition. We see this in licensing regulations which are way, way more stringent than are required for quality assurance and safety (for example, training requirements for interior decorators and hair braiders).
As a result, I don't entirely trust licensing boards. All the way from the most mundane (interior decorators) to the most safety critical (e.g. the American Medical Association). Their interests are not aligned with mine and so I believe they will always make decisions which aren't entirely in my best interest.
That's not to say a licensing board is entirely fraudulent. They can provide useful input. It's just not sufficient. As consumers, we need to be aware of this and treat their conclusions with a grain of salt. It's not entirely caveat emptor but we do need to be skeptical and responsible.
No, I don't think there is.
I thought about this a little this morning and I was being a little arrogant myself. Of course we can have a reasonable discussion about this.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
It's less of a faith position to say that a well-informed third party can deduce value than to claim that a mass of uninformed individuals can.
Well, that's a difference in judgement. I don't think either of us can prove that point. All I can say is I believe there are way, way more cases where depending on individuals to jointly, through a free market, can come to a decision on an optimal balance than there cases where a central authority will come to a better answer.
I once visited the famous tourist beauty spot of Biarritz in France. Beauty spot? It is ugly as all sin. The problem is that the mass of tourists have destroyed everything. You have clifftop walks which originally had planned paths, set out in concrete. Tourists didn't want to follow those paths, and walked across the grass. The authorities in Biarritz apparently took the view that you couldn't argue with the crowd, and they reinforced the new paths the tourist created.
That's a shame. I don't know anything about Bairritz but I've got to wonder who was making the decisions and what their incentives are. If the decisions where to put paths was made by some city agency, it doesn't sound like they did such a great job. Certainly you have an incentive problem in that tourists have no incentive to stay on the paths and protect the natural surfaces.
You may have heard of "the tragedy of the commons" -- I don't like the term: where common grazings are still in operation, they are run in planned cooperation between locals who know each other, but the idea is sound: individuals all pursuing self-interest and self-gratification do not act in ways that aim to the common good.
I've totally heard about tragedies of the commons. It's the classic first justification for government regulation. The case you cite, where the individuals using the commons self-regulate, is exactly the sort of solution I'd prefer. The individuals involved regulate themselves in their own enlightened self interest as a way to maximize their common good.
So what's weird here is I think we agree with each other more than we disagree. You point out one instance of what looks like government regulation failure and another instance of what looks like private regulation. Do we disagree with each other?
My wife has had lymph nodes out and if she goes to a salon and they use cuticle pushers incorrectly and break her skin she could be in deep trouble. So yes, there needs to be a minimum ounce of safety even for salons.
OK, you just hit on a really deep and subtle point.
Absolutely, yes, there needs to be some quality standard for manicurists, drivers, engineers, and nuclear power plant operators.
Now, here's the hard question: how best to arrange that? The safety standards aren't free. If they were, I'd ask that each manicurist have an MD so they can properly treat your wife should she get an open wound. So, clearly to me, we can't have all the safety precautions we can imagine. So the question is, what's the right level? And the answer to that is a very personal decision. I hope you and your wife are quite wealthy and can afford to go to a salon with very high standards (seriously, I do hope that). My teenage daughter doesn't need that level of security and she isn't willing to pay for it.
The hot answer these days for things like manicurists is reputation. Don't go to a salon with a 1.5 star rating on Yelp. That's how ride sharing and home sharing services also regulate their quality. And companies are really, really serious about maintaining their reputation.
So the question we need to always ask is which we trust more: a licensing board (who doesn't actually have any skin in the game if something goes south) or the company providing the good or service (who has a lot to lose)? The answer will be different in different circumstances but don't assume government regulation is the only or best option.
Would you say the job requirements and barriers for being an engineer is the same as a taxi driver? (All engineering jokes aside.)
Of course not.
Would you believe that one is self limiting by nature and one is not and need external limiting?
Nope, I don't believe that. I think they're only different in degree, not in kind. If you gave out Engineer Medallions and limited the supply, I think engineer salaries would skyrocket and it would be really, really hard to hire engineers. The only real difference between the two is it takes longer to get trained to be an engineer versus becoming a reasonable driver so the RC constant is larger. Although, now that I think of it, the barrier to entry for software development is a $500 laptop, internet access, and I dunno, a year or two of consistent effort. It probably takes a year or two of driving to be good enough to be a ride sharing driver.
There's a reasonable argument that there's a right number of Taxis.
No, I don't think there is. The number is very fluid. It changes from minute to minute and from location to location, and from person to person. I personally have no idea how you'd go about figuring it out. I don't even know how you'd decide one value is better than another because that's a judgement call, not an objective fact.
Free marketers would say that the market would find the right level. But that's religion, not reality. A free market finds A level, not necessarily the right level.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
Somehow we need to come up with the number of available taxis right now. I'm a rabid free marketer, just so you know my biases. I have no idea how many people need rides right now, how congested the streets are, how many drivers have cars and nothing to do, how much money they'd need to give up their next best alternative. It's a really, really complicated problem and I think it's uncomputable. There's no way a taxi commission or taxi company can come up with a single "right" number of taxis.
Even assuming you were omniscient and could measure everything, you'd still have to make a subjective judgement. I may be a cheapskate who doesn't mind congestion. You might be Daddy Warbucks who really likes being whisked through deserted streets. The guy reading this post might be Scrooge McDuck who likes crowded streets because it screams "profit opportunity". Who gets to make the call and why should be believe him or her?
Regarding poverty wages, I think it's a little arrogant to say what wages someone should be allowed to accept. I don't think many ride sharing drivers do that as their only source of income. Many people (I'd believe most but I can't prove it) drive around a bit to get a little extra spending cash. Do you really think you know their circumstances so well that you can confidently say it's not worth their time? How can you possibly know that?
Regarding congestion, how about we wait for that to be a problem before we act? My inclination is every ride sharing car probably reduces congestion and at least they don't drive around aimlessly looking for rides like traditional taxis do. Fun fact, a UCLA professor did a study of traffic in Westwood (I think) where they found most of the city street level congestion was people circling the block looking for parking. Just sayin'.
Thise taxes are paid by someone, either the customer through higher prices (which includes improving production efficiency and not passing the lower costs to the consumer), or through lower profits.
You make an important point. Who pays the tax (that is, who writes the check to the government) and who bears the burden (that is, who ultimately bears the cost) are not the same. Generally the burden will be borne by some combination of the investors (lower profits), customers (higher prices) or employees (lower wages and benefits). There may be other parties but those are the biggies. How exactly it works out depends on other factors, mostly how competitive the investment, product, and job markets are.
The problem comes when you see people in the company start to use the company as their credit card....One guy I knew took a 30K a year salary as President of his own company... But he didn't tell most people that the company rented a 2 bedroom apartment in a tower downtown for "out of town" clients that he happened to live in for free, and the company vehicle was his vehicle, and the reason he would take staff out to dinner to chat was so the company would pay for dinner as a business expense, business trips to Europe coincidentally were in cities near Alps ski resorts, etc.
IANAL (but I'm married to a tax accountant). That sounds an awful lot like tax fraud. If a company gives you a benefit like free use of an apartment, I believe you're supposed to pay taxes on the fair market value of that benefit. If you charge something as a business expense (e.g. a dinner), there better be a legitimate business purpose. Auditors also look at the general pattern of behavior and just have to make a case for it walking and quacking like a tax-fraud duck.
The IRS takes a dim view on these things. For example, if you use a room as an office and write off the price, you better not use that room for anything else.
Somebody sure drank some good flavored sugar water.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Maybe I wasn't clear.
Let's go back to first principles. You and a few buddies have an idea for a new product. Why would you decide to incorporate? You don't need to. You could all work on your parts of the project, buy your own equipment, write your own code, etc. If you had some shared expense, each of you could chip in your share each time you needed something. When a widget sells, each of you gets a share of the proceeds. Easy peasy. Well, actually, it sounds like a pain in the rear. There's a lot of overhead to do anything. If you want to buy a fridge for your Red Bulls in the garage, each of you has to get out your wallet. There's no single bank account, if one of you leaves, you have to figure out how to sell his share of the fridge and the remaining drinks, and on and on and on.
Now try scaling that up to an organization with 100 people. You'd never get anything done. Now scale to 100,000.
So all I'm saying is that at its core, a corporation is about reducing the friction of having a bunch of people sharing assets so they can work together. If I remember my history correctly, limited liability came later and that's the second important feature.
I'm not saying every corporation is perfect or that corporate law is optimal. All I'm pointing out is that we don't "tolerate" corporations because we want taxes from them. We tolerate (encourage, celebrate) them because they help us be productive.
What I think the OP probably meant was there are some large, well known examples of corporations which s/he thinks are bad actors and the bad behavior of those corporations are tolerated because they pay a lot of taxes. Could be, I'm guessing, and we'd have to go into specifics. I disagree with the blanket implication that all corporations fall into this bucket. I believe that's an inaccurate and simplistic view.
Does that make my position clearer?
The one thing that the "liberals" forget is that the rich aren't people. They are corporations.
Uhh, how do you figure that? Every corporation is owned by someone. Think about it: if a company had a single share outstanding, how much would the company have to pay to buy that one share back? Answer: the entire value of the company and it's future earnings. It can never be possible.
So if you eliminate corporate tax, you eliminate tax on the rich. They incorporate, and pay nothing.
Yeah, that's just not true. There's no Bill Gates Inc. which holds title to Bill Gate's assets and pays all his expenses. At best he's got his assets in a trust. Every time the fund gives money to the Billster for another jet, that's taxed as Bill's income. All incorporating or putting in trust does is change when the income is recognized and tax paid. The IRS takes a very dim view (*caugh*Clinton Foundation*caugh*) on using a corporation or foundation to convert personal expenses into untaxable corporate expenses.
They are created by law and they let the shareholders hide behind the corporations and not have any personal liability for anything they do in the name of the corporation. This is expensive for society. Still society allows it in return for the money they get from corporations as corporate taxes.
I'm getting off topic but that's not the point of corporations.
Corporations are formed because sometimes it's often easier to work as a group without the friction and transaction costs of trying to coordinate a group of independent actors. In theory, Apple could just hire 10,000 independent contract programmers working out of their houses to develop iOS. That would generate an enormous amount of overhead. At some point it's much cheaper and simpler to create a single legal entity with shared assets, cash flows, processes and the like. That's why people form corporations. Books have been written about this.
We don't tolerate corporations because we can skim taxes off them. Yes, that's a way to finance government but it's not the main point. The real win for society is corporations product products and services we gleefully and willingly buy. That transaction is mutually beneficial (what party will participate if they think they're losing value in the process) so both the buyer and the seller are made better off. Corporations are the best way we've yet found to really scale this up and generate enormous amounts of wealth for everyone.
There's a slew of ways to form a corporation: sole proprietorship, S-corp, C-corp, LLC, and probably others. IANAL so I can't tell you why you choose one over the other. But the whole idea was to make it safe for people to participate in a company and protect some of their personal assets. We as a society decided it was better to let people form corporations and take risks if they didn't have to worry about losing their house when their business idea flops. Most businesses do fail. The ones which succeed produce more value than all the failures lost. We want to make it safe to try crazy things on the off chance it is the next Apple, Google, Newman's Own, whatever.
(I'm trying to remember when limited liability corporations were invented. I think it was in the Netherlands in the early 1600's--some of early Europeans explorers were financed by these funky new LLCs like the Dutch East India trading company. That's about the time you see Europe starting to become very wealthy compared to the rest of the world. The industrial revolution a century and a half later really took advantage of this.)
Hear, hear. The title should be "Workers lose right to be contract employees, set own hours and working conditions."
I wonder if the whole employee/contractor thing is a red herring. As near as I can tell, the key to ride/home/tool/bike/whatever-sharing businesses is they don't have to bring capital to the table. Yeah, it would be more expensive to pay benefits to drivers, but that's not the real win. The real win is the drivers bring their own cars so Uber doesn't have to buy them.
Note this is a win all around. Customers win (low prices), the companies win (low capital structure), the drivers/loaners win (incremental income from idle assets). The only one who loses is the competition.
My cynical understanding is we still have pennies because the zinc manufacturers lobby Congress to keep them around
I just did a little research. Globally, most zinc is used to galvanize steel and make other metal alloys. Coinage accounts for a few percent of global zinc usage. If lobbying is what's keeping zinc coins around, that's really lame. The zinc industry doesn't need pennies to keep themselves afloat.
Hell consider the lowly penny. It costs more to make it than it's worth but it still exists, at least in the US. Canada killed the penny only recently and that's just 1 lowly coin of almost 0 value.
My cynical understanding is we still have pennies because the zinc manufacturers lobby Congress to keep them around. Is it cynical or realistic to assume every nonsensical government program can be explained in terms of distributed cost/concentrated benefit?
Lose the penny. Lose the nickle. I don't even know if dimes are worth it any more.
"I have a bonus target that kicks in when I cut our labor tab by $2 million, this will easily help me get there by eliminating a bunch of Teamster hacks and their pension contributions," Sembrot added.
If they keep cutting costs, maybe Bud will get cheap enough to be worth drinking. Nope, thought about it, it won't.
Netflix is a channel.
Either you missed my point or I'm missing yours.
ESPN is a channel (it's also a company with a zillion channels but that's not what I'm talking about). They distribute a single show at a time at a pre-arranged starting time. I watch what they're showing when they show it. If I don't like their choice, I'm out of luck. Netflix is a catalog. I pick what I want out of a large list. The catalog has thousands of times more pieces of content than a channel does.
DVRs try to turn a set of channels into a catalog. I'd rather skip the intermediate step.
How about no commercials on the channels that I pay for.
What is this "channel" thing of which you speak?
If I had a magic wand, the first thing I'd retire is the concept of a TV channel. The streaming services have the right idea, there's a sea of recorded content I watch on demand. Live events are just content which I can only fast forward to a certain point (which moves forward 60 seconds every minute.)
The second decree would be something to keep me from having to have accounts on a zillion streaming services. That's what made iTMS so great, you could buy everything there. I'd really rather not have a Netflix account for some content, an Amazon account for other stuff. The way it's going, I'm concerned we'll have 500 streaming services and still nothing will be on.
Isn't Tinder a way to hook up with a sperm donor?