You can't reasonably equate a desire for the free flow and exchange of information, ideas, opinions, and artwork with corporate harvesting of contact and demographic information for marketing purposes.
Democracy functions on our ability to effectively communicate with one another, not the ability of predatory business interests to violate our privacy.
The list's a little silly, but whatever. Steve Forbes's comments, however, are a good dose of absurdist techno-capitalist babble.
Exempli Gratia:
Ray Kroc, for instance, didn't invent the fast-food phenomenon back in the 1950s. But when he saw the facility run by the McDonald brothers, he quickly grasped--as they did not--the awesomely exciting implications of their techniques in a business that was notorious for failure. The idea of creating a chain of thousands of similar restaurants that spanned the globe was, before Kroc's vision, utterly preposterous.
Alternate reading -- Ray Kroc, shrewd businessman, stumbles upon small very profitable business. He proceeds to buy their franchising rights, eventually purchasing the business and taking legal control over the use of their own name, and makes a fortune. McDonald brothers are left in the dust.
Yet all too many academics, politicos, bureaucrats and even businesspeople don't understand that risk-taking is the wellspring of our progress.
Sure, Steve, because we know that none of the great innovations of the twentieth century have involved financial or institutional support from governments, universities, or big business. All garage tinkerers...
But the most potent fiscal incentive is reducing marginal tax rates--i.e., the tax you pay on each additional dollar you earn.
Ah yes, the Steve Forbes innovation. Surprised that wasn't number #86 on the list.
Trial lawyers have progressed too far in diffusing the stark difference between fraud and honest business mistakes.
Yeah, like the Ford Pinto. Just an honest business mistake...
The fundamental concept of limited liability--you can't lose more money than the amount you invested in an entity--is being eroded.
Fun fact -- our founding fathers viewed limited liability corporations with some concern. As a result, such corporations could only be chartered by state legislatures, and had to be renewed every few years. If a corporation didn't seem to be serving the public well, state legislatures would often decharter it.
Corporate directors with M.B.A.s and considerable experience in running businesses have been discovering that in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission they are not qualified to sit on audit committees, because they are not certified public accountants.
Perhaps that could be because spending a few years learning management culture at Harvard doesn't qualify you to thoroughly analyze corporate finances.
Democratic capitalism is moral.
Democratic capitalism? Is that something like military intelligence?
You won't long succeed in business if you don't serve the needs or wants of others.
The only major problem I see with teachers unions is that they can operate to prevent bad teachers from being hired (particularly once they get tenure). But then again, we'd have a lot better teachers hired in the first place if we paid them better.
"Accountability" is one of those buzzwords in education that makes me very nervous, because what it winds up boiling down to is "we trust bureaucrats more than we trust teachers."
What accountability should mean is a shared partnership between students, teachers, parents, and the community to make sure that educational system is serving everyone well.
Instead, what we get is political pressure driving endless standardized testing, so that everyone can have a number to look at it. It doesn't seem to matter that those numbers don't mean sh*t, because, by and large, standardized testing doesn't work, as any good teacher can tell you. (Unless the goal of standardized testing is to make money for the testing industry -- which is huge -- and to program children for a lifetime of menial answer-giving. In that case, they work great.)
What standardized does do is handcuff innovative teachers that truly care about their students and want to give them a love of learning, not a series of facts to memorize and drills to take. Often, it simply drives them away, particularly from schools in poorer and blacker neighborhoods (because standardized tests are statistically proven to be race- and class-biased).
Meanwhile, school district bureaucrats' solutions to these problems (and to bad test scores) is to micromanage teachers' classrooms and implement "one-size-fits-all" solutions that they think will look good to voters, like regularly outfitting every classroom with ever-newer expensive A/V and computer equipment.
What we need in our public schools is smaller schools, smaller class sizes, better teachers, and more flexibility. The first three of those requires a lot of money, which taxpayers are hesitant to pony up (despite being willing to pay billions for weapons systems even the military says it don't need, and build prisons which wouldn't be necessary except for the drug war).
Note that vouchers will not solve these problems, only funnel money away from public schools and put them into private schools which are _totally_ unaccountable (and I don't mean on test scores). Charter schools might help, but only if they're run by community organizations, not for-profit corporations.
inspiration for this post, and the poster believes the original article, was gained largely through understanding the logical basis of the works of Ayn Rand
Ah, yes, that bastion of human compassion. I knew the neocons had to acquire their great personal warmth _somewhere_...
Sure, wealthy folks pay a substantial burden of the personal income tax, as they should. (Although the tax isn't as progressive as it should be, thanks largely to Republican-driven tax-cutting over the past few decades.)
* In 1965, U.S. corporate income taxes were 4.1% of our GDP, compared to 2.4% of GDP in the other OECD countries.
* But by 2000 U.S. corporate income taxes had dropped to 2.5% of GDP, while corporate income taxes in the other OECD countries had risen to 3.4% of GDP.
* In 2002, U.S. corporate taxes plummeted to only 1.5% of our GDP.
I couldn't agree more. But you did leave one very important point out:
11. Build a media and political consensus for all of the above. Exclude any mildly critical voices from the airwaves and from the political process. Reinforce the notion of a political spectrum which stretches from pro-business centrism to reactionary conservativsm. Put Republican media strategists (Roger Ailes) in charge of major news outlets (Fox News).
Yuck. It's been a long while since I've read something so mixed-up and vicious. I knew Ben Stein was a conservative, but I had no idea he was quite this reactionary.
Going blow-by-blow:
Allow schools to fall into useless decay.
I'll give him that -- American public education is definitely on the decline.
Do not teach civics or history...
Indeed, far too little of both.... except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit.
WTF? Have you been in a high-school history classroom lately? Sure, the curriculum now tends to include slavery, genocide against Indians, and so forth, but I've yet to see anything of that caliber in a history text. Even the famously leftist (but wonderful) People's History of the United States comes off making the people (if not the government) of this country look pretty valiant.
Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors.
Hold it right there. We all know teachers' unions can sometimes be a little reactionary, but they're not what's ruining public education today. The biggest threat is precisely the implementation of endless "standards," in which pointy-headed administrators tie teachers' hands in the classrooms and turn learning into nothing more than a series of Scantron answer sheets. You want a capable workforce capable of innovation? Good luck accomplishing it by making them into test-taking robots.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services.
Funny fact -- we actually filed more lawsuits-per-capita in the 19th century than we do today. These endless campaigns to do away with our constitutionally-protected recourse to the courts are nothing more than a greedy attempt by powerful corporate interests to make sure they don't have to pay for the consequences of their misdeeds. I suppose you're driving a Ford Pinto to the game show every day, Ben?
Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
Alternately, use public funds to do life-saving research at the National Institutes for Health, then turn the results over to the drug companies for them to patent and make a killing. Ensure that the FDA is packed with industry insiders who don't understand the very meaning of the word regulation, and then use your profits to engineer a political consensus against any sort of price-controls for prescription drugs. Watch as columnists for business magazines tow the party line.
Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
I suppose the fact that the above-mentioned deep pockets constitute Forbes's readership is totally incidental...
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
In the interests of fairness, here is one area in which Stein is dead-on. Although the problem goes far beyond the lack of adequate standards -- it is really a structural problem in which corporations are not accountable to their workers, consumers, or the public at large. As for union leadership, the biggest problems with unions in this country is that they're too weak, and their leaders compromise too much and don't represent the interests of their members. Ongoing efforts towards union democracy may help that.
Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened.
This is Republican propaganda. The so-called marriage tax penalty was highly questionable to begin with, but it's now been repealed.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
I can't begin to comprehend what the argument is here, beyond racist invective. Most immigrants (documented or otherwise) to this country are hard-working people who do work that most native-born Americans would never care to do.
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income.
Yes, because income taxes are inherently fair, in that those who are benefiting most from our economy are in turn paying a greater share of the costs of making it work. (Sorry, Libertarians, but the market doesn't keep itself afloat.)
Then tax it as capital gains.
Capital gains is income for wealthy people who can make money without working.
Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death.
Sorry, Ben, but the estate tax only applies to estate in the millions of dollars. Besides, if you're four-square in favor of hard work, why give the children of the wealthy a free ride in life?
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
A SOCIALIZED medical system? Geez, Ben, what country are you living in? We have one of the least socialized health care systems in the developed world, and as a result it functions extremely poor. It is grossly inefficient (some amazing percentage of our health care dollars go toward bureaucratic overhead), and puts us somewhere behind Cuba, according to the World Health Organization. We're in the middle of a huge health care crisis in this country, and it's been brought to us by greedy HMOs and drug companies. (Also, see above about corporate welfare for the drug companies.)
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
This country was built by people of a variety of different faiths, frequently persecuted in their homelands, who came here seeking a place to practice their religions freely, and have an opportunity to govern themselves. Our task is allow everyone in America to bring the highest values of their traditions (whatever they may be), to make a society that works for all. Or, we could simply engage in intellectual elitism, pointing and laughing at those we consider backwards.
Never worry, Ben Stein and his ideological allies can bring us back from the brink of disaster, to build a country where everyone is fearful, rule by the rich goes unquestioned, and cultural pluralism is a thing of the past.
Unless the Norweigan legal system is wildly different from the American one, the prosecutor is only doing his case a disservice by demonstrating his technological incompetence before the judge (is there a jury in this case?). Leaves the defense with a great opportunity to paint the prosecution as being grounded in computer illiteracy.
The new campaign laws say flat out that me, Dan Heskett, a private citizen, cannot go to a newspaper and buy an ad within 90 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. Candidates can, but I can't.
Actually, you're free to do exactly that, for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that the law applies only to television and radio ads.
Secondly, the law doesn't prohibit all advertising by outside individuals or interests groups. What is does say is that if such advertising mentions a candidate for election, it must be paid for with "hard" money -- money which is given to organized political committees (not necessarily those of a particular candidate), and hence subject to contribution limits and disclosure rules.
Alternately, if you as an individual wish to spend more than $10,000 in a single year on such ads, you are legally obligate to disclose it.
What you may not do is get together with some of your friends, found an "educational" organization called "Neighbors Against Evil and Corruption," and commence buying issue ads in which you implore voters to call candidate Joe Smith and tell him to end his dealings with the devil -- all the while keeping your identities and contributions secret, because, after all, you're just educating the public, not making a campaign contribution. That's allowed under the old law, and it's what McCain-Feingold was designed to stop.
The FCC might as well be controlled by Libertarians already, given its ever-increasing affection for deregulation and the "free" market.
Dirty little secret: the airwaves are owned by the public. The FCC's supposed purpose is to grant licenses for the use of those airwaves (after all, somebody has to decide who gets to use what portions of the airwaves), on behalf of the public interest.
What has happened over the course of the past few decades is that the FCC has becoming increasingly cozy with the broadcasters it's supposed to be regulating. Meanwhile, Cato Institute-types sit on the sidelines touting the miracles of the free market.
What we end up with is an FCC that's more interested in the interests of giant media corporations than the interests of consumers.
So, please, go ahead and vote Libertarian -- there's plenty more where this came from.
What you're really saying is, Microsoft failed to pay their blackmail^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H contribution money to the democrat party during the 1990s. This is what happens when you cross the Clintonistas.
While I doubt the relationship was quite that direct, that is what I'm saying -- MS's competitors bought politicians (from both parties) while MS wasn't paying attention.
Make no mistake about it - the Green Party handed the election to Bush.
This beyond offtopic, but here goes:
It is a technical truth that if Ralph Nader were not on the ballot in Florida (or New Hampshire), Al Gore would've easily won the election. It is also true that Al Gore would've won the election if he hadn't run one of the worst campaigns in modern political history. It is even truer that he would've won the election if the Republicans didn't control the Florida Governor's Mansion and the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, this entire matter would not be an issue if we joined most of the world's democracies and stopped using first-past-the-post winner-take-all voting.
And don't forget, multi-millionaire Ralph Nader got rich by speculating in stocks of the very corporations he rails against.
Actually, he first came into money after writing Unsafe at Any Speed, when GM hired private detectives to spy on him and attempt a smear campaign. He sued them, won a lot of money, and used it to start Public Citizen. He does have money invested in the stock market, and uses the proceeds to fund his organizations. The man lives in a tiny apartment in Washington D.C. and doesn't even own a color television. Most of this is a matter of public record, and has been reported on frequently in the press.
That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least.
The reality is that we're not going to get the option to elect a president who stands for rigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws, because such a candidate would have great difficulty raising money from business interests who aren't particularly fond of such laws.
Of course, probably the only reason we ever saw an anti-trust case brought against Microsoft to begin with was that Gates & co. hadn't wised up to the need to make generous campaign contributions. With $4.6 million in contributions in the 2000 cycle, I'd say they've now figured things out, and the DoJ's antitrust division can now go back to sleep.
1) "Entreprenurial drive" is not the critical ingredient to setting up business -- capital is. You can have all the entrepreneurial drive you want, but you ain't got a business if you haven't got cash to set up shop. That's very often far beyond the reach of most ordinary working folks. Similar problem with acquiring skills -- college tuition simply isn't affordable for a great many people.
2) Labor creates value. In order to engage in produce value, capital requires workers. A farm is nothing without hands to harvest the crops, GM is nothing without assembly workers to build cars, and Microsoft is nothing without coders to produce software.
You wrote, "But I'm only worth what an employer is willing to pay.".
In reality, every worker is worth the value of the goods (or services) they're producing. The gap between what that value and what they're being paid is going into someone else's pocket.
And as it happens: No, employees don't need bossses to hire them -- there's plenty of functioning examples of worker-owned cooperatives which are effectively and efficiently self-managed.
I apologize, I misread your argument. Or, more specifically, made the assumption that someone on/. using surface-level economic analysis in support of Microsoft was doing so in defense of the holy Market. Apparently your argument was aimed in a different direction.
That does not change the fact, however, that it doesn't hold water. (Again, this is all from a neoclassical (micro/macro) perspective.)
Microsoft's pricing practices are unquestionably evidence of Microsoft's status as a monopoly, for the simple reason that a firm producing for a truly competitive market has no ability to set prices. If a farmer producing eggs attempted to charge more than the going price for his eggs, the result would be his going bankrupt, not his maximizing revenue (eggs being about as close to a perfectly competitive market as I can come up with).
Your Coke example is not salient for the reasons I mentioned before -- colas are not a competitive market, but a case of monopolostic competition (Pepsi is an imperfect substitution good for Coke, and Coke spends millions of dollars on advertising to achieve and enhance that effect.) Thus the degree to which Pepsi and Coke compete on price is limited substantially.
Microsoft has no competition on price (and very little competition on any other front), and thus can set price however it chooses -- the very definition of a monopoly.
Correspondingly, Microsoft's high profit margins are also evidence of their monopoly practices. If they were producing for a competitive market, they would be unable to make any "excess" profit. (See my first post for the reasoning behind that point, but it's fairly standard economic theory.)
The supposed magic of capitalism (Adam Smith's invisible hand) rests upon a competitive market -- one with many producers, relative ease of entry and exit, and an undifferentiated product.
Note that this describes neither the market for colas or computer operating systems. In the case of colas, it may be a case of what some economists call "monopolistic competition," in which the products are highly differentiated, so the producers are not forced to compete on price. (In this case, the differentation is a bit of a fraud, built by multi-million dollar advertising budgets designed to sell an image rather than a beverage.) If the buying public perceived all colas as identical, Coke would sell for no more than its store-brand equivalents.
Microsoft's case, however, is one of obvious monopoly. Note that this does not mean that Microsoft will set the price of Windows as high as it wishes. What it does mean is that Microsoft is able to set the price, rather than having the price determined by the market! Microsoft, if it acts intelligently, will set the price at such a point as it maximizes revenue (volume sold * price).
Which brings us to your question about the level of profit we should consider acceptable. From an economics point of view, only a "normal" rate of profit is acceptable -- anything above that is considered excess profit, and has no social justification. What is a normal rate of profit? It is the "opportunity cost of capital" -- the rate of return capital requires to locate and remain in an industry, rather than investing in, say, federal bonds (which carry no risk).
In a perfectly competitive marketplace, there is never any excess profit. This is because excess profit is a market signal for other firms to enter the market and drive the price down. However, in a market which is served by a monopoly, that monopoly is perfectly able to secure a rate of profit far above the normal rate. In other words, from the point of view of Smith's invisible hand, Microsoft's profit is in no way socially justifiable.
Really, if you're going to toss around the same tired old free market arguments, please consider making some attempt to actually learn the "science" behind your ideology. As it happens, I'm a socialist and think that neoclassical economics is largely nonsense, but I am actually taking the time to gain some working knowledge in it. You would do yourself a favor by doing the same.
Mostly because I'll never collect SocSec, and even when my wife and I were both unemployed we didn't qualify for Medicare and as a consequence have large amounts of medical bills. So I'm paying all of this money out into services I will never see a return from, and a good 40% of my tax money gets taken to fund a military industrial complex that I don't support!
Offhand, I would guess that this is because neither you or your wife is over the age of 65. Medicare is not, nor has it ever purported to be, a program for providing health insurance to the less fortunate. It is a program for providing health care to senior citizens. (There is a separate program, Medicaid, for providing health care to the poor, but it's woefully underfunded, among other shortcomings.) Keep in mind, this entire issue could be solved with a single-payer (Canadian-style) health-care system, which would actually save money by cutting HMOs and insurances companies, and the corresponding high overhead and administrative costs, out of the health care system.
On another note, I agree with you entirely on the defense budget. If the public at large understood that Congress appropriates over one-half of its discretionary budget for the military, and that much of that is going to expensive weapons systems the Pentagon doesn't even want, they'd be outraged.
And, in fact, full-scale public financing systems can be (and are) funded with voluntary check-offs as well.
But really, this is beside the point, because public financing isn't about using public funds to promote the political agendas of anyone in particular, it's about funding a system, through which we all agree that any candidate with significant public support ought to have the resources to get their message out without resorting to whoring themselves to big money interests. Assuming the system is equal and fair, that doesn't benefit any particular political agenda, it only makes room for democratic decision-making outside the context of corporate control.
Of course, the subtext to your argument is that you don't really believe in making collective democratic decisions to protect the public good, and you don't see anything wrong with big money interests.
In my view, these Libertarian notions are a kind of political neurosis in which one becomes convinced that he is living in a vacuum, that he and his neighbors should never be asked to work together on anything, or make any sort of contribution to the public good.
But hey, I'm clearly a dirty collectivist, so what do I know?
While this is certainly an unfortunate practice, it's hardly a new one, except perhaps with regards to the internet.
One of the many benefits of incumbency is the access to government resources which can be used in functionally political ways. The most basic of these is what is known in the business as "franking," whereby congresspeople can send mail to their constituents on the public dime. In 1994, the Republicans ran on a platform of reforming the franking rules, but quickly changed their minds when they found themselves in office.
As with most problems related to political campaigning, the only real fix I see is public campaign financing. By allowing anyone, incumbent or challenger, who can demonstrate a certain threshold of public support (typically through collecting a large number of very small contributions), the advantages of incumbency, fund-raising connections, etc. can be mitigated, candidates can be free to spend their time speaking to the issues, rather than raising money, and, once elected, they won't be quite so loyal to big-money interests.
Yeah, you'd rather they starved. That's always the case.
Um, no.
The liberals who want to help the poor-- what do they do? They spend three trillion dollars in the "war on poverty" in the US and produce a much larger percentage in poverty than before they started.
Well, the "War on Poverty" began and ended with the Johnson administration, and conservatives have by now managed to dismantle most of the social programs created. As for it producing more poverty, show me some numbers not provided by the Cato Institute (or similar), and we'll talk.
You're just a sucker rooting for the mugger who's taking all our money and getting fat on it... meanwhile, eliminating opportunity for the people who are poor to get jobs.
If anybody's taking all of our money and getting fat on it, it's the corporate greedheads who make billions on various forms of corporate welfare, giveaways, tax credits, etc. Not to mention a military budget now approaching $400 billion, most of which is sheer pork for defense contractors.
Great example: minimum wage. Yeah, lets get rid of jobs.... sheesh.
Again, some evidence, please? And not just the standard line of laissez-faire bullshit -- give me numbers showing that the minimum wage hurts, rather than helps, the economy.
Not to mention that all of this violates fundamental human rights.
Have you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lately? It actually guarantees people the right to earn a decent wage, and be provided with housing, health care, etc.
I have the right to earn $2 an hour if I want to.
Do you want to? Have you ever met an American who wants to?
More broadly, do you actually have any, say, logic or argument here, or do you just enjoy using classic conservative cliches to make fun of people of who disagree with you?
Getting totally offtopic here (and I'm not sure I understood the original point about IT labor costs to begin with, unless the implication is that maintaining Linux systems requires dramatically more labor time, which I kind of doubt), but...
This kind of talk about sweatshops reflects the standard neoliberal B.S. Very often, in so-called underdeveloped countries, you're dealing with a population that survives on peasant agriculture and other traditional economic activities. In the name of "opening markets," the West does its level best to destroy the markets for traditional crops (read what happened to the maize economy in Mexico after NAFTA) and otherwise disrupt traditional forms of social organization and ways of making a living, thus leaving people with the appealling choice of working in unsafe sweatshops for ridiculously low wages, AFTER having been otherwise dislocated from rural areas for one reason or another. Very often, young children from rural families will be sent to the factories in the hopes of making money to send back home, only to discover that isn't really possible when you're earning pennies a day.
None of which is to idealize the living conditions of poor farmers, but it does seem preferable to sending 14-year-old girls away from their families to be paid near-nothing for producing Nikes.
I meant no particular insult to you, and am glad to hear you've covered both Putnam and Enron -- I'll look up those articles as soon as I get the chance.
As it happens, I am a fairly regular reader of the Times, though I'm afraid I pay little attention to bylines (with the exception of your opinion columnists, most of whom make me gag).
My concern is with the tendency of the punditocracy to waste endless column inches attempting to analyze social issues and the internet (typically of inflated importance -- how much is society really affected by someone selling penis pills over the net?) using some combination of pompous talking heads and bad analogies, while ignoring serious and pressing social problems. For example, when was the last time your newspaper covered:
the 40 million Americans without health insurance, and the sad prospects for universal coverage in ongoing healthcare debates?
the meteoric rise in wealth inequality in the United States, to the point where the average CEO is now payed 400 times the average worker, up from 40 times just a few decades ago
the continuing decline of family farming in America, under the thumb of giant agribusiness, which is simultaneously patenting life forms and using American consumers as a laboratory for risky genetic experiments?
Like most establishment journalism, the Times continues to suffer from a massive failure to cover the concerns, and the include the voices, of thouse outside of elite political, media, and academic circles. So a reporter like you winds up quoting academics on the social significance of business scams on the net.
... to write an articulate article, with lots of sweeping claims from important-sounding people, which doesn't really offer much to substantiate its claims.
In some ways, I wish the "cyberspace" notion had never been introduced, because it furthers bad analogies like these, comparing the net to a geographical neighborhood, which has apparently become a red-light district.
The reality, of course, is that the internet is a communication medium, not a neighborhood, and the apparently-proliferating number of sleazy businesses making use of it proves very little. Sure, you can make money selling fake penis-enlargement pills at a $57 markup, so long as you can find suckers (although I do admit being a bit surprised that there are so many of them).
Brewster Kahle is right on point, even if his thoughts are buried in the article:
Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.
"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on.
You can't reasonably equate a desire for the free flow and exchange of information, ideas, opinions, and artwork with corporate harvesting of contact and demographic information for marketing purposes.
Democracy functions on our ability to effectively communicate with one another, not the ability of predatory business interests to violate our privacy.
As for getting rid of pay phones, I'm fine with it. I mean, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone?
Last week. I even called someone on it.
The list's a little silly, but whatever. Steve Forbes's comments, however, are a good dose of absurdist techno-capitalist babble.
Exempli Gratia:
Ray Kroc, for instance, didn't invent the fast-food phenomenon back in the 1950s. But when he saw the facility run by the McDonald brothers, he quickly grasped--as they did not--the awesomely exciting implications of their techniques in a business that was notorious for failure. The idea of creating a chain of thousands of similar restaurants that spanned the globe was, before Kroc's vision, utterly preposterous.
Alternate reading -- Ray Kroc, shrewd businessman, stumbles upon small very profitable business. He proceeds to buy their franchising rights, eventually purchasing the business and taking legal control over the use of their own name, and makes a fortune. McDonald brothers are left in the dust.
Yet all too many academics, politicos, bureaucrats and even businesspeople don't understand that risk-taking is the wellspring of our progress.
Sure, Steve, because we know that none of the great innovations of the twentieth century have involved financial or institutional support from governments, universities, or big business. All garage tinkerers...
But the most potent fiscal incentive is reducing marginal tax rates--i.e., the tax you pay on each additional dollar you earn.
Ah yes, the Steve Forbes innovation. Surprised that wasn't number #86 on the list.
Trial lawyers have progressed too far in diffusing the stark difference between fraud and honest business mistakes.
Yeah, like the Ford Pinto. Just an honest business mistake...
The fundamental concept of limited liability--you can't lose more money than the amount you invested in an entity--is being eroded.
Fun fact -- our founding fathers viewed limited liability corporations with some concern. As a result, such corporations could only be chartered by state legislatures, and had to be renewed every few years. If a corporation didn't seem to be serving the public well, state legislatures would often decharter it.
Corporate directors with M.B.A.s and considerable experience in running businesses have been discovering that in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission they are not qualified to sit on audit committees, because they are not certified public accountants.
Perhaps that could be because spending a few years learning management culture at Harvard doesn't qualify you to thoroughly analyze corporate finances.
Democratic capitalism is moral.
Democratic capitalism? Is that something like military intelligence?
You won't long succeed in business if you don't serve the needs or wants of others.
Yeah, that's why Ken Lay did so poorly...
The only major problem I see with teachers unions is that they can operate to prevent bad teachers from being hired (particularly once they get tenure). But then again, we'd have a lot better teachers hired in the first place if we paid them better.
"Accountability" is one of those buzzwords in education that makes me very nervous, because what it winds up boiling down to is "we trust bureaucrats more than we trust teachers."
What accountability should mean is a shared partnership between students, teachers, parents, and the community to make sure that educational system is serving everyone well.
Instead, what we get is political pressure driving endless standardized testing, so that everyone can have a number to look at it. It doesn't seem to matter that those numbers don't mean sh*t, because, by and large, standardized testing doesn't work, as any good teacher can tell you. (Unless the goal of standardized testing is to make money for the testing industry -- which is huge -- and to program children for a lifetime of menial answer-giving. In that case, they work great.)
What standardized does do is handcuff innovative teachers that truly care about their students and want to give them a love of learning, not a series of facts to memorize and drills to take. Often, it simply drives them away, particularly from schools in poorer and blacker neighborhoods (because standardized tests are statistically proven to be race- and class-biased).
Meanwhile, school district bureaucrats' solutions to these problems (and to bad test scores) is to micromanage teachers' classrooms and implement "one-size-fits-all" solutions that they think will look good to voters, like regularly outfitting every classroom with ever-newer expensive A/V and computer equipment.
What we need in our public schools is smaller schools, smaller class sizes, better teachers, and more flexibility. The first three of those requires a lot of money, which taxpayers are hesitant to pony up (despite being willing to pay billions for weapons systems even the military says it don't need, and build prisons which wouldn't be necessary except for the drug war).
Note that vouchers will not solve these problems, only funnel money away from public schools and put them into private schools which are _totally_ unaccountable (and I don't mean on test scores). Charter schools might help, but only if they're run by community organizations, not for-profit corporations.
inspiration for this post, and the poster believes the original article, was gained largely through understanding the logical basis of the works of Ayn Rand
Ah, yes, that bastion of human compassion. I knew the neocons had to acquire their great personal warmth _somewhere_...
Sure, wealthy folks pay a substantial burden of the personal income tax, as they should. (Although the tax isn't as progressive as it should be, thanks largely to Republican-driven tax-cutting over the past few decades.)
But check out this little tidbit from Citizens for Tax Justice:
* In 1965, U.S. corporate income taxes were 4.1% of our GDP, compared to 2.4% of GDP in the other OECD countries.
* But by 2000 U.S. corporate income taxes had dropped to 2.5% of GDP, while corporate income taxes in the other OECD countries had risen to 3.4% of GDP.
* In 2002, U.S. corporate taxes plummeted to only 1.5% of our GDP.
I couldn't agree more. But you did leave one very important point out:
11. Build a media and political consensus for all of the above. Exclude any mildly critical voices from the airwaves and from the political process. Reinforce the notion of a political spectrum which stretches from pro-business centrism to reactionary conservativsm. Put Republican media strategists (Roger Ailes) in charge of major news outlets (Fox News).
Yuck. It's been a long while since I've read something so mixed-up and vicious. I knew Ben Stein was a conservative, but I had no idea he was quite this reactionary.
...
... except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit.
Going blow-by-blow:
Allow schools to fall into useless decay.
I'll give him that -- American public education is definitely on the decline.
Do not teach civics or history
Indeed, far too little of both.
WTF? Have you been in a high-school history classroom lately? Sure, the curriculum now tends to include slavery, genocide against Indians, and so forth, but I've yet to see anything of that caliber in a history text. Even the famously leftist (but wonderful) People's History of the United States comes off making the people (if not the government) of this country look pretty valiant.
Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors.
Hold it right there. We all know teachers' unions can sometimes be a little reactionary, but they're not what's ruining public education today. The biggest threat is precisely the implementation of endless "standards," in which pointy-headed administrators tie teachers' hands in the classrooms and turn learning into nothing more than a series of Scantron answer sheets. You want a capable workforce capable of innovation? Good luck accomplishing it by making them into test-taking robots.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services.
Funny fact -- we actually filed more lawsuits-per-capita in the 19th century than we do today. These endless campaigns to do away with our constitutionally-protected recourse to the courts are nothing more than a greedy attempt by powerful corporate interests to make sure they don't have to pay for the consequences of their misdeeds. I suppose you're driving a Ford Pinto to the game show every day, Ben?
Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
Alternately, use public funds to do life-saving research at the National Institutes for Health, then turn the results over to the drug companies for them to patent and make a killing. Ensure that the FDA is packed with industry insiders who don't understand the very meaning of the word regulation, and then use your profits to engineer a political consensus against any sort of price-controls for prescription drugs. Watch as columnists for business magazines tow the party line.
Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
I suppose the fact that the above-mentioned deep pockets constitute Forbes's readership is totally incidental...
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
In the interests of fairness, here is one area in which Stein is dead-on. Although the problem goes far beyond the lack of adequate standards -- it is really a structural problem in which corporations are not accountable to their workers, consumers, or the public at large. As for union leadership, the biggest problems with unions in this country is that they're too weak, and their leaders compromise too much and don't represent the interests of their members. Ongoing efforts towards union democracy may help that.
Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened.
This is Republican propaganda. The so-called marriage tax penalty was highly questionable to begin with, but it's now been repealed.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
I can't begin to comprehend what the argument is here, beyond racist invective. Most immigrants (documented or otherwise) to this country are hard-working people who do work that most native-born Americans would never care to do.
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income.
Yes, because income taxes are inherently fair, in that those who are benefiting most from our economy are in turn paying a greater share of the costs of making it work. (Sorry, Libertarians, but the market doesn't keep itself afloat.)
Then tax it as capital gains.
Capital gains is income for wealthy people who can make money without working.
Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death.
Sorry, Ben, but the estate tax only applies to estate in the millions of dollars. Besides, if you're four-square in favor of hard work, why give the children of the wealthy a free ride in life?
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
A SOCIALIZED medical system? Geez, Ben, what country are you living in? We have one of the least socialized health care systems in the developed world, and as a result it functions extremely poor. It is grossly inefficient (some amazing percentage of our health care dollars go toward bureaucratic overhead), and puts us somewhere behind Cuba, according to the World Health Organization. We're in the middle of a huge health care crisis in this country, and it's been brought to us by greedy HMOs and drug companies. (Also, see above about corporate welfare for the drug companies.)
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
This country was built by people of a variety of different faiths, frequently persecuted in their homelands, who came here seeking a place to practice their religions freely, and have an opportunity to govern themselves. Our task is allow everyone in America to bring the highest values of their traditions (whatever they may be), to make a society that works for all. Or, we could simply engage in intellectual elitism, pointing and laughing at those we consider backwards.
Never worry, Ben Stein and his ideological allies can bring us back from the brink of disaster, to build a country where everyone is fearful, rule by the rich goes unquestioned, and cultural pluralism is a thing of the past.
Unless the Norweigan legal system is wildly different from the American one, the prosecutor is only doing his case a disservice by demonstrating his technological incompetence before the judge (is there a jury in this case?). Leaves the defense with a great opportunity to paint the prosecution as being grounded in computer illiteracy.
The new campaign laws say flat out that me, Dan Heskett, a private citizen, cannot go to a newspaper and buy an ad within 90 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. Candidates can, but I can't.
Actually, you're free to do exactly that, for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that the law applies only to television and radio ads.
Secondly, the law doesn't prohibit all advertising by outside individuals or interests groups. What is does say is that if such advertising mentions a candidate for election, it must be paid for with "hard" money -- money which is given to organized political committees (not necessarily those of a particular candidate), and hence subject to contribution limits and disclosure rules.
Alternately, if you as an individual wish to spend more than $10,000 in a single year on such ads, you are legally obligate to disclose it.
What you may not do is get together with some of your friends, found an "educational" organization called "Neighbors Against Evil and Corruption," and commence buying issue ads in which you implore voters to call candidate Joe Smith and tell him to end his dealings with the devil -- all the while keeping your identities and contributions secret, because, after all, you're just educating the public, not making a campaign contribution. That's allowed under the old law, and it's what McCain-Feingold was designed to stop.
The FCC might as well be controlled by Libertarians already, given its ever-increasing affection for deregulation and the "free" market.
Dirty little secret: the airwaves are owned by the public. The FCC's supposed purpose is to grant licenses for the use of those airwaves (after all, somebody has to decide who gets to use what portions of the airwaves), on behalf of the public interest.
What has happened over the course of the past few decades is that the FCC has becoming increasingly cozy with the broadcasters it's supposed to be regulating. Meanwhile, Cato Institute-types sit on the sidelines touting the miracles of the free market.
What we end up with is an FCC that's more interested in the interests of giant media corporations than the interests of consumers.
So, please, go ahead and vote Libertarian -- there's plenty more where this came from.
... roughly 17 million children $40 billion would provide health care for (under Medicaid, at a nat'l average of ~$2,300 per child)
$40 billion is slightly more than the annual budgets for the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation combined.
Say what you want about whether it's justified, but $40 billion isn't pocket change, even by federal standards.
What you're really saying is, Microsoft failed to pay their blackmail^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H contribution money to the democrat party during the 1990s. This is what happens when you cross the Clintonistas.
While I doubt the relationship was quite that direct, that is what I'm saying -- MS's competitors bought politicians (from both parties) while MS wasn't paying attention.
Make no mistake about it - the Green Party handed the election to Bush.
This beyond offtopic, but here goes:
It is a technical truth that if Ralph Nader were not on the ballot in Florida (or New Hampshire), Al Gore would've easily won the election. It is also true that Al Gore would've won the election if he hadn't run one of the worst campaigns in modern political history. It is even truer that he would've won the election if the Republicans didn't control the Florida Governor's Mansion and the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, this entire matter would not be an issue if we joined most of the world's democracies and stopped using first-past-the-post winner-take-all voting.
And don't forget, multi-millionaire Ralph Nader got rich by speculating in stocks of the very corporations he rails against.
Actually, he first came into money after writing Unsafe at Any Speed, when GM hired private detectives to spy on him and attempt a smear campaign. He sued them, won a lot of money, and used it to start Public Citizen. He does have money invested in the stock market, and uses the proceeds to fund his organizations. The man lives in a tiny apartment in Washington D.C. and doesn't even own a color television. Most of this is a matter of public record, and has been reported on frequently in the press.
That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least.
The reality is that we're not going to get the option to elect a president who stands for rigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws, because such a candidate would have great difficulty raising money from business interests who aren't particularly fond of such laws.
Of course, probably the only reason we ever saw an anti-trust case brought against Microsoft to begin with was that Gates & co. hadn't wised up to the need to make generous campaign contributions. With $4.6 million in contributions in the 2000 cycle, I'd say they've now figured things out, and the DoJ's antitrust division can now go back to sleep.
You're fundamentally wrong, on two basic points:
1) "Entreprenurial drive" is not the critical ingredient to setting up business -- capital is. You can have all the entrepreneurial drive you want, but you ain't got a business if you haven't got cash to set up shop. That's very often far beyond the reach of most ordinary working folks. Similar problem with acquiring skills -- college tuition simply isn't affordable for a great many people.
2) Labor creates value. In order to engage in produce value, capital requires workers. A farm is nothing without hands to harvest the crops, GM is nothing without assembly workers to build cars, and Microsoft is nothing without coders to produce software.
You wrote, "But I'm only worth what an employer is willing to pay.".
In reality, every worker is worth the value of the goods (or services) they're producing. The gap between what that value and what they're being paid is going into someone else's pocket.
And as it happens: No, employees don't need bossses to hire them -- there's plenty of functioning examples of worker-owned cooperatives which are effectively and efficiently self-managed.
Except our elected Attorney General (Tom Reilly) is a Democrat.
(As an aside, please tell me you're not implying that Massachusetts Democrats are populist foes of big business....)
I apologize, I misread your argument. Or, more specifically, made the assumption that someone on /. using surface-level economic analysis in support of Microsoft was doing so in defense of the holy Market. Apparently your argument was aimed in a different direction.
That does not change the fact, however, that it doesn't hold water. (Again, this is all from a neoclassical (micro/macro) perspective.)
Microsoft's pricing practices are unquestionably evidence of Microsoft's status as a monopoly, for the simple reason that a firm producing for a truly competitive market has no ability to set prices. If a farmer producing eggs attempted to charge more than the going price for his eggs, the result would be his going bankrupt, not his maximizing revenue (eggs being about as close to a perfectly competitive market as I can come up with).
Your Coke example is not salient for the reasons I mentioned before -- colas are not a competitive market, but a case of monopolostic competition (Pepsi is an imperfect substitution good for Coke, and Coke spends millions of dollars on advertising to achieve and enhance that effect.) Thus the degree to which Pepsi and Coke compete on price is limited substantially.
Microsoft has no competition on price (and very little competition on any other front), and thus can set price however it chooses -- the very definition of a monopoly.
Correspondingly, Microsoft's high profit margins are also evidence of their monopoly practices. If they were producing for a competitive market, they would be unable to make any "excess" profit. (See my first post for the reasoning behind that point, but it's fairly standard economic theory.)
The supposed magic of capitalism (Adam Smith's invisible hand) rests upon a competitive market -- one with many producers, relative ease of entry and exit, and an undifferentiated product.
Note that this describes neither the market for colas or computer operating systems. In the case of colas, it may be a case of what some economists call "monopolistic competition," in which the products are highly differentiated, so the producers are not forced to compete on price. (In this case, the differentation is a bit of a fraud, built by multi-million dollar advertising budgets designed to sell an image rather than a beverage.) If the buying public perceived all colas as identical, Coke would sell for no more than its store-brand equivalents.
Microsoft's case, however, is one of obvious monopoly. Note that this does not mean that Microsoft will set the price of Windows as high as it wishes. What it does mean is that Microsoft is able to set the price, rather than having the price determined by the market! Microsoft, if it acts intelligently, will set the price at such a point as it maximizes revenue (volume sold * price).
Which brings us to your question about the level of profit we should consider acceptable. From an economics point of view, only a "normal" rate of profit is acceptable -- anything above that is considered excess profit, and has no social justification. What is a normal rate of profit? It is the "opportunity cost of capital" -- the rate of return capital requires to locate and remain in an industry, rather than investing in, say, federal bonds (which carry no risk).
In a perfectly competitive marketplace, there is never any excess profit. This is because excess profit is a market signal for other firms to enter the market and drive the price down. However, in a market which is served by a monopoly, that monopoly is perfectly able to secure a rate of profit far above the normal rate. In other words, from the point of view of Smith's invisible hand, Microsoft's profit is in no way socially justifiable.
Really, if you're going to toss around the same tired old free market arguments, please consider making some attempt to actually learn the "science" behind your ideology. As it happens, I'm a socialist and think that neoclassical economics is largely nonsense, but I am actually taking the time to gain some working knowledge in it. You would do yourself a favor by doing the same.
Mostly because I'll never collect SocSec, and even when my wife and I were both unemployed we didn't qualify for Medicare and as a consequence have large amounts of medical bills. So I'm paying all of this money out into services I will never see a return from, and a good 40% of my tax money gets taken to fund a military industrial complex that I don't support!
Offhand, I would guess that this is because neither you or your wife is over the age of 65. Medicare is not, nor has it ever purported to be, a program for providing health insurance to the less fortunate. It is a program for providing health care to senior citizens. (There is a separate program, Medicaid, for providing health care to the poor, but it's woefully underfunded, among other shortcomings.) Keep in mind, this entire issue could be solved with a single-payer (Canadian-style) health-care system, which would actually save money by cutting HMOs and insurances companies, and the corresponding high overhead and administrative costs, out of the health care system.
On another note, I agree with you entirely on the defense budget. If the public at large understood that Congress appropriates over one-half of its discretionary budget for the military, and that much of that is going to expensive weapons systems the Pentagon doesn't even want, they'd be outraged.
And, in fact, full-scale public financing systems can be (and are) funded with voluntary check-offs as well.
But really, this is beside the point, because public financing isn't about using public funds to promote the political agendas of anyone in particular, it's about funding a system, through which we all agree that any candidate with significant public support ought to have the resources to get their message out without resorting to whoring themselves to big money interests. Assuming the system is equal and fair, that doesn't benefit any particular political agenda, it only makes room for democratic decision-making outside the context of corporate control.
Of course, the subtext to your argument is that you don't really believe in making collective democratic decisions to protect the public good, and you don't see anything wrong with big money interests.
In my view, these Libertarian notions are a kind of political neurosis in which one becomes convinced that he is living in a vacuum, that he and his neighbors should never be asked to work together on anything, or make any sort of contribution to the public good.
But hey, I'm clearly a dirty collectivist, so what do I know?
While this is certainly an unfortunate practice, it's hardly a new one, except perhaps with regards to the internet.
One of the many benefits of incumbency is the access to government resources which can be used in functionally political ways. The most basic of these is what is known in the business as "franking," whereby congresspeople can send mail to their constituents on the public dime. In 1994, the Republicans ran on a platform of reforming the franking rules, but quickly changed their minds when they found themselves in office.
As with most problems related to political campaigning, the only real fix I see is public campaign financing. By allowing anyone, incumbent or challenger, who can demonstrate a certain threshold of public support (typically through collecting a large number of very small contributions), the advantages of incumbency, fund-raising connections, etc. can be mitigated, candidates can be free to spend their time speaking to the issues, rather than raising money, and, once elected, they won't be quite so loyal to big-money interests.
(If you live in Massachusetts, be sure to vote yes on Ballot Question 2, to preserve our Clean Elections public-financing system.)
Yeah, you'd rather they starved. That's always the case.
Um, no.
The liberals who want to help the poor-- what do they do? They spend three trillion dollars in the "war on poverty" in the US and produce a much larger percentage in poverty than before they started.
Well, the "War on Poverty" began and ended with the Johnson administration, and conservatives have by now managed to dismantle most of the social programs created. As for it producing more poverty, show me some numbers not provided by the Cato Institute (or similar), and we'll talk.
You're just a sucker rooting for the mugger who's taking all our money and getting fat on it... meanwhile, eliminating opportunity for the people who are poor to get jobs.
If anybody's taking all of our money and getting fat on it, it's the corporate greedheads who make billions on various forms of corporate welfare, giveaways, tax credits, etc. Not to mention a military budget now approaching $400 billion, most of which is sheer pork for defense contractors.
Great example: minimum wage. Yeah, lets get rid of jobs.... sheesh.
Again, some evidence, please? And not just the standard line of laissez-faire bullshit -- give me numbers showing that the minimum wage hurts, rather than helps, the economy.
Not to mention that all of this violates fundamental human rights.
Have you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lately? It actually guarantees people the right to earn a decent wage, and be provided with housing, health care, etc.
I have the right to earn $2 an hour if I want to.
Do you want to? Have you ever met an American who wants to?
More broadly, do you actually have any, say, logic or argument here, or do you just enjoy using classic conservative cliches to make fun of people of who disagree with you?
Getting totally offtopic here (and I'm not sure I understood the original point about IT labor costs to begin with, unless the implication is that maintaining Linux systems requires dramatically more labor time, which I kind of doubt), but ...
This kind of talk about sweatshops reflects the standard neoliberal B.S. Very often, in so-called underdeveloped countries, you're dealing with a population that survives on peasant agriculture and other traditional economic activities. In the name of "opening markets," the West does its level best to destroy the markets for traditional crops (read what happened to the maize economy in Mexico after NAFTA) and otherwise disrupt traditional forms of social organization and ways of making a living, thus leaving people with the appealling choice of working in unsafe sweatshops for ridiculously low wages, AFTER having been otherwise dislocated from rural areas for one reason or another. Very often, young children from rural families will be sent to the factories in the hopes of making money to send back home, only to discover that isn't really possible when you're earning pennies a day.
None of which is to idealize the living conditions of poor farmers, but it does seem preferable to sending 14-year-old girls away from their families to be paid near-nothing for producing Nikes.
Wow, surprised to hear from the author.
I meant no particular insult to you, and am glad to hear you've covered both Putnam and Enron -- I'll look up those articles as soon as I get the chance.
As it happens, I am a fairly regular reader of the Times, though I'm afraid I pay little attention to bylines (with the exception of your opinion columnists, most of whom make me gag).
My concern is with the tendency of the punditocracy to waste endless column inches attempting to analyze social issues and the internet (typically of inflated importance -- how much is society really affected by someone selling penis pills over the net?) using some combination of pompous talking heads and bad analogies, while ignoring serious and pressing social problems. For example, when was the last time your newspaper covered:
the 40 million Americans without health insurance, and the sad prospects for universal coverage in ongoing healthcare debates?
the meteoric rise in wealth inequality in the United States, to the point where the average CEO is now payed 400 times the average worker, up from 40 times just a few decades ago
the continuing decline of family farming in America, under the thumb of giant agribusiness, which is simultaneously patenting life forms and using American consumers as a laboratory for risky genetic experiments?
Like most establishment journalism, the Times continues to suffer from a massive failure to cover the concerns, and the include the voices, of thouse outside of elite political, media, and academic circles. So a reporter like you winds up quoting academics on the social significance of business scams on the net.
In some ways, I wish the "cyberspace" notion had never been introduced, because it furthers bad analogies like these, comparing the net to a geographical neighborhood, which has apparently become a red-light district.
The reality, of course, is that the internet is a communication medium, not a neighborhood, and the apparently-proliferating number of sleazy businesses making use of it proves very little. Sure, you can make money selling fake penis-enlargement pills at a $57 markup, so long as you can find suckers (although I do admit being a bit surprised that there are so many of them).
Brewster Kahle is right on point, even if his thoughts are buried in the article:
Now if only the NY Times would stop running articles about the supposed decline of electronic "civil society," and start commentataing on the actual decline of actual civil society. Or, heaven forbid, the sleazy nature of elected officials and their corporate benefactors.