Mar 25, 2020 | Business, Politics
Professor Jaana Woiceshyn’s marvelous book on business ethics, How to Be Profitable and Moral: A Rational Egoist Approach to Business, has just been released as an audiobook narrated by Sean Salsbury.
Does one have to sacrifice business profits to be moral?
Dr. Woiceshyn says “no”, and explains why, by introducing business students a set of rational, logical, scientific principles on how they can maximize profits in the long run by acting morally.
Required reading — or listening — for all employees, business students, and CEOs.
Get it here.
p.s. We will have a full review posted shortly!
Nov 8, 2019 | Business, Politics
In an age with a frenzy of Government antitrust departments going after successful businessines like: Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Facebook, Bill Gates commented in a recent interview that he thinks that Windows would have been dominant in the mobile phone category if not for the DOJ antitrust suit against Microsoft.
“There’s no doubt the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system, and so instead of using Android today, you would be using Windows Mobile if it hadn’t been for the antitrust case” […] “Oh, we were so close….I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction.” He said the company was three months too late with a release Motorola would have used on a phone….Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile. But oh, well. That’s a few hundred billion here or there…” [Bill Gates: People would use Windows Mobile if not for antitrust case]
This is a damning indictment of how government policy determines winners and losers in the marketplace.
(It would be an interesting investigation to see how many government officials and their cronies have profited over Microsoft losing the Mobile category to Google and Apple.)
Even worse, reports the article:
Gates also said he would not have retired as soon had it not been for the U.S. government case, which began in 1998. Gates started the company with Paul Allen in 1975, then stepped aside as CEO in 2000, letting Steve Ballmer take the reins as the antitrust case was at its peak.
From the archives:
Nov 8, 2019 | Business, Politics
From Bill Gates: People would use Windows Mobile if not for antitrust case:
Gates also said he would not have retired as soon had it not been for the U.S. government case, which began in 1998. Gates started the company with Paul Allen in 1975, then stepped aside as CEO in 2000, letting Steve Ballmer take the reins as the antitrust case was at its peak.
Recommended Reading:
Jul 22, 2019 | Business, Politics
A new Institute for Justice study (PDF), made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation, finds the nation’s largest forfeiture program does not help police fight crime. Instead, the study indicates police use forfeiture to boost revenue—in other words, to police for profit. The IJ study, “Fighting Crime or Raising Revenue? Testing Opposing Views of Forfeiture,” combines local crime, drug use and economic data from a variety of federal sources with more than a decade’s worth of data from the Department of Justice’s equitable sharing program. Equitable sharing lets state and local law enforcement cooperate with the Drug Enforcement Administration and other DOJ agencies on forfeiture cases and receive up to 80% of the proceeds.
The study—the most extensive and sophisticated of its kind—calls into question whether distributing billions of dollars in forfeiture proceeds improves police effectiveness. The new evidence undercuts claims by prominent forfeiture supporters, such as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who called forfeiture an “important tool that can be used to combat crime, particularly drug abuse,” and Attorney General William Barr, who, while acknowledging “problems and potential abuses,” called forfeiture “a valuable tool in law enforcement.”
Specifically, the study finds:
- More forfeiture proceeds do not translate into more crimes solved, despite claims forfeiture gives law enforcement more resources to fight crime.
- More forfeiture proceeds also do not mean less drug use, even though forfeiture supposedly rids the streets of drugs by crippling drug dealers and cartels financially.
- When local economies suffer, forfeiture activity increases, suggesting police make greater use of forfeiture when local budgets are tight. A 1 percentage point increase in local unemployment—a standard proxy for fiscal stress—is associated with a statistically significant 9 percentage point increase in seizures of property for forfeiture.
“These results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that forfeiture’s value in crime fighting is exaggerated and that police do use forfeiture to raise revenue,” said Dr. Brian Kelly, associate professor of economics at Seattle University and the study’s author. “Given this evidence and the serious civil liberties concerns raised by forfeiture, forfeiture proponents should bear the burden of proof when opposing reforms that would keep police focused on fighting crime, not raising revenue.”
The scale of federal forfeiture is vast. Between 2001 and 2017, the federal government’s two main forfeiture funds took in close to $40 billion, and the funds’ net assets have surpassed $4 billion in every year since 2013. From 2000 to 2016, the DOJ’s equitable sharing program made more than 660,000 distributions totaling over $6.8 billion to state and local law enforcement. Distributions fell following modest reforms introduced by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 2015. However, former Attorney General Sessions reversed the Holder reforms in 2017. Detailed data following this reversal are not yet available.
“This study shows policymakers can undertake serious and much-needed forfeiture reforms without jeopardizing police effectiveness,” said Lee McGrath, IJ’s senior legislative counsel. “Congress should abolish equitable sharing, and in the meantime, states should opt out of the program. And lawmakers should eliminate the financial incentives in both state and federal forfeiture laws that encourage the pursuit of revenue over the pursuit of justice.”
Since the Institute for Justice began its End Forfeiture initiative in 2010, 32 states and the District of Columbia have enacted forfeiture reforms. Seven states and the district have largely opted out of equitable sharing, limiting law enforcement’s ability to receive funding through the program and making it harder for law enforcement to circumvent state civil forfeiture laws. And in 2015, New Mexico abolished civil forfeiture, replacing it with criminal forfeiture and requiring that all forfeiture proceeds be deposited in the state’s general fund. In February, IJ secured a landmark victory in Timbs v. Indiana, where the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state civil forfeiture cases are bound by the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “excessive fines.” – Made available through ij.org
Mar 20, 2019 | Business, Politics
Economist Steven Kates speaks with Tom Woods on why the Keynesian attack on Say’s Law is the truly fundamental error in the Keynesian system.
A wonderful listen for fans of pro-capitalist economics.
For a more comprehensive coverage of all of these issues and why they matter, read Kate’s Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader.
Feb 16, 2019 | Business, Politics
Ayn Rand Student Conference Europe (AynRandCon) is officially underway in Prague, the Czech Republic! This is ARI’s first ever conference in Europe and the theme is “Individualism in an Age of Tribalism.”
Some particular new talks and panels of note:
- An Individualist Doing Business in Collectivist Europe – Mr. Christensen, co-founder of Denmark’s Saxo Bank and founder of the private equity firm Seier Capital, has had a long, successful career as an innovator in banking and finance. In this talk, he discusses some of the challenges he’s faced as a staunch individualist (indeed, an Objectivist!) doing business in collectivist Europe.
Panel + Q&A: Immigration and Islam
The issue of Muslim immigration is one of the major sources of political and cultural tension in Europe today. This panel will explore the controversies over immigration and Islam and the future of Europe.
- Panel + Q&A: Capitalism, Individualism and the Welfare State – This panel will discuss the ways in which tribalism leads to the “mixed economy” welfare state—and how that political-economic system reinforces the anti-individual mindset. The result is a vicious circle of increasingly collectivist policies and an increasingly collectivist electorate that both supports and is victimized by the system.
Even if you are not at AynRandCon, you have the opportunity to join attendees and speakers and watch all or some of the program live on the Ayn Rand Institute’s YouTube channel, beginning this Saturday, February 16 at 8:40 AM CET. (Note that Prague is on Central European Standard Time or six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.)
Link: Ayn Rand Institute’s YouTube channel
