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Walter Watts
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It’s a Profit Deal
« on: 2007-04-06 15:55:19 » |
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A long, but rewarding read. (with some interesting comments at the end too)
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The New York Times
Wall Street Wired
April 2, 2007, 6:03 pm
It’s a Profit Deal
by Andy Kessler
Needing relief from medieval churches and cutesy cafes on a trip to Prague a few years back (O.K., and a tax break), I paid a call on the Prague Stock Exchange, tucked in a blocky, Soviet-style building off the main drag. I climbed a few flights of poorly lit stairs and entered a dour, dusty-musty office. I didn’t expect John Thain clapping with happy C.E.O.s at the opening bell, but heck, this place might as well have been a D.M.V. I started pining for stained-glass windows again. Nonetheless, I learned more in the next 20 minutes about how the world works than I had in the last 20 years sweating on Wall Street as an analyst and running a hedge fund.
Back home, everything on Wall Street is beyond complex: Men in funny sports coats grunting and littering the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Dow Jones industrial averages rising and falling in seeming random correlations to sunspots or something. Million-dollar bonuses to traders younger than that Rolling Stones T-shirt in the back of your closet. Derivatives. Rate hikes. Credit swaps. Sub-prime loans. Discounted free cash flow. Man, this stuff is harder than Chinese arithmetic. I craved for a simple explanation on what it all meant. It was right in front of me.
There in the Prague office I spoke with a nice chain-smoking gentleman in an ill-fitting suit who was no doubt a district member of the Party a decade earlier. I quickly learned that, duh, there is no Prague Stock Exchange, not physically anyway. It’s just a bunch of computer servers sitting in a backroom that match trades all day. O.K., I get that. But how is it that the Czech Republic has stocks to trade in the first place? One day the government owns every business, bloated with beer-breath bureaucrats, and bleeding money if they ever bothered to check. And then one day, boom, the Berlin Wall falls, Prague is wrapped in Velvet, and the next, you have capitalism? Tricky transition.
To pull this off in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Soviet satellite states, authorities handed out vouchers, chits really — an equal number to each citizen — that could be traded in auctions for shares of companies, including banks, oil refineries, phone service providers, electric utilities, auto manufacturers and others. Or you could just sell the chits to someone else, which plenty of people did around Christmas time.
From Prague, a high-speed data line to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange was set up, and foreign money slowly came in to buy shares of Czech companies. It took a few years, but as trading increased, the value of each company was set by its profits and prospects for growth, and the market eventually transferred ownership from Party to proletariat, from all to y’all. My host smiled and said, “Then with magic, companies start make money, they cut — how you say — fat?” he grabbed his belly, “and stock go up and they get more money to grow.” How cool. It was like being present at the creation.
Strip away all the glitz of Wall Street — CNBC’s daily “well, Maria, the market’s up because there were more buyers than sellers”— and you get Prague, so simple that it can be boiled down to three thoughts, mega-maxims that I’ve subsequently written on my forehead (backwards so I can read them in a mirror) with an indelible conceptual Sharpie. I use them every day. Cancel those night classes – here’s two years of B-school in a nutshell:
* Profits lead to increased living standards.
* Money sloshes around the globe seeking its highest risk-adjusted returns.
* The stock market allocates precious capital to companies it thinks can maximize profits and starves those that it thinks can’t.
In other words, the stock market is democracy’s half-evil, half-angelic henchman, whose tool is more carrot than stick. The tenets of capitalism’s dead economists — from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” and Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” — are powerful concepts. But it’s the stock market that makes them a reality and carries out the dirty work. No five-year plans. No individual or bureaucrat controls the economy. Instead, over time, the collective not-so-invisible hands of investors end up funding the companies with the best prospects and destroying those that aren’t worthy. Just by driving stock prices up and down.
Greed is a deadly sin for good reason, but why are profits always linked with greed? Consumer outrage against profits is legendary — windfall oil profits, overpriced drugs, ESPN on premium cable. I’m the first one to get annoyed when I get charged $5 for a Coke at the ballpark, knowing that what I am holding in my hand is 10 cents worth of syrup and sugar mixed with water and ice. The esteemed economist Navin Johnson best sums it up in the economic primer “The Jerk,” starring Steve Martin:
Navin: Frosty, I’m no good at this.
Frosty: Aw come on Navin, you’re doing fine.
Navin: I’ve already given away eight pencils, two hula dolls and an ashtray, and I’ve only taken in 15 dollars.
Frosty: Navin, you have taken in 15 dollars and given away 50 cents worth of crap, which gives us a net profit of 15 dollars and 50 cents.
Navin: Ah! It’s a profit deal!
Despite its negative place in our culture — thanks Ebenezer — 99 and 44/100ths percent of the time, profits aren’t motivated by greed. Gordon Gekko was just a trader with a bad ’80s hairdo; ignore him and his clones in today’s private equity business. Profit not only tells you if a project is worth doing, the profit motive has been a giant carrot for centuries and is what drives innovation and productivity and, yup, increases standards of living.
James Watt, a University of Glasgow flunky, studied latent heat and tinkered for years until he came up with a more efficient steam engine, selling off two-thirds of his future invention to venture capitalist Matthew Boulton in exchange for capital to fund his work. The whole thing was set up to make money. And make money it did. Watt’s steam engine was originally built to pump water out of flooded mines, replacing the horses that would walk around in circles running a manual pump. Boulton and Watt charged one-third of the annual costs of the horses. A few horses were out of a job, and a lot more miners were hired.
Decent biz, but Boulton and Watt plowed their profits back into scores of innovations, and their steam engine ended up powering jennies and yarn pullers and looms, displacing entire villages of cottage workers, who later were employed in the very factories that eliminated their jobs. Say what you will about industrialization and soot and Mary Poppins chimney sweeps, men’s life expectancy in England jumped from 35 to over 55 from 1800 to 1900, and kept rising to its level of 80 years today. Wealth from industrialization led to better food, better medicine, better science. Yes, it also led to bizarre Victorian morals and robber barons and all the ugly mutations of concentrated wealth, but for my dollar, it beats waking up at 5 a.m. and milking the chickens.
Think of a world in which we all do each other’s laundry. We all get paid, but no wealth is created. Until you get the bright idea of hooking up an oxen to a wheel and invent the agitation cycle. Woo-hoo. All of a sudden you own the laundry concession. Someone else owns farming or omelette-making, etc. More work is done with fewer people. The economy grows and people, no longer washing clothes all day, see their standard of living rise. Wealth is created. Economists like big words like productivity (output per worker hour), but you get the idea – if there are no profits, there is no wealth, no cancer drugs, no microbreweries, no progress. Really.
Productivity creates wealth. Consumers are willing to pay more than cost for a product or service because it has value and would probably be more expensive to make or do themselves. Searches via Google are more productive than wrestling with Mr. Dewey’s decimal system at the library. Except for the profits of government-mandated monopolies — you know, phone, cable, electric, cellular, Congress — most profits are driven by some form of productivity. Finding the next wave of these profits is the giant pain in the assets of investing.
But this is not just about ledgers and hedgers – economics drive policy. Democracies have embraced profits for a reason. Totalitarian systems rarely recognize individual ownership of property, so the only way to increase wealth is to steal it from someone else, invade your neighbor, roll tanks (into Prague as it turned out, or Poland, Nanking or Kuwait). The thinking that “the pie isn’t growing, just get a bigger slice” in the end loses out to productive economies that increase the size of the whole cherry pie.
Profits really do increase our collective standard of living, not just that of the fat cats who make the profits. But hey, what about the stock market’s role? Or those other two mega-maxims on my forehead – something about sloshing and starvation? Oh yeah . . . I’ll get to those in my next post. I’ve got all month.
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32 comments so far...
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1.
April 3rd,
2007
2:58 am
All fine and dandy as a Cliff Notes version of the transformation of CZ from a socialist to a capitalist country with even a stock exchange. But, as I recall, along with the chits that were passed along to every citizen, there were some very sweet deals that were cut between those “beer-breathed” bureaucrats and well-connected privateers who did quite nicely during that transformational period by acquiring more than a few chits to be placed in the hands of a utility company manager or an entrepreneur. The point is that the conversion of value that took place in the early 1990s, in CZ as in most of Eastern Europe, was fraught with corruption, rigged markets and nepotism, not simply the magic hand of Adam Smith and profit-seeking capitalists. It took more than a decade to straighten out all the dis/misincentives that occurred as a result of a rocky road to profits and tradable commodities. If CZ is fat and happy now, I’m glad to hear it, but a lot of people were burned along the way—hmm, sounds a bit like the United States in the 1880s and 1890s now that I think about it.
— Posted by Harris
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2.
April 3rd,
2007
7:20 am
You really think it’s as simple as “Profits lead to increased living standards” ? I find that scary, and really rather sad. But this column is in the business section, so I suppose I shouldn’t expect to read anything here with a broader perspective.
Here are some questions it might actually be more rewarding to reflect on further:
- What is “profit” really? Is something profitable if its manufacture damages the environment? Are we really so callous and shortsighted in our thinking that we feel it’s okay to place short term gain over long term stability (I make some cash now, never mind the cost to people in 50 years)?
- Is there worth to things out there to which you can’t give a monetary value? Isn’t the real richness of life diminished when all of our interactions involve assigning a dollar amount to things and then proceeding with all this buying and selling?
— Posted by Phil
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3.
April 3rd,
2007
7:27 am
You put down your fellow human beings when you ascribe the only motivating factor in improving survival is profit. Taking one of your examples of namely medicines it is our universities and NIH that has produced the most significant advances. Quite frankly if the stock market sunk into the ocean tomorrow, it would make little impact on most people’s lives. It is surprising that people who belive in individual responsibility build an institution that allows escape from the decisions they make.
The Czech Republic was corrupt in its government and that is what caused poor performance and with time, if its stock held industries follow the same path, their fate will ultimately be the same.
The wealth of the world is measured by the individual net increase of human created products and not when a disproportionate share winds up in the hands of a few at the expense of others.
The world does have past examples of florishing civilizations that were not capitalistic. I am not saying capitalism should be dismissed but its primary engine of wealth falls with the worker not the entrepreneur. There should be profit for those who innovate and take risk but not at the detriment of large segments of a society. Thomas Paine: No one joined a civilization to make themselves worse off.(paraphrase)
— Posted by Donald Green
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4.
April 3rd,
2007
8:47 am
This is just silly. Profits lead to increasing living standards for *whom*? And in what time frame? Except for Poland and Slovenia, no country in the former East Bloc had achieved its 1989 GDP as of several years ago (I haven’t seen figures recently, but none of them were on a good trend). So obviously someone must have lost out.
— Posted by mcg
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5.
April 3rd,
2007
9:12 am
Do we really need more invisible hand cheerleading (and presented as tho it were a revelation from a former hedgie anyway)? All props to Mr. Smith, but:
1) Nobel prize economist Herbert Simon once argued that 90% of great wealth could properly be attributed to the work of those who maintain the social order that allows profitable activities take place (ie, police, teachers, etc etc). The earnings of such workers have remained largely stagnant of late, while those at the top of the financial pyramid have grown rapidly, perhaps beyond robber baron levels. Social discomfort at this situation (thru mortgage troubles, etc) might very well lead to a new round of Keynesianism to lessen this income disparity (welcome in my view). And do finance mavens really need such out-of-proportion compensation to come to work every morning?
2) The era of the lone inventor (Watt, Edison, etc) is pretty 19th C. Even Schumpeter despaired that his engine of creative destruction, the entrepreneur, would die out in a see of bureaucracy. Now we are in an era of entrepreneurial bureaucracy; it seems to me the effect of corporations on markets are widely understudied. One of the things corporations do is to control the scope of the markets that they function in (as opposed to operating in some hypothetical environment where every actor has the same access to information) thru scales of production, barriers of entry, marketing, lobbying, etc. Thus lots of gainful employment for lawyers. So yes, an invisible hand, but that hand more often than not has a few strings attached.
— Posted by Hugh
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6.
April 3rd,
2007
9:12 am
As for totalitarian countries invading others to ‘grow’ their economy- why do you think we’re in Iraq? We’re not there chasing terrorists, we’re trying to lock down control over a big chunk of the world’s petroleum and we’re using the military to do it. So what does that make us?
And, lest this be chalked up as conspiracy theory, take a look at the embassy we’ve built in Baghdad: It’s the world’s largest with facilities to support 3000 workers. That tells me there has never been any intent to leave the country.
I’m a believer in capitalism in its purest form with a level playing field but corruption is its constant companion.
— Posted by Martin Edic
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7.
April 3rd,
2007
10:43 am
Some truth but the side-effects include destruction of the planet and unacceptable levels of inequality in the USA and world.
Wayne
— Posted by profwork
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8.
April 3rd,
2007
11:07 am
If what we read was intended to be an obvious, rational analysis about the inherent benefit of maximizing profits then someone made a mistake. It is just another example of irrationality. Just as an example … money does NOT ALWAYS flow around the world seeking maximum yield. Often it flows seeking stability and low risk. Stability and low risk are antithetical to maximizing profits since anything that is “stabilizing” involves feedback systems that limit growth. As everyone who is now getting ready to retire if they want predictability and security or profits with risk. Anyone who studies human nature knows that we first avoid loss, then we seek gain.
— Posted by Paul Kobulnicky
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9.
April 3rd,
2007
11:19 am
Capitalism and profit works whenever there is choice and if all contributors, not just the people at the top, benefit. Oil companies and car manfactures are practicing extortion not capitalism. The oil companies determine the price and we have to pay it as there are no altenatives. If they really believe in their product, put it up against electric or methane powered cars and see if oil can compete. Again, there is no real choice if your child has cancer. You are not going to shop around for the cheapest doctor or say no to the best drugs. In that state one would pay any price. Capitalism works great for peanut butter and refigerators, but not the many areas of the economy where there is no choice.
Also, whenever one talks of money you have to consider values. How a country, organization or a family spends its money clearly defines its values. Right now the average worker is barely staying ahead of inflation and the divide between rich and poor is widening. The middle class is being obliterated. Our fine public servents often can’t live where they work. Profits may be growing but the workers are working longer hours and families are under stress. The environment is suffering because industry is not cleaning up its own messes so profit can be maximized. Profits are only part of the story. Quality of life matters. We need mechanisms in place that prevent extremism in the market place.
— Posted by L. M. L. C
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10.
April 3rd,
2007
12:08 pm
Gotta love reading the inane ramblings of the Socialists on this here site. Such as this:
“the side-effects include destruction of the planet and unacceptable levels of inequality in the USA and world.”
You want (financial) equality? Then go work hard and earn it, and stop expecting wealthy people to put it in your out-reached hand. There is no guaranteed levels of financial “equality” in this country. Learn to live with it.
— Posted by MJD
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11.
April 3rd,
2007
12:10 pm
I find the responses here to be quite comical… amongst the Times-reading elite it’s pretty clear that conformism is now defined by believing that corporations and profits are evil, evil, evil.
There’s no doubt that almost all governments under-price environmental costs, but to suggest that all this capitalism should be looked at as evil throws the baby out with the bathwater. Is there too much income inequality in this country? Sure, and Kessler says so too. But even for the poorest americans real incomes have doubled since the early 50’s. Pollution and infant mortality has decreased; life expectancies increased. This is real progress, and to ignore the impact of the free market in achieving this progress is pure revisionist history. Show me one planned economy that has achieved anything like these levels of progress - let alone achieved anything remotely like the utopia of equality that it set out to achieve. Can’t do it.
— Posted by bigred93
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12.
April 3rd,
2007
12:30 pm
This is all so Adam Smithy, fine and dandy but the facts are that the human race cannot continue doing what it is doing. If the earth provided infinite resources and raw materials, well, OK, but it doesn’t. Sooner or later, the human race is going to run out of everything that the technical civilization needs to keep going. Then what, and who gets to decide who gets what? If greed is good and devil take the hindmost, is that not a recipe for a return to the Hobbesian State of Nature? How is greed-is-good capitalism going to reach a balance of resource versus what the earth can produce when all the oil is gone, all the coal is gone, all the natural gas is gone, all the iron has been mined, etc. etc.?
— Posted by RICHARD CAHALL
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13.
April 3rd,
2007
1:14 pm
“…milk the chickens”? Son, you’ve been in the city FAR too long. Come home soon. The mule’s lame again and I need someone to pull the plow for me, and Moma’s getting grouchy over having to do it.
— Posted by Besino
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14.
April 3rd,
2007
1:18 pm
Profits lead directly to increased living standards when everyone gets a piece of them. When Joe Schmoe gets one chit and Joe Ceo gets 440 chits, it leads to the situation which we have now where the overlords don’t ever have enough, and the masses may live better than they did in 1900, but they still have significant deficits in their standard of living…
And let’s not mention countries other thant he US who never even saw a chit much less got a couple a piece.
— Posted by Dejah
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15.
April 3rd,
2007
2:20 pm
The most successful company in Minnesota is the second largest privately held company in the world. And it would rank in the top twenty of the Fortune 500. It is 142 years old, has 149,000 employees and revenue of $75.2 billion. The company is Cargill and it is so successful because it could not care less about quarterly profits.
I have a friend, he is not a sophisticated guy, he is a contractor. He does not believe in banks and has never had a dime in the stock market. He owns homes in Hawaii, Arizona, Montana, Alaska and two in Minnesota. They are all paid for.
The moral of these two stories is if you want to be rich, don’t give your money to someone else. Start your own company, big or small.
— Posted by Brian
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16.
April 3rd,
2007
2:52 pm
It’s unfortunate that many of the previous posters do not understand the challenge of creating surplus value.(i.e. profits)
Every business struggles to create more wealth than they consume, from the local hardware store to most of our large American auto manufacturers.
The free flow of capital is responsible for the creation of goods decried by Keynesians as being “unevenly distributed”. Everyone might not have access to the most cutting-edge cancer drug in the first few years of it’s existence, but open markets are the primary reason it exists in the first place.
Profits are simply the traffic light that let us know when to continue to use our collective resources, and when to stop. (Hint: The lack of this traffic light in the USSR is precisely why socialism was doomed to fail - See Ludwig Von Mises)
— Posted by Dale S.
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17.
April 3rd,
2007
5:37 pm
This fallacy of a free market perpetuated by Wall Street whiz boys to justify their ridiculous salaries for the ridiculously banal function they provide society just keeps coming. Wall Street is probably the most regulated and controlled market in the world where the only people guaranteed massive returns are those with inside information. And most of those blue chip corporations they like to trade in have benefited from massive government support from subsidy to trade limitation, about as free market as the old E. block. To attribute some kind of Darwinian justice to a market that rewards the worst kind of elitism, nespotism, chauvinism, etc. is disappointing. This article demonstrates a facile understanding of economics. Try explaining the Manhattan art market. The idea that money flow or market activity gives some kind of pure information about socioeconomic reality on a global basis is wrong.
— Posted by TJ
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18.
April 3rd,
2007
5:48 pm
First of all, a very basic gee-whiz Econ 101 lesson doesn’t exactly qualify as irreverent. This is a blog?
Secondly: profits are good? This is news? I like the post by Brian #15. Capital markets are useful but don’t make the world go round - a fact that hedge fund managers may find hard to believe. Every wonder why Bloomberg, whose business involves reporting on every market and publically held-company in the world, keeps his vast enterprise private?
— Posted by Steve
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19.
April 3rd,
2007
5:52 pm
Is it really possible that this many readers are clueless about the process of wealth creation? Do they really think that the environment will be better off by limiting individual property rights and profits? Because of the profit motive venture capitalists are pouring billions into clean energy sources. They aren’t doing that just for profit but if you morons take the profit motive away because you think it is somehow evil, the money will dry up and we’ll end up with China’s enviromental issues. You want a clean environment? Agree to pay European gas prices and you’ll see an explosion of alternatives.
— Posted by Phil
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20.
April 3rd,
2007
6:06 pm
Profit, I learned as a child, is a cost of doing business in a capitalist system. Just as an honorable ongoing business will pay its workers, taxes, power bills and hundreds of other obligations it also pays investors in the form of profit. Profit is one more bill that must be paid.
By this understanding, a goal of maximizing profit makes no more sense than a goal of maximizing the health insurance costs. That so many businesses have adopted profit as an absurd goal rather than a necessary expense only serves to increase the cost of capital and handicap business achievement.
What do we really want business to achieve? How about goods and services. Quality jobs. Innovation. Wise use of resources.
Profit? Like other bills, it is to be paid at the lowest rate possible.
— Posted by George Cottay
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21.
April 3rd,
2007
6:48 pm
You people have to lighten up. Andy Kessler was pretty clear, both in statement and tone, that he’s being a bit glib and intentionally over-simplifying things. Take what you like among his points (there are some good points in there), discard what you don’t like, and lose the economically-holier-than-thou attitude.
Most of these readers’ comments read like they were written by frustrated ‘intellectuals’ who think they deserve their own Times column … if only the world was smart enough to listen to your pearls of wisdom instead of Kessler’s!
Drink a glass of cold water and lie down on the couch for a while.
— Posted by e
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22.
April 4th,
2007
1:44 am
Speaking of Hobbesian, or Hobson’s, choices, might I throw in here that there are profits, and there are profits. In this closed loop, in that there is only so much money that can waft around, there cannot be winners without losers, and when there are bigger and bigger winners, there must be, by definition, bigger and bigger losers. One way to partly hide that ugly fact is to spread the losers more widely, such that there are more losers to share the loss. Even better, make them think they are all still winning slightly over their neighbors, and you can quell the unrest. Then get them a few stocks to give them a sense of control, so they’ll never figure out in their lifetime that the dividends they realized never even came close to paying for the rising cost of their medications, which gave great profits to the few who do. The rich do indeed get richer, and the poor do indeed get poorer, they just don’t get FOX News coverage. And they don’t have the resources to complain about inane blogs by computer.
— Posted by Houyhnhnm
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23.
April 4th,
2007
7:34 am
Health improved in Victorian times because of public sanitation, i.e., clean water, proper sewage. It was in spite of industrialization, not because of it.
There was and is great hardship for those individuals who actually do the work of manufacturing. You may no longer have to “milk the chickens,” but someone is killing and plucking and packing those chickens at very low, desperation wages so that you can have cheap food and someone else can have big profits and if you think that job is fun and easy, and translates into a healthy happy lifestyle, you can try it.
— Posted by Stellaria
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24.
April 4th,
2007
9:38 am
Private enterprise does some things well. Government does other things we need, and is around to bail out private enterprise when it goes under. The two most beneficial enterprises civilization has developed are public education and public health, both governmental.
— Posted by Harry Marsh
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25.
April 4th,
2007
11:27 am
Dale is right, and I think the traffic light example is perfect in context of Andy’s blog.
However I am confused with some of the topics covered in the blog. It seems like it starting veering in the direction of wealth distribution instead of staying on profit generation.
Take your pie example, the pie doesn’t get bigger but just grabbing a bigger slice. I would say the natural progression in this case would be, okay the pie is bigger now, who gets the bigger piece.
Regardless, it’s always something to think about.
thanks for the blog.
— Posted by Jeff G.
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26.
April 4th,
2007
2:25 pm
Jeez -
Sure, health improvements in Victorian times were due to clean water and sanitation. Would that have been possible in a economy dominated by subsistence agriculture? Of course not.
Lifespans are way up. Standards of living are up. Literacy is up. 40% of the world’s population lived on less than $1 a day in 1981 - that was true of 21% of the population in 2001. (That’s a “real”, aka purchasing power adjusted dollar.) Of course that’s still way too many, but the scale of the improvement in just 20 years is absolutely immense.
I challenge all the naysayers and socialists on this board to two things:
1. If you could go back in time fifty years or to some other point in history before all this awful free market stuff you hate so much, would you? What do you think your life would be like?
2. If free markets (capitalism, growth and development of privately owned enterprises, etc) are not a major cause of those improvements in the human condition, what was? I’d love to hear a viable alternative hypothesis.
— Posted by bigred93
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27.
April 4th,
2007
4:02 pm
Have you or any of your other respondents read some of the recent articles
in this newspaper about the alarming differences in the poor and the rich?
Now, it is a question of the poor or middle class compared to the FILTHY
rich. What’s the point of making vulgar amounts of money if not to buy
everything on the planet? That includes judges, congressmen, the very
government itself. Leonore Helmsly said it best: “Only poor people pay
taxes!” Are the taxes the wealthy do not pay considered “profits”? Can I
afford to have a tax attorney on retainer? Hell, no.
— Posted by Donald Waits
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28.
April 4th,
2007
5:36 pm
Great article.
— Posted by Andrew
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29.
April 5th,
2007
5:20 pm
In this increasingly blog-centered world, I often find the reader comments more illuminating than the NYTimes articles themselves.
I see 95% criticism of a simple article which simply celebrates capitalism’s efficiency. Is this America? Whose newspaper is this? I thought we were supposed to be a bunch of liberal entrepreneurs here, people…
And what’s with all the articles griping about executive salaries? Like he says, for a while now you haven’t been able to make a profit in this country without a bunch of dumb hippies bitching. Now it seems even NYTimes readers have forgotten what made this country so productive.
And PS, I make less than $25K per year.
— Posted by Patrick Walsh
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30.
April 5th,
2007
7:54 pm
ECON 101 — AGAIN
Those of us near Chemical Bank in the early 1990s remember, with amusement, Mr. Kessler’s way with words. That includes the recent work on techno-medicine (an oxymoron if there ever was one).
So — profits make the world work. What a concept. Not unlike Jackie Mason on the old “Ed Sullivan” show about capitalism v. communism (”man exploits man, and vice-versa”). Someone let Sam Zell know that, will ya?
Keep trying, Andy. You’re obviously trying.
— Posted by Leonard Washington
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31.
April 5th,
2007
9:49 pm
Andy, great post. I am simply astonished by the comments here. I didn’t realize the Times readership had gone so far left. Yes, Capitalism is imperfect, and yes, there are externalities, but the simple rebuttal is who gets to decide all this, the markets (the people) or the state?
— Posted by BRIAN GALLO
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32.
April 6th,
2007
3:06 pm
Andy, maybe you can discuss the latest rise of private equity and leveraged buyouts. What’s different, if anything, about what’s happening today as opposed to what Milken et. al. were doing? Heck, Carl Icahn is still in the mix after all!
— Posted by Nick Schulz
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Walter Watts
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Blunderov
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Re:It’s a Profit Deal
« Reply #1 on: 2007-04-06 17:52:17 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2007-04-06 15:55:19
A long, but rewarding read. (with some interesting comments at the end too)
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[Blunderov] Indeed. Thanks.
The comments were interesting and presented a spectrum of opinion but why is it the right seems to resort to ad hominem more often than not, no matter what the subject? Maybe it's a machismo thing but the women seem to do it too...very strange. Puts me in mind of a song about an icon of muscular conservatism, Bald-Headed John.
http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Frank-Zappa/Dong-Work-For-Yuda.html
Dong Work For Yuda (Frank Zappa)
FATHER RILEY B. JONES :
This is the story 'bout Bald-Headed John
FORMER EXECS:
Dong work for Yuda, Dong, Dong
FATHER RILEY B. JONES:
He talks a lot 'n it's usually wrong
FORMER EXECS:
Dong work for Yuda, Dong, Dong
FATHER RILEY B.JONES:
He said Dong was Wong,
'N Wong was Kong
'N Dong work for Yuda,
N John was wrong
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
Dong work for Yuda
Dong, Dong
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
He said Dong was Wong
And Wong was Kong
And Dong was Gong
'N John was wrong
FATHER RILEY B. JONES :
John's got a sausage
Yeh man
John's got a sausage
Yeh man
John's got a sausage that will make you fart
John's got a sausage that will break your heart
Make you fart
And break your heart
Don't bend over if you are smart
He took a little walk to the weenie stand
Johns got a sausage
Yeh man
A great big weenie in both his hands
John's got a sausage
Yeh man
He sucked on the end 'til the mustard squirt
He said. "Ya'll stand back 'cause you might get hurt'
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
Johns got a sausage
Yeh man
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
He said Dong was Wong
Wong was Kong
Kong was Gong
'N" John was wrong
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Make way for the iron shaschige
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
I need a dozen towels so the boys can take a shower
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Bartender, bring me a colada and milk
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
On second thought, make that a water . . . H20
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Falcum . . .
Take me to the falcum!
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
I wave my bags
Did you wave your'n?
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Well how much did they wave?
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Ah'm almost two kilometers tall
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
This girl must be praketing richcraft
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Don't worry about the faggot
I'll take care of the faggot
FORMER EXECS:
Sorry John
Sorry better
Try it again
Try it again,
Try it again
Try, try, try again . . .
etc., etc., etc.
BALD-HEADED JOHN:
Your Pomona is very extinct...
Yeah, I studied with the Dong of Tokyo
'N also with the oriental Kato...
My body contain uh water
I just loves the way these Copenhagens talks!
Driver, McDoodle...
Sausage
Salima
Salami
That looks like that stuff that Freckles lets out
Once a rmimfth...
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Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
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Re:It’s a Profit Deal
« Reply #2 on: 2007-04-08 02:01:25 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2007-04-06 17:52:17
[Blunderov] Indeed. Thanks.
The comments were interesting and presented a spectrum of opinion but why is it the right seems to resort to ad hominem more often than not, no matter what the subject? Maybe it's a machismo thing but the women seem to do it too...very strange. Puts me in mind of a song about an icon of muscular conservatism, Bald-Headed John.
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I guess ad hominem is just an all too familiar retreat for the weak-minded.
WW 
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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