(Source: theantistatist, via self-ownership)
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. … War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable*, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
—
United States Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler
*Of course, such destruction could only ever be profitable if its losses were borne by others: funded by force (taxation and inflation) and funneled by favor (cronyism and corruption).
Senate Banking Investigation of JPMorgan to be Headed by - wait for it - Former JPMorgan Lobbyist →
Related:
- JPMorgan’s Blunder Is No Market Failure
- Government’s Implicit Subsidies to “Too Big To Fail” Corporations Enabled JP Morgan’s $2 billion loss
- Glass-Steagall Wouldn’t Have Prevented the JPMorgan Loss or the Financial Crisis
- How JP Morgan could actually benefit from the London Whale debacle, through the long-term regulations that could result
Politicians and Team Owners Snooker Sports Fans and Taxpayers →
Minnesota governor Mark Dayton just signed the midnight deal that state lawmakers struck with the owners of the Minnesota Vikings to build the team a new stadium. Players and management shook hands. Fans breathed a sigh of relief that their beloved football team would remain in the Gopher State. But some important parties were missing from the celebration: the taxpayers who are stuck with the check.
Both of us are sports fans — one a born-and-bred Vikings supporter, the other a Washington Capitals season-ticket holder who wrote his master’s thesis on the Olympics — but we recognize that most fans are hurt by such deals. That’s because they lead to increased taxes and higher prices, squeezing the average fan for the benefit of owners and sponsors. And that’s not even counting the overwhelming majority of taxpayers, regardless of fandom, who never set foot in these gladiatorial arenas.
Let’s look at this particular deal. The stadium costs $975 million on paper, with over half coming from public funds, $348 million from the state and $150 million from Minneapolis — not through parking taxes or other stadium-related user fees, but with a new city sales tax. In return, the public gets an annual $13 million fee and the right to rent out the stadium on non-game-days….
The reality of the Vikings deal is that the owners will gain the most, not taxpayers or fans. Taxpayers will bear most of the risk, while the expected increase in the franchise’s value will accrue wholly to the owners — who will also be free from facility-financing costs. The owners will also have new revenue opportunities in the form of higher ticket prices, club seats, stadium-naming rights, and advertising. With all these luxury goodies, the only fans who will be able to actually attend the games are those with luxury incomes, many of whom will surely be writing the cost off their taxes as a business expense.
(Source: antigovernmentextremist)
Diabetic Defies State-Approved Diet; State Threatens Jail →
The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle….
When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.
But this past January the state dietetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog —Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.
Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.
The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.
On January 12, Cooksey attended a nutrition seminar at a church in Charlotte. The speaker was the director of diabetes services for a local hospital.
“She was giving all the wrong information, just like everyone always does — carbs are OK to eat, we must eat carbs to live, promoting low-fat, etc.,” Cooksey said. “So I spoke up.”
After the meeting he handed out a couple of business cards pointing people to his website.
Three days later, he got a call from the director of the nutrition board.
“Basically, she told me I could not give out nutritional advice without a license,” Cooksey said.
How the Fed Favors The 1% →
The relentless expansion of credit by the Fed creates artificial disparities based on political privilege and economic power. …
The Fed doesn’t expand the money supply by uniformly dropping cash from helicopters over the hapless masses. Rather, it directs capital transfers to the largest banks (whether by overpaying them for their financial assets or by lending to them on the cheap), minimizes their borrowing costs, and lowers their reserve requirements. All of these actions result in immediate handouts to the financial elite first, with the hope that they will subsequently unleash this fresh capital onto the unsuspecting markets, raising demand and prices wherever they do.
The Fed, having gone on an unprecedented credit expansion spree, has benefited the recipients who were first in line at the trough: banks (imagine borrowing for free and then buying up assets that you know the Fed is aggressively buying with you) and those favored entities and individuals deemed most creditworthy. Flush with capital, these recipients have proceeded to bid up the prices of assets and resources, while everyone else has watched their purchasing power decline.
At some point, of course, the honey flow stops—but not before much malinvestment. Such malinvestment is precisely what we saw in the historic 1990s equity and subsequent real-estate bubbles (and what we’re likely seeing again today in overheated credit and equity markets), culminating in painful liquidation.
The Fed is transferring immense wealth from the middle class to the most affluent, from the least privileged to the most privileged. This coercive redistribution has been a far more egregious source of disparity than the president’s presumption of tax unfairness (if there is anything unfair about approximately half of a population paying zero income taxes) or deregulation.
Pitting economic classes against each other is a divisive tactic that benefits no one. Yet if there is any upside, it is perhaps a closer examination of the true causes of the problem. Before we start down the path of arguing about the merits of redistributing wealth to benefit the many, why not first stop redistributing it to the most privileged?
<strike>Corruption</strike> Government Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill →
And so Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers. And how much does this cost you? Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%. That’s how much you should be paying. You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service. Americans pay $635.85 a year. That $500 a year difference, from most consumers with a cell phone, goes straight to AT&T and Verizon (and to a much lesser extent Sprint and T-Mobile). It’s the cost of corruption. It’s also, from the perspective of these companies, the return on their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. Every penny they spend in DC and in state capitols ensures that you pay high bills, to them.
Wow.
This is the direct result of government interferences (i.e. regulations), which create barriers to entry and establish oligopolies.
(Source: azspot)
More on Wage Labor and Mutualism
Following up on a post I responded to this weekend, fellow blogger logicallypositive (whom I will be responding to directly and is heretofore referred to as “you”) posted:
that C4SS article I reblogged yesterday talking about the conditionally exploitative nature of wage labor basically made the point i’ve been tryign to make all along. wage labor is not exploitative as long as you can employ yourself. but it’s your good friend the government that makes that impossible with fun things like zoning laws, liscensing requirements, permits, etc.
I guess it leads me back to my central point: all exploitation can be traced back to the cartelization of brute, physical force. Exploitative economic relationships are only maintained because if you try to break free from them, then suddenly you find yourself locked up in a jail cell. Absent coercive forces, capitalism loses its intimidating fangs so many people are scared of. If they can’t beat you or imprison you for not playing by their rules, then it’s really rather harmless. It’s not an inherent trait of capitalism, it’s a result of a bureaucratic monopoly gone wild thanks in part to the influence of capital.
In responding, it is my hope to clarify a perceived misunderstanding.
First, your premise: “wage labor is not exploitative as long as you can employ yourself.”
I absolutely agree. If one is prevented from self-employment, chiefly by the state, then wage employment becomes eo ipso ”exploitative” as the employers are themselves necessarily agents and proxies of the state (either directly or by crony corporatist grace) since no one can self-employ in order to eventually become an employer. Even if self-employment is not completely obstructed, the more impediments to self-employment and entrepreneurship, the more exploitative wage employment becomes.
So here is where your word “can” is key. Can one employ oneself? The more easily one can - without the state interfering - the less the likelihood for relative exploitation, as it were. In other words: the more the state impedes in the ability to employ oneself in order to drive laborers to certain employers, and in turn the more individuals are thus employed by such employers, the more control comes under direction of the state since those employers are themselves wards of the state. The artificial elimination of choice shifts the scales of fairness away from the individual and in favor of the state and its agents and proxies.
And it is abundantly obvious that the labyrinthine legal and regulatory code is weaved with the thread of the larger special interests and connected cronies, thus weighing more heavily on the smaller competition. And there’s no smaller business than a self-employed entrepreneur.
As Rothbard argued: “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.”
In fact, I agree with the crux of an argument - though decidedly not all his points in making his argument - Kevin Carson (the mutualist author of the piece you posted) presented a few years ago:
[T]he state, by artificially reducing the costs of large size and restraining the competitive ill effects of calculation problems, promotes larger size than would be the case in a free market—and with it calculation problems to a pathological extent. The state promotes inefficiencies of large size and hierarchy past the point at which they cease to be worth it, from a standpoint of net social efficiency, because those receiving the benefits of large size are not the same parties who pay the costs of inefficiency.
Further, Austrians view entrepreneurs - an historically ambiguous term, but chiefly as promoter-entrepreneurs (the driving, “quick-eyed,” visionaries) and capitalist-entrepreneurs (the entrepreneurs who risk their own capital in their endeavors for profit) - as ultimate Homo agens.
Said Mises:
The driving force of the market, the element tending toward unceasing innovation and improvement, is provided by the restlessness of the promoter (entrepreneur) and his eagerness to make profits as large as possible.
More Mises, later in Human Action:
The driving force of the market process is provided neither by the consumers nor by the owners of the means of production—land, capital goods, and labor—but by the promoting and speculating entrepreneurs. These are people intent upon profiting by taking advantage of differences in prices. Quicker of apprehension and farther-sighted than other men, they look around for sources of profit. They buy where and when they deem prices too low, and they sell where and when they deem prices too high. They approach the owners of the factors of production, and their competition sends the prices of these factors up to the limit corresponding to their anticipation of the future prices of the products. They approach the consumers, and their competition forces prices of consumers’ goods down to the point at which the whole supply can be sold. Profit-seeking speculation is the driving force of the market as it is the driving force of production.
Murphy condenses the Austrian respect for the self-employed entrepreneur as such:
Following Mises, modern Austrian economists stress the primacy of the entrepreneur. At bottom, the entrepreneur simply buys low and sells high. But in order to do this, the entrepreneur must see an opportunity in the market pricing structure that others have overlooked.
By pursuing personal profits, the entrepreneur ends up rearranging goods in a way more pleasing to consumers. [There is] harmony between personal profit and service to others in the voluntary market economy.
Lachmann explains the crucial role played by the self-employed entrepreneur:
We are living in a world of unexpected change; hence capital combinations … will be ever changing, will be dissolved and reformed. In this activity, we find the real function of the entrepreneur.
Rothbard elaborates:
Every entrepreneur, therefore, invests in a process because he expects to make a profit, i.e., because he believes that the market has underpriced and undercapitalized the factors in relation to their future rents. If his belief is justified, he makes a profit. If his belief is unjustified, and the market, for example, has really overpriced the factors, he will suffer losses.
The profits and losses, in turn, inform the market (the various other economic actors) on what is viable. (Related: The Calculation Problem and Price Theory.)
But the mutualist position, which, again, is what Carson subscribes to, doesn’t end with simply advocating for the option of self-employment to not be obstructed. Mutualism sees all hierarchy, even truly voluntary (or euvoluntary), as problematic.
Confusion, however, is understandable considering Carson presented his argument as such:
As libertarians, we don’t want to abridge the freedom to contract wage employment any more than [the typical libertarian] does.. But we see subordination and hierarchy as undesirable. And we want to reduce, as much as possible, material constraints that promote entry into such authoritarian relationships.
His first sentiment flatly asserts that he adheres to the “libertarian” ideal of not wishing to interfere with “the freedom to contract wage employment.” All well and good… until we reach his “but.” It is in that contrasting conjunction where we find truth. The second sentiment belies his first, and through the use of “but” we learn that it is the second sentiment that counts. Wage employment is definitionally hierarchical. Carson goes one further and refers to wage employment as authoritarian (and he earlier describes a wage-paying workplace as an “authoritarian workplace”).
Ultimately, that is the mutualist position: (1) all hierarchy is illegitimate, exploitative, and intolerable, (2) eliminating the state would eventually lead society to eliminating hierarchy. Wage employment, thus, is illegitimate, exploitative, intolerable, and only prevalent because of the state. Indeed, the title of the post calls for the outright abolition of the wage system - a pillar of mutualism per Pierre-Joseph Proudhon himself.
As an Austrian anarcho-capitalist, I see it differently.
Not everyone is a visionary. Not everyone has the capacity to develop techniques in improving production methods. Not everyone has the capital to supply the start-up costs. Not everyone has the capacity or willingness to take risks. And even among those who do, not everyone will be successful. And among those who are successful, expanding business to meet consumer demands (and thus creating further wealth) would mean to expand production - and to do so requires different roles at different levels of productivity (i.e. labor), which establishes a natural hierarchy. And even those who are successful, they may not always be successful.
So for these individuals, wage labor offers the opportunity for employment without risking initial capital, offering insight on production methods, or being inclined to creativity and inventiveness in postulating future demands.
Here’s Mises again:
In the context of economic theory the meaning of the terms concerned is this: Entrepreneur means acting man in regard to the changes occurring in the data of the market. Capitalist and landowner mean acting man in regard to the changes in value and price which, even with all the market data remaining equal, are brought about by the mere passing of time as a consequence of the different valuation of present goods and of future goods. Worker means man in regard to the employment of the factor of production human labor. Thus every function is nicely integrated: the entrepreneur earns profit or suffers loss; the owners of means of production (capital goods or land) earn originary interest; the workers earn wages.
Rothbard explains that the wise entrepreneur is thus rewarded:
[The entrepreneurial] loser… receives his penalty in the form of losses. These losses drive him from his poor role in production. If he is a consistent loser wherever he enters the production process, he is driven out of the entrepreneurial role altogether. He returns to the job of wage earner. In fact, the market tends to reward its efficient entrepreneurs and penalize its inefficient ones proportionately. In this way, consistently provident entrepreneurs see their capital and resources growing, while consistently imprudent ones find their resources dwindling. The former play a larger and larger role in the production process; the latter are forced to abandon entrepreneurship altogether.
There is no inevitably self-reinforcing tendency about this process, however. If a formerly good entrepreneur should suddenly made a bad mistake, he will suffer losses proportionately; if a formerly poor entrepreneur makes a good forecast, he will make proportionate gains. The market is no respecter of past laurels, however large. Moreover, the size of a man’s investment is no guarantee whatever of a large profit or against grievous losses. Capital does not “beget” profit. Only wise entrepreneurial decisions do that. A man investing in an unsound venture can lose 10,000 ounces of gold as surely as a man engaging in a sound venture can profit on an investment of 50 ounces.
[It is a flawed] view that working for wages is somehow nonmarket or antilibertarian, and would disappear in a free society. … [H]ow [anyone] can say that a voluntary sale of one’s labor for money is somehow illegitimate or unlibertarian passeth understanding. Furthermore, it is simply absurd for him to think that, in the free market of the future, wage labor will disappear. Independent contracting, as lovable as some might see it, is simply grossly uneconomic for manufacturing activity. The transaction costs would be far too high. It is absurd, for example, to think of automobile manufacturing conducted by self-employed, independent contractors. …
[T]he emergence of wage labor was an enormous boon for many thousands of poor workers and saved them from starvation. If there is no wage labor — as there was not in most production before the Industrial Revolution — then each worker must have enough money to purchase his own capital and tools. One of the great things about the emergence of the factory system and wage labor is that poor workers did not have to purchase their own capital equipment; this could be left to the capitalists.
Contrast the above with Proudhon:
Mutuality, reciprocity exists when all the workers in an industry, instead of working for an entrepreneur who pays them and keeps their products, work for one another and thus collaborate in the making of a common product whose profits they share amongst themselves.
So your interpretation of Carson’s position - that wage labor is “conditionally exploitative” - is incorrect. To mutualists, wage labor is inherently exploitative because of its hierarchical (authoritarian, per Carson) nature.
This is what Carson implied when he mentioned “the culture of subordination in the workplace,” and “the economic power structures on which it depends.”
This belief ultimately stems from the mutualist shunning of anarcho-capitalist/libertarian understanding of private property in favor of a Marx-Proudhon distinction of personal property through the mutualist adherence to the labor theory of value and its corollary that the laborer must be the owner of the means of production. The employer/owner/capitalist, thus, is robbing the laborer of his full value.
Property is key to the argument here:
Improved productivity depends on capital goods, which in turn depend on delayed consumption. People who choose to delay consumption extensively can come to own a stock of capital goods beyond what they can physically use themselves. If such people cannot hire labor to work with those goods without thereby losing title, they will consume their capital and stop saving. …
A capitalist/worker arrangement is effectively an intertemporal exchange. Workers are advanced present money in exchange for enabling the capitalist to own and sell a future product. Abolishing wages would therefore be injurious to both would-be consenting parties in the exact same way that abolishing interest, another phenomenon of intertemporal exchange, would be. …
By rigidly yoking ownership with physical manipulation, anarcho-syndicalists [and mutualists] would severely constrain the public’s horizons by making it so those who provide for them can only do so in a severely limited variety of ways. Under [this] legal order, not only would shareholder/capitalists have to be workers and vice versa; they would have to be shareholder/capitalists in the same industry in which they are workers and vice versa.
Again, that would preclude innumerable mutually advantageous intertemporal exchanges, and plunge savings, capital accumulation, and future productivity to levels that are fathoms below what the public as consumers (users of final goods) would have preferred. The result would be starvation for most, and a return to a primitive, hand-to-mouth existence for the rest.
And Austrians (indeed - most libertarians, voluntaryists, and anarcho-capitalists), of course, also adhere to the idea that value is subjective.
Per Menger:
Value is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.
If you wish to dip your toe in mutualist waters, simply be aware of what lies beneath.
socraticapology asked: 1. Why would "freed market" necessarily be mutualist? Do you think we're living under a free market right now? 2. Why would something being from C4SS "confirm" it being mutualist? Last I checked, the vast majority of the posters there are left-Rothbardian agorists.
1a. A “freed market,” in theory, is of course not necessarily mutualist, as it - as I understand it - is ostensibly another way of expressing the free and voluntary exchange of consenting individuals. However, I was commenting on the rhetoric, meaning the language used. Generally speaking, using the adverb “freed” instead of the adjective “free” seems to be a practice more commonly employed by mutualists. No judgment was intended on using “free” or “freed,” mind you (in fact, I’ve used the adverb at times when appropriate), merely making an observation that helped explain why agreement may not be as universal as Logan implied.
1b. The United States’ economy is decidedly not free, though certainly moreso than the economies of some of the more totalitarian countries. (Of course, there are countless free market exchanges daily in the micro sense, as any exchange between consenting individuals without the state’s interference represents a free market exchange.) With the state’s taxes and tax breaks, tariffs and subsidies, regulations and protections, fees and licensing, interest-free loans, wage and price controls, bailouts, and worst of all, its printing press - the U.S. is at best a corporatist state.
2. I intended to write “mutualist/agorist” and it has since been corrected.
Thanks.
Subsidies “promote” exports only by distorting and weakening the overall economy. They do so by transferring resources away from private-sector activities that successfully meet market tests to private-sector activities that fail market tests and, hence, survive only if taxpayers are forced to pay for them. Efficient economic activities are obliged to contract so that inefficient economic activities can artificially expand. (Never mind that also, in practice, subsidies tend to flow to cronies whose chief qualifications are their political connections.)
California's Public Transportation Boondoggle →
Thanks to labor unions and big-government activists, transportation has become another form of social engineering. …
[Government-directed] transportation… isn’t about getting around, but about creating government-funded jobs, [greasing palms, pleasing special interests,] and pursuing big-vision projects that have little correlation to how we actually get around [much less what we demand or would otherwise be willing to pay for].
Education, Economics, Food, and Corporatism
Consider how the decisions are made differently in a government school vs. a private school.
In the former, some bureaucrat likely gets a phone call from some politician who makes certain promises of support for a higher office if his school district buys mass quantities of leftover product from the agri-business in whose pocket said politician sits (so he “creates jobs” in his district!). The bureaucrat is comforted in that his decision is cost-agnostic as market mechanisms that would reduce prices and increase quality are hardly at play (therefore allowing for greased palms along the way). Further, he is unlikely to face serious consequences since funds are guaranteed irrespective of student/parent satisfaction (after all they can’t opt out) and firing government employees is usually a morass of red tape that inoculates the incompetents.
In the latter, the administrators are cognizant that they must make a decision that fits the demands of their customers, the parents and children - because displeasing them can result in a loss of funds. Corruption, mismanagement, overspending, toxic food are all reasons customers would look elsewhere to invest their hard-earned wealth in nourishing their children’s bodies and minds.
The differences here are a simple matter of economics: “[W]ithout free exchange, we cannot have accurate prices. Without accurate prices, we cannot make rational decisions with limited resources and we thus squander said resources.”
With regards to schools specifically, it’s as I’ve previously explained:
“As with any service business, there’s a natural feedback system built-in that is obscured by government interference: school administrators would be sensitive to making sure parents’ demands are fulfilled. In a free market in education, schools face the risk of losing students if they don’t fulfill [certain] demands.”
For this and other reasons, I advocate a free market in education:
“[H]aving locally controlled schooling… forces schools to compete for students and thus lets parents hold the teachers and administration accountable. …
[S]ince no taxpayers would be on the hook for a penny, only the parents [and guardians and students] - and not the public at large or bureaucrats or union leaders - have a say.
The best schools will produce the best adults, and that’s where the parents will send their children. The bad schools will go out of business. The rich can already opt out of bad schools, so why not dismantle the infrastructure that keeps the poor from doing the same?
Additionally, the mass-production of food and the high-availability of processed garbage that is labeled food are directly correlated to the corporatist system that is in place.
Take the case of sweeteners, for example.
Who doubts that sugar (although toxic in its own right) is better for you than high fructose corn syrup? So then why is this outrageously toxic substance (HFCS) so readily available? Because it’s cheap. Now ask yourself: why is it cheap. If I handed you some sugar cane and some ears of corn, which do you think would be easier to extract sweetener from?
The corn industry is a favorite of politicians. Our tax-dollars provide subsidies to corn farmers. When a farmer decides what to grow on his land, it often makes more sense to accept the easy subsidies to grow corn than to try another crop and risk that demand wouldn’t meet his supply. So, naturally, more corn is produced. A lot more. More than could ever be needed for corn-on-the-cob, cornbread, and popcorn. So alternative uses were developed, among them: a sweetener (ever eaten an ear of corn and thought “tastes like sugar!”), oil (ever eaten an ear of corn and thought “so oily!”), and a fairly inefficient fuel source. It even became an unhealthy but cheap way to fatten up cows (with few people pondering why something that is fed to a cow to fatten it up wouldn’t also do the same to us). Thus supply glut created this artificially cheap sweetener.
But there’s still sugar. Surely the process of extracting sugar from sugar cane is easier than doing the same with corn. As such, it should be cheaper!
Well, the protections for sugar come in another form: tariffs and quotas. You see, American sugar growers are protected from “unfair” international competition by forcing fees and limits on those imports. Fees that are reflected on the prices we pay. And since the domestic producers have no real pressure to keep prices low (since foreign supply availability is limited, and what does has inflated prices due to the import fees), they don’t. Naturally, the big sugar exporters didn’t like paying these fees and that their products, in turn, were more expensive to American consumers. So they griped to the World Trade Organization. The easy resolution would have been to drop the tariffs, and every consumer of sugar (including the many producers who use sweeteners in their products) would in turn save money and have relatively healthier products made available. But that wouldn’t be very good for the sugar industry, one of the oldest protected industries. So, instead, the dispute settlement was export subsidies. Yes, now we subsidize them to help offset their costs so that we can be charged more for sugar. Sweet deal.
This is how our the corporatist state works. We pay taxes that go to farmers to grow a crop we do not directly demand. Then we pay taxes to pay the salaries of bureaucrats who enforce rules that make a product we do wish to buy more expensive. And we pay taxes to pay off the foreign entities who are getting screwed by the quotas that limit their sales (lowering available supply and competition, thus increasing our prices) and by the fees that are passed down to us anyway. We pay taxes to fund entire agencies to tell us it’s all perfectly healthy, and to present us a “food pyramid” that merely reinforces the consumption desires of the same cronies who are in bed with the state (whilst doing little to promote actual human health). And what do we get out of it? An inferior, extremely unhealthy product that finds its way into almost everything we eat and is shaving years off of all our lives. Truly: the intake of HFCS has helped unleash a plague of obesity, insulin resistance and even heart disease. Oh, and cancer.
This is what corporatism looks like:
[S]ubsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That’s why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain. (It doesn’t hurt that those lightly populated farm states exert a disproportionate influence in Washington, since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That means agribusiness can presumably “buy” a senator from one of these underpopulated states for a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.) …
Cheap corn… is truly the building block of the “fast-food nation.” Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70′s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald’s to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.
But, please, let’s not blame poor government.
The real reason MegaUpload was shut down? →
In December of 2011, it was reported by Digital Music News that the creators of MegaUpload were rolling out plans for a new cloud based music service that had the potential to change the music industry.
Called Megabox, it would have created an alternative to record labels as a means for artists to sell their music on-line, cut out the middle man and allow artists to keep 90 percent of their earnings.
They were also going to have a program called Megakey that allowed artists to offer their music free and still generate revenue.
This came just a week or so after Universal filed to have a promotional video by Megaupload removed from youtube that featured A list artists, that Universal had absolutely no claim to.
Was Megaupload taken down because it was a threat to an existing business model, that makes a lot of people a lot of money?
It’s starting to look that way.
Also, for your reading enjoyment, here is an interview with the founder of Megaupload concerning the youtube video take down, and his previous problems with Universal.
Sources:
Mystery surrounds Universal’s takedown of Megaupload YouTube video on C|NET
MegaUpload Is Now Launching a Music Service Called MegaBox… on Digital Music News
Post on google plus by Shauna Myers “Why was MegaUpload really shut down?”
(via statehate)
