Efficiency vs. Equality

self-ownership:

It always frustrates me when Obama is on TV so passionately talking about how much he cares about small businesses. He seems so genuine about creating an economic environment to help people start their own business and people actually believe it.

More regulations and red tape is not the way to help someone create a business. THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

Leave people alone. Nobody forced these people to make these websites or gave them taxpayer money to do so. Entrepreneurs saw a business opportunity for online specialty vendors and other entrepreneurs saw an outlet to sell their goods. Everyone’s happy!

If you want to create an economic environment that will help create economic growth, stop trying.

If you could travel back in time and give a book to your younger self, what book (and what age) would you choose?

I think I would give my 15 year old self Atlas Shrugged because it helps losing this anti-business attitude and I wanted to start something directly after reading it.

What would you give your younger self?

Otellini [Intel’s CEO] had dire things to say about the state of things:

“Our research centers were without peer. No country was more attractive for start-up capital…We seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology. That simply is no longer the case.”

The reason for this is pretty simple—the legal, tax, and financial hoops that the U.S. enforces on all industry, with a particular emphasis on startups, is to blame.
Successive administrations have been blind to this problem, or have ignored it, and the situation is now so dire that from his own experience Otellini notes “it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States.”
Other nations have tax breaks for new companies, sometimes with a special emphasis on high-tech, and the U.S. is particularly hostile to foreign nationals who want to study and then work here. Some of the recent fiascos and political tussles over the H1B visas is a classic example of this, and demonstrates that there’s little intention to change the status quo.

Otellinis warning is stark: “The United States a less attractive place to invest—and create jobs—than places in Europe and Asia that are “clamoring” for Intel’s business.” And Intel is just the start.

Very simply, in cases where private profits and public interests are aligned, the idea of corporate social responsibility is irrelevant: Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.

Irrelevant or ineffective, take your pick. But it’s worse than that. The danger is that a focus on social responsibility will delay or discourage more-effective measures to enhance social welfare in those cases where profits and the public good are at odds. As society looks to companies to address these problems, the real solutions may be ignored.

Yes, some people have suffered during the recession—but compared to all the other countries in the history of the world, America is rich. Why?

One reason is that America is a good place to do business.