Someone deliberately wasting their company's money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty' against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
It is also 'Tortious Interference' against both the company they work for and the company that _didn't_ get the contract, as that hypothetical business relationship has been interfered with using fraud.
Depending on state laws, a single instance of those may or may not be prosecuted under criminal fraud law and may just be a tort. Notice that these are both actions against the company itself, and the corporate veil does not apply, the executive can be personally sued.
However, a conspiracy to commit such a thing, a system in place that repeatedly does that, is a RICO violation, which _is_ a violation of criminal law.
Oh, and unrelated to that, let me address this huge CEO pay thing, or, at least, a common justification for it.
'Sure, it's unfair, but all those CEOs went to school with each other, and play golf with each other, and all know each other and can get good deals from each other, you have to hire one of them.'
Let's just think about this for a second. It's always presented as 'getting good deals for the company', from that direction. But as a _system_, that's outright admitting that sometimes that the CEO _we're_ hiring will give 'good deals' to other CEOs based on personal friendship.
Which is _criminal malfeasance_ for a company officer. People are _justifying_ the absurd pay because the leaders of the business company is operating a blatant _criminal conspiracy_ that, apparently, the stockholders have no problem with.
This is because the stockholders on the board are CEO of other corporations, so those shareholders never complain. But it is still actually, literally, criminal.
The next time someone attempts to justify executive pay by talking about how the executives 'know' people, ask who they know, does this person they know commonly waste company money on people they 'know', and do the shareholders of _that_ company know it?
It's like me being a cop, and saying "If you want to get out of a ticket, hire me as security for fifty dollars and I'll come to your hearing with you. When a police officer shows up with the witness, the ticketing officer often gets 'busy' and fails to show, so the case is thrown out."
While this article is very insightful, it missed the _other_ problem that causes mismanagement of corporations, and that fixing would lead to a huge decrease in utterly stupid decisions by management.
Namely, that half the owners of a corporations wish to see stock prices temporarily go up so they can sell some stock and make a profit. That is their 'corporate goal'. So corporations bring in someone who will raise stock prices by making incredibly stupid long-term decisions, like lay off half the company or threaten a union or whatever, stock prices go up, tada, they get a bonus, everyone is happy.
A year later, of course, stock prices drop back down as the stupid decisions catch up with the company, but wait, neverfear, the current stockholders have found the next SuperCEO to leap in and do something stupid to temporarily bump up stock prices. Rinse, repeat.
So we have _two_ layers of stupidity. We have the middle management which could usually have 90% of them removed with no effect on productivity, and who's major job is to justify themselves. And we have the top management who don't give a damn about 'producing things', they care only about 'getting people to want our stock'.
It's amazing American company produce anything at all, we're so...*hold hand to ear like Jon Stewart*...oh, I'm being told American companies do not produce things anymore, my mistake.
I have a plan that sounds insane: Stock must only be traded once a quarter. Each quarter, the company issues that quarter's dividends, and then come out with the next quarter's projection, and, a few days after that, everyone puts in buy and sell orders that are all resolved at a single instant at the end of the day, and that's it. No one can buy or sell the rest of the quarter.
No short sales, no speculation, no nothing. You pay your money, and you get three months worth of profits. You like it, you keep owning it, otherwise, you sell it. The purpose of the stock is not to sell the stock, the purpose is to actually share in the profits.
If public unions go on strike—esp police and fire—people will die.
If corporations do not produce weapons for our police, people will die. If they do not produce firetrucks, people will die. If drug companies do not produce needed medication, people will die.
Strangely, no one ever seems to want to _require_ them to do this or be dissolved by the government. Odd, that.
Public unions are sui generis, because they are also monopolies on service,
How on earth can you monopolize labor? Do other people not exist?
Not that conservatives appear to care that much about other sorts of monopolies anyway, but unions workers are only 14% of the population, so cannot possibly have any sort of monopoly, even pretending they were all in the same union, and not in a bunch of different unions that competed against each other.
and not only unions but civil service as well.
Yes, unions are the sole members in the category you invented to contain unions and nothing else. And thus, because they're in a singular category that you've invented, they need to be regulated in ways that you've just stated they need to be regulated, without any reason why.
It's like how car washes are special, because they have a monopoly on car washing, and they're the only service that wash cars. And thus should be forbidden from selling soft drinks. Q.E.D.
And unlike corporations, public unions make little effort to provide an excellent product; in fact, they are more likely to defend a bad worker than reward an extraordinary one.
You know, that sentence right there says a lot about how conservatives think. I really should just let that sentence stand by itself. In fact, I should demand it get tattooed on every conservative's forehead. Corporations can do no wrong.
When's the last time a union's shoddy work killed someone because they decided to save a few thousand dollars? When's the last time a union sold people toxic products? When's the last time they poisoned a lake?
We know the only possible sin in this universe is not giving your employers all your time and energy.
Labor is a commodity, and as such, can be substituted for any other commodity in capitalism. It follows from that substitution that the agents who control its supply may set its price. Where that commodity is fungible, the consumer may find alternate suppliers. Where that commodity is not fungible, as in the case of public sector jobs such as teachers and firemen, the union arises as a necessary component of bargaining: who else is going to negotiate the salaries with an equally non-transferable entity such as government?
Yes, I get really baffled by this, also. The right have invented this thinking of unions as 'unions', as some unique evil thing that exists.
Unions are corporations supplying services. They are no different than any other corporation. They sell services to other corporations, and to the government.
Anything restricting their ability to negotiate or restricting their ability to write contracts (Like a contract stating that they are the sole permissible supplier, which they cannot write in right-to-work states.) is a government restriction on business, and as such should be anathema to all these die hard 'no government interference in business' people.
Seriously, this is insane.
Imagine the government interjecting itself between your company and your company's cleaning service, and demanding that your company not have the right to ask them to come in three times a week, or something crazy like that. Or saying your cleaning service contract couldn't charge you extra when you called them in for an emergency.
And imagine if the government, when hiring government contractors to supply steel, demanded that they just give them steel. Sure, they started with a contract, but, eh, that's not important. The government can just _make_ that corporation do stuff for them. If that corporation does not supply the stuff, if it refuses, the government can just dissolve it and operate the steel mill itself.
I want people to stop and think about those analogies, and how conservatives would react if they happen. _Really_ think about them.
But somehow, when it's a supplier of labor, called a 'union', as opposed to a supplier of, well, anything else, conservatives pull a 180. Oh, no, _that_ organization, that business that is selling stuff, has no rights to negotiate specific contract terms. It has no right to exclusivity. It has no right to choose not to supply the government.
Because _that_ sort of organization, a union, is owned and operated by working class people, and the superrich owned businesses have a right to do whatever they want to those people.
| It’s certainly true that once the courts decided to grant the artificial status of persons to corporations – not a recent decision at all – the constitutional jurisprudence that follows is unremarkable and probably even correct. It’s the original decision to grant them that status that is problematic.
Indeed. 'Persons' do not, and cannot, exist at the whim of the government..._as all corporations do_.
Tomorrow, any state could, poof, magically uncreate all corporations that exist in it, by repealing corporation law and dissolving the corporations. Yes, yes, you'd run into issues with the taking of property from the _owners_ of the corporation, but those are solvable, and there's no actual issue with the corporation itself.
So, tell me...how does 'someone' have 'free speech rights' but not a 'right to not be killed randomly by a change in the law'? This is utterly nonsensical. Entities created and destroyed by law cannot possibly, in any manner at all, have 'rights' that the law cannot touch.
Whenever libertarians talk about how corporations shouldn't be regulated, I nod, exclaim how it's an awesome idea, and ask them how they plan to deal with such a massive change that dissolution of all corporations would bring to society, and if they've figured out how to replace them with private contracts, which seems tricky to me, but maybe they've figure it out.
They tend to look at me in bafflement until I point out that failing to regulate corporations would result in them _not existing at all_, as they are, after all, the creation of regulations in the first place.
Corporate personhood isn't just 'problematic', it's...well, you know that claim that 'You can produce a reasonable facsimile of insanity by taking one nonsensical premise and extending it to the logical conclusion.'? Well, that's the US's 'nonsensical premise' of the century.
Exactly, that's what I was getting at, except I wanted the pro-free-trade people to _state_ what they thought the benefit of, but apparently that's so 'consensus-y' that no one needs to.
Climate change is not a policy. It is a scientific theory that explains observations and makes predictions. Now, these predictions are so bad that there is an _obvious_ policy that suggests itself if you believe the theory, but the policy is not, strictly speaking, part of the science, just like a 'I'm not going to attempt to exit this car while it's moving at 65 MPH policy' is not part of physics, it's just a policy you'll adopt if you understand physics at all.
Science doesn't tell you what to do, it tell you what will happen if you do, or why what already happened did happened.
I suspect the author this has decided that economics have decided that 'free trade always results in higher world-wide productivity', but even if that is scientific consensus...so? I bet lack of child labor laws also result in higher productivity (and I bet that would be easier to prove), but we don't do that. I bet not letting people watch TV would result in higher productivity. I bet having them sleep in barracks at work would result in higher productivity.
The only people who care about the 'higher productivity of the world as a whole' are the fat cat assholes who have managed to convince the world they own 50% _of_ everyone in the world's productivity because they have pieces of paper saying they do.
The rest of us care about our _standard of living_. And then everyone else's standard of living. Only our _owners_ care about our productivity. Of course, our owners also appear to own our government and political discussion, so apparently, our productivity is more important than actually having a job to pay for a house to live in.
I was just pointing to that as to the 'we make more than anyone else in the world' claim, which was utter nonsense. (Especially as Europe turns into the EU, which actually _does_ make more than the US in total.)
And all those countries, and the US, while still barely managing to go up per-capita, have managed to go up by less than they used to. Growth is tapering off. We slowed and stopped growing, and in the modern world where we're constantly reducing the number of workers, slowed production growth means negative employment growth.
And I'm not counting the recession there, I mean before that.
Meanwhile, China growth is skyrocketing. It's still _nowhere_ close per-capita, but, as I pointed out, a huge section of China is utterly unrelated to any sort of industrial concern at all, and doesn't really participate in a 'market' in any sense, they're farmers who work in the shared-rice paddy and are maybe lucky to actually have electricity, which they do not pay for, because they literally do not have money. China's like what happens if you take modern Michigan and attach it to Medieval Europe....yeah, the per capita production sucks, but only a fraction of the population are even trying to 'produce' anything at all. And 'Michigan' keeps expanding into Europe.
China is growing by converting _to_ a first word country, and it has a _hell_ of a lot of extra population to convert. (Which is why the recession hasn't much hurt it.) And because it has such top-down control, it's managing to actually do it in a slow and sane manner, instead of total chaos. (Like India's doing, rather poorly.)
Great for them. Rather sucky for the rest of the world.
Did you actually _look_ at that chart? It's not per-capita. It's totally worthless.
Please notice where Japan and Germany and the UK are, and then remember that they have just a fraction of US population.
And then remember that China is something like 90% vast stretches of small villages interspersing rice fields, and the actual manufacturing base is maybe 25% of the population.
| Actually, what I read from Krugman (not as much as I used to), is that he believes the free-trade mantra on it’s own full-stop. He also believes it’s benefits accrue unevenly and unfairly, so he supports broad social services and progressive taxation to ameliorate the unfair negative effects. That’s a pretty different view than what you’re saying.
Uh, the second part of that doesn't really have anything to do with the first. I'm glad he wants to _fix_ the problems that he, himself, wants to cause, but that doesn't really change anything I said about him.
And that's utterly unrelated to the actual issue in what he proposes, in that he seems to understand that trade is a two way street, and that we are currently going on only one way...and...um...something something something, free market with a safety net, blah blah.
Hey, I'm actually mostly with Paul Krugman. Krugman at least realizes that importing is only a good idea when we're also _exporting_. I.e., 'free trade' has to be _trade_, an actual exchange of goods.
However, he doesn't seem to have any logical way for us to actually start producing more things to trade, nor does he admit that moving production _there_ that we used to do _here_ is not, in any way, better for us.
I.e., he seems to grasp the actual logic of the situation, but then doesn't seem to come to any actual conclusion. He just seems to shrug and say 'And that's how it is'. Um, how about some policy ideas so that we _don't_ have a trade imbalance?
If the stuff coming needs to equal the stuff going out, and _right now_ more stuff is coming in than going out, should we not then make policies to have _less_ stuff coming in and _more_ stuff going out? Which would be the _opposite_ of 'free trade' that he seems to think is so awesome?
OTOH, I could probably respond better to an actual article by him as opposed to links to a book I don't have, thus forcing me to remember what he generally talks about when I do read him.
Well, yes, but surely we could come to some compromise. I mean, I see all these luxury goods around, like cars and houses and cars, when we could have been building more steel plants and giant warehouses where people live on bunk beds and wear jumpsuits.
Surely, we can come up with the scientific 'optimal' design for the world, and do that. What the purpose would be, I have no idea, but apparently, scientific consensus is behind it and we can't disagree.
Also, economists agree: Children not working in steel mills produces 'losses'.
Overall the social losses exceed the gains, both worldwide and in China.
I don't _see_ any 'social losses'. I see small losses to manufacturers in the US.
This is where this entire discussion is stupid. Yes, free trade might result in higher world-wide productivity...AND?
Is that what we make economic policy on? The grand total of 'stuff made'?
If so, wouldn't a better policy be to nationalize (and, in fact, internationalize) all production and enslave everyone to work 18 hours a day in factories?
This is silly. Climate change is an actual measurable thing, and the causes can be determined. Climate scientists are not, strictly speaking, telling us what to do, they're telling us what is happening, and what will continue to happen if we do certain things.
Now, 'not attempting to walk off the top of a ten story building' is an obvious plan of action when confronted with the theory of gravity, and likewise 'reducing CO2' is an obvious plan of action when confronted with the theory of climate change, but neither of those actions _are_ part of the theory....the theory just says what will happen if you do them, it's silent on if you _should_ or not.
Free trade, OTOH, is a _policy_. It is a plan of action.
But let's treat it like a science. In fact, let's treat it like climatology, which economics actually shares many resemblances with.They're both the result of a bunch of tiny interactions, so they're a statistical science, there are no control groups possible because experiments can't be 'made', they just happen, the entire world is involved to some extent...they're actually pretty close.
Do, does 'free trade' make any predictions? Where are you even measuring for the results?
Wait, back up. First, what is 'free trade', anyway? How d you measure how much 'freetradey' something is? As others have pointed out, there appear to be dozens of classes restriction on the market already.
_Economics_ may be a science. Free trade is a specific policy, it cannot have 'consensus', as policies are not part of science. What _could_ have consensus is that 'free trade policies result in more X', where X is some obviously good thing...but I've yet to hear even what that would be, and I would probably disagree that more X is always automatically good.
I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to say anything in 'true Republican fashion', being a pretty far-left Democrats. (That is, far-left of where the party appears to be.)
But perhaps more important, you're wrong _anyway_. I thought you were before, but didn't say anything until I actually looked it up.
You do pay taxes on business reimbursements...except you can _deduct business expenses_.
If you buy a airplane ticket for $200, you turn a receipt to the company, and your company gives you $200 to cover that, yes, you have to pay taxes on the $200 they just gave you...but you can deduct the $200 you just spent, so it's exactly the same, tax wise. (Of course, this seriously hurts people who don't itemize their deductions.)
Now, granted, what a business might reimburse you for, and what the government might allow as a deduction, are not the same thing. If a business reimburses you for, example, commuting costs , you'll still end up paying taxes on that, because you can't deduct that. (Or, as you said, the company might give you extra to cover the taxes.)
But business travel is explicitly deductible. No one pays taxes on that.
Of course, peons have to ride coach and only go to a conference every two years, whereas executives get to define their own business reasons and fly wherever, as long as they have a business lunch there for an hour.
Police unions just have way too much power, period. The inability to fire police officers is not bad compared to the inability to _prosecute_ police officers for clear violations of the law. The police union often behaves as a public face for criminal conspiracy to cover up crimes committed by police.
But with normal unions, the reasons that unions are doing that is companies wold (and still do) fire more expensive older workers to get younger, cheaper ones. That's why senority exists, to counter that. If you divide people into tiers, companies will just put the expensive people in the 'first to go' tier.
If you fix that by requiring them to have 'evidence' before having bad reviews, congrats, you've just reinvented the dismissal process you're complaining about. ;)
What is supposed to happen is that the union is supposed to know the amount of people, and only keep that many, and _itself_ let people go who are not performing. But that never happens.
The best way to make unions responsive, to actually make them only defend productive workers, is to give them some profit-sharing. In fact, in my ideal world, we wouldn't have unions...we'd have worker-owned companies in the first place, where workers owned at least 51% of the voting stock.
Expense reimbursements are reported as income on your W-2, and you pay taxes on them.
I don't think you understand. CEOs do not pay to use the company jet and then get reimbursed for it. They just _get to_ use the company jet for ill-defined 'business' purposes.
Perhaps you thought I meant 'flying in first class', but that's not right either. Often the company just buys those tickets to start with, and hence no one is 'reimbursed' either.
As for the private jet, the company pays property taxes and registration fees on that, plus fuel taxes and operations fees if they actually want to use it.
I didn't say taxes weren't paid, I said _income_ taxes weren't paid. We are talking about _people_ paying _income_ tax.
You appear to have imagine I said 'Not taxed' or 'no taxes' or something in my post. I didn't say anything like that at all.
I repeatedly said things _didn't count as income_, which was to lead people to the (correct) conclusion they were not taxed as income. And most aren't taxed at all. Capital gains is, and I mentioned it.
…doesn’t everyone at a company work for the CEO? Shouldn’t your reasoning therefore conclude that every person’s salary should be considered part of the CEO’s compensation?
Um, no, more people at a company are, in fact, working for the _company's_ benefit. Personal assistants are _not_,
So they are taxed, then. Your contention was that they were not.
Uh, no. it's pretty easy to read what I said, perhaps you should. I said they mysteriously _weren't income_, and only taxed at 15%.
Um, health insurance isn't taxed _even for normal people_, I have no idea why you think it's taxed for the rich.
Likewise, while company vehicles are _supposed_ to be taxed, that's only if they're actually given to the user. Just letting the CEO or owners jet around on 'company business' that is one 'business related' lunch in Paris and then a three-day stay is _not_ taxed.
Likewise, companies often hire _personal_ assistants for executives. As in, someone who picks up dry cleaning and whatnot. No, that doesn't count as 'income' either.
You _might_ have a point about the limos.
And capital gains are not _taxed_ as standard income, they are taxed at 15%.
And my other post. Let's look at this another direction. I actually put this in my earlier post, and then deleted it because it obscured my point about partnerships, but look at this way:
You're not really paying the union. The union negotiated _it's own_payment, per worker.
Surely you'll agree that two companies working together can come to any negotiation they want. In fact, third-party security companies often charge the company they're working for per-employee they have to deal with. The union is a partnership that supplies labor, ergo, it makes sense for them to charge per laborer.
So it would be entirely reasonable for a union to charge to a company, say, $30 a worker a month.
The question is, is it reasonable to charge you, and the answer, of course, is...they _aren't_. This payment from your company to the union, just, strangely, _goes through your paycheck_.
I actually addressed that point in part of my post and then deleted it, because it makes things less clear. I was going to explain, and realized it, again, made things less clear, so i will instead make two posts:
Technically, in what I described, _you_ pay for a parking pass. In fact, people pay for stuff associated with their job all the time. _Most_ of that gets reimbursed, but it certainly doesn't have to be.
Do you argue that your employees shouldn't legally be able to require you to visit a convention somewhere and pay for your own hotel room? Yes, yes, there'd be outrage, but _is it illegal_ for them to do that and fire you if you don't?
Likewise, is it illegal for them to require that you keep up your _third-party_ certifications? That you have to go and pay for some company to give you an MSCE or something?
Those things are pretty dickish moves, even in today's labor market. However, they aren't illegal.
Or, hell, at many jobs you're required to meet a dress code, and, last I checked, you had to buy those clothes yourself.
I'm a little confused at the distinction you're trying to make. Joining the union isn't some random weird thing that you were just forced to do, you were forced to do it _as a condition of your job_, just like paying for a college degree or gas to get to work.
Indeed. I actually know how taxes work just fine, and if people want to present real arguments that's one thing.
But saying 'My god, look at how much taxes so few people pay', without following up with 'because they make a huge fraction of the income'...
Yes, 'fundamentally dishonest' is exactly the term I use.
Especially since the 'actual' numbers, the actual correct comparison, is _still_ dishonest. The top 1% make about _half_ the money in this country, and only pay 40% taxes. They just make only 23% of the 'income' because of all the rigging they've done to make their stuff not count as income.
Magical 100% health care coverage? Not income. Personal assistants who do everything for them, and I'm not talking about corporate assistants, I'm talking butlers? Not income. Private limos everywhere? Not income. Helicopter? Not income.
All somehow provided by the companies they own, at company expense. None of it 'income'. It's just, for some reason, the company sees fit to provide them near infinite 'benefits', and no actual, taxable, cash.
But how do they get cash? I'm glad you asked. Why, the company lets them buy stock for cheap, and sell it. Capital gains? Also not income for no explicable reason, only taxed at 15%.
Let there be no mistake: If you look at some random guy down the block, and total up every dollar and benefit and physical object he was given over the year, and look at a member of the top 1% and total up everything they were given, the _rich person actually paid less in income tax_, percentage-wise.
So even the 'actual correct percentages' are dishonest, because 'income' has been defined to nonsense under the tax code. Almost every penny given to them (Except, admittedly, health insurance) counts as income for most people, and almost nothing counts for the superrich. But then using _incorrect_ percentages for comparison on top of that is just epically dishonest.
Indeed. In actuality, the top 1% make about _45%_ of income, and somehow only 23% of that is taxed, to get 40% of tax revenue.
That looks like it it almost even outs, but it doesn't. That untaxed part, which is 20% of all revenue, actually means that everyone else is paying more to cover the shortfall.
| Are you asserting that taxes are unrelated to those who pay them?
No, I'm asserting that the _amount_ of tax is unrelated to the _amount_ of people paying it. We do not have a 'head tax' in this country.
The revenue from income tax is related to (wait for it...) income. Ergo, the percentage from income tax revenue is related to the percentage of income. That is all it should be _compared_ with when talking about tax rates.
It is reasonable to mention the amount of people you're referring to, but not in such a manner that it invites comparison of those unrelated percentages, and certainly not without first stating the actual thing to compare to.
Did you know that 10% of the patients are responsible for 50% of prostate cancer screening exams paid for by tax dollars? And only 1% of doctors? Doesn't that seem like scam of taxpayer money?
Did you know only 20% of people visit the ocean each year, but 100% of shark attacks happen there?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Free Market as Forest”
Um, that would be because they have to buy politicians or the right will destroy unions. You know, like they're trying right now?
'Look at that idiot, he wasted all his money on self-defense.'
"
Someone deliberately wasting their company's money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty' against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
It is also 'Tortious Interference' against both the company they work for and the company that _didn't_ get the contract, as that hypothetical business relationship has been interfered with using fraud.
Depending on state laws, a single instance of those may or may not be prosecuted under criminal fraud law and may just be a tort. Notice that these are both actions against the company itself, and the corporate veil does not apply, the executive can be personally sued.
However, a conspiracy to commit such a thing, a system in place that repeatedly does that, is a RICO violation, which _is_ a violation of criminal law.
"
Oh, and unrelated to that, let me address this huge CEO pay thing, or, at least, a common justification for it.
'Sure, it's unfair, but all those CEOs went to school with each other, and play golf with each other, and all know each other and can get good deals from each other, you have to hire one of them.'
Let's just think about this for a second. It's always presented as 'getting good deals for the company', from that direction. But as a _system_, that's outright admitting that sometimes that the CEO _we're_ hiring will give 'good deals' to other CEOs based on personal friendship.
Which is _criminal malfeasance_ for a company officer. People are _justifying_ the absurd pay because the leaders of the business company is operating a blatant _criminal conspiracy_ that, apparently, the stockholders have no problem with.
This is because the stockholders on the board are CEO of other corporations, so those shareholders never complain. But it is still actually, literally, criminal.
The next time someone attempts to justify executive pay by talking about how the executives 'know' people, ask who they know, does this person they know commonly waste company money on people they 'know', and do the shareholders of _that_ company know it?
It's like me being a cop, and saying "If you want to get out of a ticket, hire me as security for fifty dollars and I'll come to your hearing with you. When a police officer shows up with the witness, the ticketing officer often gets 'busy' and fails to show, so the case is thrown out."
"
While this article is very insightful, it missed the _other_ problem that causes mismanagement of corporations, and that fixing would lead to a huge decrease in utterly stupid decisions by management.
Namely, that half the owners of a corporations wish to see stock prices temporarily go up so they can sell some stock and make a profit. That is their 'corporate goal'. So corporations bring in someone who will raise stock prices by making incredibly stupid long-term decisions, like lay off half the company or threaten a union or whatever, stock prices go up, tada, they get a bonus, everyone is happy.
A year later, of course, stock prices drop back down as the stupid decisions catch up with the company, but wait, neverfear, the current stockholders have found the next SuperCEO to leap in and do something stupid to temporarily bump up stock prices. Rinse, repeat.
So we have _two_ layers of stupidity. We have the middle management which could usually have 90% of them removed with no effect on productivity, and who's major job is to justify themselves. And we have the top management who don't give a damn about 'producing things', they care only about 'getting people to want our stock'.
It's amazing American company produce anything at all, we're so...*hold hand to ear like Jon Stewart*...oh, I'm being told American companies do not produce things anymore, my mistake.
I have a plan that sounds insane: Stock must only be traded once a quarter. Each quarter, the company issues that quarter's dividends, and then come out with the next quarter's projection, and, a few days after that, everyone puts in buy and sell orders that are all resolved at a single instant at the end of the day, and that's it. No one can buy or sell the rest of the quarter.
No short sales, no speculation, no nothing. You pay your money, and you get three months worth of profits. You like it, you keep owning it, otherwise, you sell it. The purpose of the stock is not to sell the stock, the purpose is to actually share in the profits.
On “Labor Roundtable: The Labor Movement, Redistributive Justice, and Procedural Fairness”
If public unions go on strike—esp police and fire—people will die.
If corporations do not produce weapons for our police, people will die. If they do not produce firetrucks, people will die. If drug companies do not produce needed medication, people will die.
Strangely, no one ever seems to want to _require_ them to do this or be dissolved by the government. Odd, that.
"
Public unions are sui generis, because they are also monopolies on service,
How on earth can you monopolize labor? Do other people not exist?
Not that conservatives appear to care that much about other sorts of monopolies anyway, but unions workers are only 14% of the population, so cannot possibly have any sort of monopoly, even pretending they were all in the same union, and not in a bunch of different unions that competed against each other.
and not only unions but civil service as well.
Yes, unions are the sole members in the category you invented to contain unions and nothing else. And thus, because they're in a singular category that you've invented, they need to be regulated in ways that you've just stated they need to be regulated, without any reason why.
It's like how car washes are special, because they have a monopoly on car washing, and they're the only service that wash cars. And thus should be forbidden from selling soft drinks. Q.E.D.
And unlike corporations, public unions make little effort to provide an excellent product; in fact, they are more likely to defend a bad worker than reward an extraordinary one.
You know, that sentence right there says a lot about how conservatives think. I really should just let that sentence stand by itself. In fact, I should demand it get tattooed on every conservative's forehead. Corporations can do no wrong.
When's the last time a union's shoddy work killed someone because they decided to save a few thousand dollars? When's the last time a union sold people toxic products? When's the last time they poisoned a lake?
We know the only possible sin in this universe is not giving your employers all your time and energy.
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Labor is a commodity, and as such, can be substituted for any other commodity in capitalism. It follows from that substitution that the agents who control its supply may set its price. Where that commodity is fungible, the consumer may find alternate suppliers. Where that commodity is not fungible, as in the case of public sector jobs such as teachers and firemen, the union arises as a necessary component of bargaining: who else is going to negotiate the salaries with an equally non-transferable entity such as government?
Yes, I get really baffled by this, also. The right have invented this thinking of unions as 'unions', as some unique evil thing that exists.
Unions are corporations supplying services. They are no different than any other corporation. They sell services to other corporations, and to the government.
Anything restricting their ability to negotiate or restricting their ability to write contracts (Like a contract stating that they are the sole permissible supplier, which they cannot write in right-to-work states.) is a government restriction on business, and as such should be anathema to all these die hard 'no government interference in business' people.
Seriously, this is insane.
Imagine the government interjecting itself between your company and your company's cleaning service, and demanding that your company not have the right to ask them to come in three times a week, or something crazy like that. Or saying your cleaning service contract couldn't charge you extra when you called them in for an emergency.
And imagine if the government, when hiring government contractors to supply steel, demanded that they just give them steel. Sure, they started with a contract, but, eh, that's not important. The government can just _make_ that corporation do stuff for them. If that corporation does not supply the stuff, if it refuses, the government can just dissolve it and operate the steel mill itself.
I want people to stop and think about those analogies, and how conservatives would react if they happen. _Really_ think about them.
But somehow, when it's a supplier of labor, called a 'union', as opposed to a supplier of, well, anything else, conservatives pull a 180. Oh, no, _that_ organization, that business that is selling stuff, has no rights to negotiate specific contract terms. It has no right to exclusivity. It has no right to choose not to supply the government.
Because _that_ sort of organization, a union, is owned and operated by working class people, and the superrich owned businesses have a right to do whatever they want to those people.
On “Labor Roundtable: Thoughts on a Libertarian-Labor Alliance”
| It’s certainly true that once the courts decided to grant the artificial status of persons to corporations – not a recent decision at all – the constitutional jurisprudence that follows is unremarkable and probably even correct. It’s the original decision to grant them that status that is problematic.
Indeed. 'Persons' do not, and cannot, exist at the whim of the government..._as all corporations do_.
Tomorrow, any state could, poof, magically uncreate all corporations that exist in it, by repealing corporation law and dissolving the corporations. Yes, yes, you'd run into issues with the taking of property from the _owners_ of the corporation, but those are solvable, and there's no actual issue with the corporation itself.
So, tell me...how does 'someone' have 'free speech rights' but not a 'right to not be killed randomly by a change in the law'? This is utterly nonsensical. Entities created and destroyed by law cannot possibly, in any manner at all, have 'rights' that the law cannot touch.
Whenever libertarians talk about how corporations shouldn't be regulated, I nod, exclaim how it's an awesome idea, and ask them how they plan to deal with such a massive change that dissolution of all corporations would bring to society, and if they've figured out how to replace them with private contracts, which seems tricky to me, but maybe they've figure it out.
They tend to look at me in bafflement until I point out that failing to regulate corporations would result in them _not existing at all_, as they are, after all, the creation of regulations in the first place.
Corporate personhood isn't just 'problematic', it's...well, you know that claim that 'You can produce a reasonable facsimile of insanity by taking one nonsensical premise and extending it to the logical conclusion.'? Well, that's the US's 'nonsensical premise' of the century.
On “Why don’t we treat free trade like global warming?”
Exactly, that's what I was getting at, except I wanted the pro-free-trade people to _state_ what they thought the benefit of, but apparently that's so 'consensus-y' that no one needs to.
Climate change is not a policy. It is a scientific theory that explains observations and makes predictions. Now, these predictions are so bad that there is an _obvious_ policy that suggests itself if you believe the theory, but the policy is not, strictly speaking, part of the science, just like a 'I'm not going to attempt to exit this car while it's moving at 65 MPH policy' is not part of physics, it's just a policy you'll adopt if you understand physics at all.
Science doesn't tell you what to do, it tell you what will happen if you do, or why what already happened did happened.
I suspect the author this has decided that economics have decided that 'free trade always results in higher world-wide productivity', but even if that is scientific consensus...so? I bet lack of child labor laws also result in higher productivity (and I bet that would be easier to prove), but we don't do that. I bet not letting people watch TV would result in higher productivity. I bet having them sleep in barracks at work would result in higher productivity.
The only people who care about the 'higher productivity of the world as a whole' are the fat cat assholes who have managed to convince the world they own 50% _of_ everyone in the world's productivity because they have pieces of paper saying they do.
The rest of us care about our _standard of living_. And then everyone else's standard of living. Only our _owners_ care about our productivity. Of course, our owners also appear to own our government and political discussion, so apparently, our productivity is more important than actually having a job to pay for a house to live in.
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I was just pointing to that as to the 'we make more than anyone else in the world' claim, which was utter nonsense. (Especially as Europe turns into the EU, which actually _does_ make more than the US in total.)
And all those countries, and the US, while still barely managing to go up per-capita, have managed to go up by less than they used to. Growth is tapering off. We slowed and stopped growing, and in the modern world where we're constantly reducing the number of workers, slowed production growth means negative employment growth.
And I'm not counting the recession there, I mean before that.
Meanwhile, China growth is skyrocketing. It's still _nowhere_ close per-capita, but, as I pointed out, a huge section of China is utterly unrelated to any sort of industrial concern at all, and doesn't really participate in a 'market' in any sense, they're farmers who work in the shared-rice paddy and are maybe lucky to actually have electricity, which they do not pay for, because they literally do not have money. China's like what happens if you take modern Michigan and attach it to Medieval Europe....yeah, the per capita production sucks, but only a fraction of the population are even trying to 'produce' anything at all. And 'Michigan' keeps expanding into Europe.
China is growing by converting _to_ a first word country, and it has a _hell_ of a lot of extra population to convert. (Which is why the recession hasn't much hurt it.) And because it has such top-down control, it's managing to actually do it in a slow and sane manner, instead of total chaos. (Like India's doing, rather poorly.)
Great for them. Rather sucky for the rest of the world.
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Did you actually _look_ at that chart? It's not per-capita. It's totally worthless.
Please notice where Japan and Germany and the UK are, and then remember that they have just a fraction of US population.
And then remember that China is something like 90% vast stretches of small villages interspersing rice fields, and the actual manufacturing base is maybe 25% of the population.
| Actually, what I read from Krugman (not as much as I used to), is that he believes the free-trade mantra on it’s own full-stop. He also believes it’s benefits accrue unevenly and unfairly, so he supports broad social services and progressive taxation to ameliorate the unfair negative effects. That’s a pretty different view than what you’re saying.
Uh, the second part of that doesn't really have anything to do with the first. I'm glad he wants to _fix_ the problems that he, himself, wants to cause, but that doesn't really change anything I said about him.
And that's utterly unrelated to the actual issue in what he proposes, in that he seems to understand that trade is a two way street, and that we are currently going on only one way...and...um...something something something, free market with a safety net, blah blah.
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Hey, I'm actually mostly with Paul Krugman. Krugman at least realizes that importing is only a good idea when we're also _exporting_. I.e., 'free trade' has to be _trade_, an actual exchange of goods.
However, he doesn't seem to have any logical way for us to actually start producing more things to trade, nor does he admit that moving production _there_ that we used to do _here_ is not, in any way, better for us.
I.e., he seems to grasp the actual logic of the situation, but then doesn't seem to come to any actual conclusion. He just seems to shrug and say 'And that's how it is'. Um, how about some policy ideas so that we _don't_ have a trade imbalance?
If the stuff coming needs to equal the stuff going out, and _right now_ more stuff is coming in than going out, should we not then make policies to have _less_ stuff coming in and _more_ stuff going out? Which would be the _opposite_ of 'free trade' that he seems to think is so awesome?
OTOH, I could probably respond better to an actual article by him as opposed to links to a book I don't have, thus forcing me to remember what he generally talks about when I do read him.
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Well, yes, but surely we could come to some compromise. I mean, I see all these luxury goods around, like cars and houses and cars, when we could have been building more steel plants and giant warehouses where people live on bunk beds and wear jumpsuits.
Surely, we can come up with the scientific 'optimal' design for the world, and do that. What the purpose would be, I have no idea, but apparently, scientific consensus is behind it and we can't disagree.
Also, economists agree: Children not working in steel mills produces 'losses'.
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Overall the social losses exceed the gains, both worldwide and in China.
I don't _see_ any 'social losses'. I see small losses to manufacturers in the US.
This is where this entire discussion is stupid. Yes, free trade might result in higher world-wide productivity...AND?
Is that what we make economic policy on? The grand total of 'stuff made'?
If so, wouldn't a better policy be to nationalize (and, in fact, internationalize) all production and enslave everyone to work 18 hours a day in factories?
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This is silly. Climate change is an actual measurable thing, and the causes can be determined. Climate scientists are not, strictly speaking, telling us what to do, they're telling us what is happening, and what will continue to happen if we do certain things.
Now, 'not attempting to walk off the top of a ten story building' is an obvious plan of action when confronted with the theory of gravity, and likewise 'reducing CO2' is an obvious plan of action when confronted with the theory of climate change, but neither of those actions _are_ part of the theory....the theory just says what will happen if you do them, it's silent on if you _should_ or not.
Free trade, OTOH, is a _policy_. It is a plan of action.
But let's treat it like a science. In fact, let's treat it like climatology, which economics actually shares many resemblances with.They're both the result of a bunch of tiny interactions, so they're a statistical science, there are no control groups possible because experiments can't be 'made', they just happen, the entire world is involved to some extent...they're actually pretty close.
Do, does 'free trade' make any predictions? Where are you even measuring for the results?
Wait, back up. First, what is 'free trade', anyway? How d you measure how much 'freetradey' something is? As others have pointed out, there appear to be dozens of classes restriction on the market already.
_Economics_ may be a science. Free trade is a specific policy, it cannot have 'consensus', as policies are not part of science. What _could_ have consensus is that 'free trade policies result in more X', where X is some obviously good thing...but I've yet to hear even what that would be, and I would probably disagree that more X is always automatically good.
On “The Death and Life of the Great American Middle Class”
I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to say anything in 'true Republican fashion', being a pretty far-left Democrats. (That is, far-left of where the party appears to be.)
But perhaps more important, you're wrong _anyway_. I thought you were before, but didn't say anything until I actually looked it up.
You do pay taxes on business reimbursements...except you can _deduct business expenses_.
If you buy a airplane ticket for $200, you turn a receipt to the company, and your company gives you $200 to cover that, yes, you have to pay taxes on the $200 they just gave you...but you can deduct the $200 you just spent, so it's exactly the same, tax wise. (Of course, this seriously hurts people who don't itemize their deductions.)
Now, granted, what a business might reimburse you for, and what the government might allow as a deduction, are not the same thing. If a business reimburses you for, example, commuting costs , you'll still end up paying taxes on that, because you can't deduct that. (Or, as you said, the company might give you extra to cover the taxes.)
But business travel is explicitly deductible. No one pays taxes on that.
Of course, peons have to ride coach and only go to a conference every two years, whereas executives get to define their own business reasons and fly wherever, as long as they have a business lunch there for an hour.
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Police unions just have way too much power, period. The inability to fire police officers is not bad compared to the inability to _prosecute_ police officers for clear violations of the law. The police union often behaves as a public face for criminal conspiracy to cover up crimes committed by police.
But with normal unions, the reasons that unions are doing that is companies wold (and still do) fire more expensive older workers to get younger, cheaper ones. That's why senority exists, to counter that. If you divide people into tiers, companies will just put the expensive people in the 'first to go' tier.
If you fix that by requiring them to have 'evidence' before having bad reviews, congrats, you've just reinvented the dismissal process you're complaining about. ;)
What is supposed to happen is that the union is supposed to know the amount of people, and only keep that many, and _itself_ let people go who are not performing. But that never happens.
The best way to make unions responsive, to actually make them only defend productive workers, is to give them some profit-sharing. In fact, in my ideal world, we wouldn't have unions...we'd have worker-owned companies in the first place, where workers owned at least 51% of the voting stock.
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He exempted police from a law prohibiting them from going on strike...to keep them from going on strike?
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Expense reimbursements are reported as income on your W-2, and you pay taxes on them.
I don't think you understand. CEOs do not pay to use the company jet and then get reimbursed for it. They just _get to_ use the company jet for ill-defined 'business' purposes.
Perhaps you thought I meant 'flying in first class', but that's not right either. Often the company just buys those tickets to start with, and hence no one is 'reimbursed' either.
As for the private jet, the company pays property taxes and registration fees on that, plus fuel taxes and operations fees if they actually want to use it.
I didn't say taxes weren't paid, I said _income_ taxes weren't paid. We are talking about _people_ paying _income_ tax.
You appear to have imagine I said 'Not taxed' or 'no taxes' or something in my post. I didn't say anything like that at all.
I repeatedly said things _didn't count as income_, which was to lead people to the (correct) conclusion they were not taxed as income. And most aren't taxed at all. Capital gains is, and I mentioned it.
…doesn’t everyone at a company work for the CEO? Shouldn’t your reasoning therefore conclude that every person’s salary should be considered part of the CEO’s compensation?
Um, no, more people at a company are, in fact, working for the _company's_ benefit. Personal assistants are _not_,
So they are taxed, then. Your contention was that they were not.
Uh, no. it's pretty easy to read what I said, perhaps you should. I said they mysteriously _weren't income_, and only taxed at 15%.
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Um, health insurance isn't taxed _even for normal people_, I have no idea why you think it's taxed for the rich.
Likewise, while company vehicles are _supposed_ to be taxed, that's only if they're actually given to the user. Just letting the CEO or owners jet around on 'company business' that is one 'business related' lunch in Paris and then a three-day stay is _not_ taxed.
Likewise, companies often hire _personal_ assistants for executives. As in, someone who picks up dry cleaning and whatnot. No, that doesn't count as 'income' either.
You _might_ have a point about the limos.
And capital gains are not _taxed_ as standard income, they are taxed at 15%.
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And my other post. Let's look at this another direction. I actually put this in my earlier post, and then deleted it because it obscured my point about partnerships, but look at this way:
You're not really paying the union. The union negotiated _it's own_payment, per worker.
Surely you'll agree that two companies working together can come to any negotiation they want. In fact, third-party security companies often charge the company they're working for per-employee they have to deal with. The union is a partnership that supplies labor, ergo, it makes sense for them to charge per laborer.
So it would be entirely reasonable for a union to charge to a company, say, $30 a worker a month.
The question is, is it reasonable to charge you, and the answer, of course, is...they _aren't_. This payment from your company to the union, just, strangely, _goes through your paycheck_.
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I actually addressed that point in part of my post and then deleted it, because it makes things less clear. I was going to explain, and realized it, again, made things less clear, so i will instead make two posts:
Technically, in what I described, _you_ pay for a parking pass. In fact, people pay for stuff associated with their job all the time. _Most_ of that gets reimbursed, but it certainly doesn't have to be.
Do you argue that your employees shouldn't legally be able to require you to visit a convention somewhere and pay for your own hotel room? Yes, yes, there'd be outrage, but _is it illegal_ for them to do that and fire you if you don't?
Likewise, is it illegal for them to require that you keep up your _third-party_ certifications? That you have to go and pay for some company to give you an MSCE or something?
Those things are pretty dickish moves, even in today's labor market. However, they aren't illegal.
Or, hell, at many jobs you're required to meet a dress code, and, last I checked, you had to buy those clothes yourself.
I'm a little confused at the distinction you're trying to make. Joining the union isn't some random weird thing that you were just forced to do, you were forced to do it _as a condition of your job_, just like paying for a college degree or gas to get to work.
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Indeed. I actually know how taxes work just fine, and if people want to present real arguments that's one thing.
But saying 'My god, look at how much taxes so few people pay', without following up with 'because they make a huge fraction of the income'...
Yes, 'fundamentally dishonest' is exactly the term I use.
Especially since the 'actual' numbers, the actual correct comparison, is _still_ dishonest. The top 1% make about _half_ the money in this country, and only pay 40% taxes. They just make only 23% of the 'income' because of all the rigging they've done to make their stuff not count as income.
Magical 100% health care coverage? Not income. Personal assistants who do everything for them, and I'm not talking about corporate assistants, I'm talking butlers? Not income. Private limos everywhere? Not income. Helicopter? Not income.
All somehow provided by the companies they own, at company expense. None of it 'income'. It's just, for some reason, the company sees fit to provide them near infinite 'benefits', and no actual, taxable, cash.
But how do they get cash? I'm glad you asked. Why, the company lets them buy stock for cheap, and sell it. Capital gains? Also not income for no explicable reason, only taxed at 15%.
Let there be no mistake: If you look at some random guy down the block, and total up every dollar and benefit and physical object he was given over the year, and look at a member of the top 1% and total up everything they were given, the _rich person actually paid less in income tax_, percentage-wise.
So even the 'actual correct percentages' are dishonest, because 'income' has been defined to nonsense under the tax code. Almost every penny given to them (Except, admittedly, health insurance) counts as income for most people, and almost nothing counts for the superrich. But then using _incorrect_ percentages for comparison on top of that is just epically dishonest.
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Indeed. In actuality, the top 1% make about _45%_ of income, and somehow only 23% of that is taxed, to get 40% of tax revenue.
That looks like it it almost even outs, but it doesn't. That untaxed part, which is 20% of all revenue, actually means that everyone else is paying more to cover the shortfall.
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| Are you asserting that taxes are unrelated to those who pay them?
No, I'm asserting that the _amount_ of tax is unrelated to the _amount_ of people paying it. We do not have a 'head tax' in this country.
The revenue from income tax is related to (wait for it...) income. Ergo, the percentage from income tax revenue is related to the percentage of income. That is all it should be _compared_ with when talking about tax rates.
It is reasonable to mention the amount of people you're referring to, but not in such a manner that it invites comparison of those unrelated percentages, and certainly not without first stating the actual thing to compare to.
Did you know that 10% of the patients are responsible for 50% of prostate cancer screening exams paid for by tax dollars? And only 1% of doctors? Doesn't that seem like scam of taxpayer money?
Did you know only 20% of people visit the ocean each year, but 100% of shark attacks happen there?
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