Will You Listen Now, Cap'n Oblivious?

Back in September, I posted about Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel and his comments about investing in the US.  He ain't.

Well, OK, he is.  But most of their investment in new plants is happening overseas.  Note that the Vietnamese plant is expected to:  "...expected to create thousands of skilled jobs as the nation moves from low to hi-tech."


Vietnam is becoming hi-tech.  Viet-f'n-nam is becoming hi-tech.  


If O (and the rest of our governmental leaders) doesn't get it through his shellacked head that we compete globally for jobs, we are doomed.  Because our business leaders have figured it out.

One of the Giants Speaks

Bernie Marcus is one of the founders of Home Depot, one of the most remarkable businesses to spring to life in the last 30 years.  He and his co-founders, Arthur Blank and Ken Langone started from nothing back in the late ‘70’s and built a huge, successful business that redefined an entire industry.  In short, Marcus is the sort of man you would want to listen to about creating jobs, since he had a big hand in creating over 300,000 of them.

Being the evil rich man that he is (he’s worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion), a few years ago he single-handedly kicked in $200 million to the city of Atlanta to build what is now the world’s largest aquarium and has also signed on with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at The Giving Pledge, (read his nasty letter at the link) where he has pledged to give most of his fortune to their foundation upon his death.

Mr. Marcus was on CNBC today and, well, he ain’t happy.  This is a little over 15 minutes long and worth every minute.  (I tried mightily with my puny HTML skilz to embed the video here, but it is apparently the video that will not be embedded.)

Are you listening up there in your Ivory Tower, Mr. President?

Another One on the Way Out

Yesterday, I wrote about Paul Otellini and his comments on investing in the US from the high point of being a Fortune 500 CEO.  Big picture, you might say.  Well, here is what it looks like up close, from the Washington Post, via Minyanville.

Read down a bit in the Minyanville piece and see what a guy went to engineering school to do in Elkhart, Indiana.

Here’s my theory on doing business with any government entity.  They pass rules and regulations not to get anything done but to keep something from getting done.  Specifically, government employees and manager come up with the regs that they come up with to keep them from getting in trouble.  That’s all.  That engineer is filling out mounds of paper for a stimulus project for no other reason than so a government clerk somewhere can make sure that all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed because if that is done, then they really don’t care about the outcome.

It is this that led to the Bernie Madoff scheme.  Harry Markopolos, the man who tried to stop Madoff but couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, eventually came to the conclusion that the people running the SEC were all lawyers who neither had the math skills to understand what Madoff was doing, nor the inclination to understand.  They were merely concerned with making sure all the disclosure documents were properly filed.  Which they were.  How’d that work out?

How to drive businesses out of the US in three easy steps:

• Raise taxes
• Raise uncertainty
• Bury them with paperwork:
• “The United States, by contrast, has offered financing under the stimulus program, but the process has proved too cumbersome for the small company.”

Man, it works like a charm!

In Which, While in my Underwear, I Critique a Nobel Prize Winner

Paul Krugman, in today's New York Times laments the absence of Richard Nixon in the White House today rather than the current office holder.

"But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable."

So, what was that era of American politics really like? It was a time when the Democrats had been in power for so long that the Republican party had acclimated so thoroughly to being the minority party that they mounted no real challenge to the Democrats in the House and the Senate. Instead, they sought to pick up a few crumbs here and there that the Democrats tossed their way after funding things like, oh, I don't know-the ultra successful War on Poverty. Republicans in that era weren't so much an opposition party as they were inside players, skilled at greasing the skids in order to maintain their own access to the public coffers. They didn't challenge the Democrats in either philosophy or the execution of that philosophy. So Krugsie laments the loss of a time when Republicans were compliant and easily manipulated with a few bread crumbs.

When you hear Krugman and others on the Left decry the lack of civility and bipartisanship in politics today, what they are really moaning about is that the Dems can't roll the Reps any more. Hell, they can't even roll the Blue Dog Dems any more. Somewhere along the line over the last 30 years, conservatives and libertarians found their voice and formed a clear understanding of those beliefs. And because these beliefs are principle-based, not desire based, they don't yield. In short, the Krugmans of the world can't stand the fact that the conservative side of the country dug in its heels and started to push back. For me personally, this crystallization of thought began about 3 years after I got out of college, in the time of Reagan.

Read this passage from Krugman:

"Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers;"

I don't know of anyone who is balking at that idea. In fact, many people in this health care debate would like to see employer-based health care come to an end. Further, the market for employees already dictates that large employers provide health insurance. It's a ludicrous statement for Krugman to make.

And then Krugman gets it completely wrong:

"So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties."

How condescending. What an ass. The disagreement over health care reform, or health insurance reform, isn't based on a reasonable proposal from the Democrats. What the Democrats are proposing isn't reasonable to people who have a firm belief that health care, and the responsibility for it, is better left to the people who need it and the people who provide it. The socialist Left is dumbfounded that people wouldn't want a government provided program for everything (see "What's Wrong With Kansas"). The conservative/libertarian right is dumbfounded that some people believe the government should be their Sugar Daddy and parcel out everything we need to live.

Obamacare is a dangerous expansion of government, period. Neither I nor any clear-thinking person can see the benefit of that, never mind the anti-competitive nature of it. We simply can't see the wisdom or benefit in turning over so large a component of the private sector to the government. The socialist Left is seriously misjudging the anger being shown at town hall meetings these days. Obama and the crew are trying to ram something through with little if any debate or discussion. Elected representatives stand in front of these town hall meetings and read talking points designed to sell the plan rather than talking substantively about the bill at hand. People see this and quite rightly they go ballistic.

The hell of it is, there is quite a lot of agreement between the two sides about health care and, I believe, a real willingness to fix it. But when the party in power tries to shove something down our throats, we fight back. Areas of agreement include:

• Health care costs too much
• We should eliminate employer-provided health care. We need true portability.
• We don't like having either insurance companies or the government between us and our doctors
• Medical providers need relief from the administrative nightmare they face every day
• The ultimate responsibility for one's health resides with the individual. People need to eat properly and get enough exercise. We should do more to encourage the acceptance of this responsibility.
• Pre-existing conditions should be more limited in scope. The other side of this double-edged sword is that insurers will price for recent conditions, as they should. My ex-wife was recently denied coverage because the insurer thought that she had had a sprained knee within the last 30 days. A sprained knee. (She appealed and got the coverage.)

I am a big believer in the use of Health Savings Accounts coupled with major medical coverage. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods recently wrote about how his company uses these to control costs and places more responsibility in the hands of his employees and he was excoriated by his Volvo-driving, tofu-chewing customers. He was accused of being anti-healthcare reform, which was ludicrous. He just didn't care for Obamacare and has a workable, proven alternative. Since the Whole Foods plan works, there is no chance that Obama, Krugman or any of the fringe Left will adopt any of its methods.

Krugman goes on to whine about corporate lobbying in Congress. Blah, blah, blah.

So, I propose a compromise for health care. The socialist Left is bent on a giveaway, so let's do this. The government just handed as much as $4500 to everybody who purchased one of the government's preferred automobiles. Let's declare the Whole Foods plan to be the government's preferred plan, eliminate employer-provided health care and then give everyone $5000 (the annual limit) in a Health Savings Account. And then let the market do what it does best, wring the fat out of the market. This compromise would satisfy the right's desire to make the health care market function more like a free market and would satisfy the left's burning desire to give other people's money away.

Nah, better not. It might work.