Hollywood Director James Orr points out some interesting factoids about how megacorporate movieland is seeing the game shifting before their very eyes.
The internet changes everything… we just do not know precisely how yet.
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It is often said by libertarians, or “radicals for capitalism”, to coin Ayn Rand’s phrase, that Big Business is often lousy at defending the market and in fact is only too happy to co-opt the State to make life hard for competitors. I was reminded of this fact when noted Libertarian Alliance author, Sean Gabb, made much of this point in a talk on Friday evening. It appears that the U.S. retailing giant WalMart may be guilty of this by lobbying for a rise in the U.S. minimum wage. Debate continues as to what exactly is the impact of a minimum wage on the unemployment rate in a country, but in theory at any rate, raising the marginal cost of hiring a worker presumably makes it less likely that said persons will be hired, other things being equal. Marginal Revolution, the U.S. economics blog, has a take on the issue here. Other useful discussions at the Von Mises Institute here, and taking a more supportive view of such laws, is this paper here. Even if one takes the assumption that minimum wage laws don’t always raise unemployment overall, the businesses that lobby for them may think they do, or think that by raising their would-be competitors’ costs, that it will strengthen their own market position. In short, there is nothing very altruistic about it. And Walmart, to take this firm as an example, is also renowned as a beneficiary of eminent domain land-grabs. Funnily enough, this has become something of a cause celebre for parts of the left, who ironically, are relying on the same sorts of defences of property rights that I referred to a few days back on this site. It would be nice if the left embraced property rights as a cause. Stranger things have happened. October 30th, 2005 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I went from Instapundit to this this presumably not-so-instant pundidtry by Glenn Reynolds called The old industrial state, and from there, via an eBay reference, to another Glenn Reynolds piece called Is small the new big?. The idea here is that that new big businesses – eBay, Amazon – are getting big by helping the small guy to do his thing, unlike the old big business, which was an economically deluded tyrant. But did not the big, bad old industrial system – which only became a “state” in the years of its dotage – also empower people? For as long as it was properly run, it did. The Model T and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue empowered the little guy, just like eBay and Amazon now. The Model T was the basis of many a small business. Sears Roebuck made it possible for smaller operators outside the big cities to function on level terms with the city folks by letting them buy the same stuff and get their money back if not satisfied, just as if they were buying it from a big city store. Most of the USA still lives in small towns, I am constantly told. The old industrial “state” is what enabled them to do so, comfortably. More recently, the personal computer industry – now dominated by big, bad, old Intel and Microsoft – has empowered millions of individuals, and made possible the growth of enterprises like eBay and Amazon. Empowering the little guy is not a new idea. I can still remember the thrill of empowerment that I felt from my first computer, an Osborne 1. There are two quite distinct ideas rubbing together here. One is bigness, and its alleged badness. The other is the genuinely bad idea that it is both smart to try to – and actually possible to – insulate huge numbers of people from market pressures, indefinitely. J. K. Galbraith, quoted by Reynolds, thought that this could happen, and his big idea, if you can call it that, was that business bigness meant being above and beyond market realities. The truth is that a big business that ignores market realities is heading for a big fall. But the little guy is just as prone to economic delusion as the big guy. That is often why he is so little. Like the guy making a small fortune in sport, he started out with a large fortune. The ultimate embodiment of the Galbraith delusion was of course the USSR, which copied the bigness of US business without copying any of the market responsiveness that brought the USA’s business bigness into being in the first place. The USSR just stole bigness from others, and eventually the loot ran out. What is true is that formerly successful and still established ways of doing things can get into serious trouble, and because they once were so successful, they can last way beyond their days of success. There is a lot of ruin in them. Big and successful businesses become Galbraithian. They become, on a tiny scale, economically speaking, the USSR. But they cannot last, any longer than the USSR could. Not being able to murder all their rivals and critics, they last a lot less long. Business bigness is the consequence of a new business idea becoming thoroughly understood by a few exceptional people, who proceed to organise it, and then to triumph over almost all of their rivals. Then, times change, and that kind of bigness needs to change too, but by then millions have got used to it and cling to it. That is the problem of the old “industrial state”. What we are living through is neither the end of bigness nor the beginning of individual empowerment by bigness. It is a transitional period, between one lot of bignesses and other sorts of bigness. And these new bignesses will be just as like to give rise to new Galbraithian delusions as the earlier ones were. And let us also give credit where credit is still due. Those big old businesses got big in the first place by doing lots of empowering of the little guy. To put it in Reynolds-ese: the old big also did small. October 18th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Just over a year ago I spent a very happy few days in northern California, spending one very long and pleasant day in the state’s Napa Valley wine region. The region boasts some of the best wines in the world, including the now-famous wineries of Robert Mondavi. Mondavi’s wines caused a global sensation in the trade when, during a “blind tasting” in the early 1970s, wine critics rated his produce a notch above the competition from more exalted premises in Bordeaux and Burgundy. The horror! This article very nicely draws out how the challenge of New World wines from California, Chile, Argentina (a magnificent producer of wine), South Africa, New Zealand and Australia has led to a fairly grumpy response from the traditional centres. This is perhaps understandable. The French produced some of the finest wines of all time, with only a bit of competition from the flowery Hocks and Moselles from Germany and the likeable Riojas in Spain and a few good ones from Italy. About 20-plus years ago, you could walk into a supermarket and choose from only a relatively limited range of wines, much of it fairly basic plonk. Globalisation has put some of the world’s most far-flung wine producers into the reach of Joe Public. All we need now is a similar global “race to the top” in the production of effective hangover cures. October 15th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Richard D. North, Rich is Beautiful, (page 199). September 29th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have long defended an American corporation, much hated by anti-globalisation types, greens, leftists, even many conservatives. While many seem to think that the mission of said corporation is to destroy all that is good in the world and to act as a back door through which America can destroy local colour and local traditions, I have found it hard to fault a company that sells hamburgers to people who voluntarily choose to consume them, that has introduced the concept of the public toilet to many parts of the world where the idea was lacking, and generally provides excellent customer service to go with its slightly questionable food. I have found it hard to see anything sinister in that. But alas, in the Praça da Liberdade in Porto on Saturday, I discovered that those brave battlers against corporate domination of the world were right. For the era of concealment is over. McDonald’s restaurants are now established in most of the world, and they can finally allow their true ambitions and the true scope of their mission to become clear. The time for hiding is now, clearly, over.  I will confess that despite their obvious sinister ambitions, I quite like the new logo. September 26th, 2005 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I can not say this bad story came as a total surprise, given the near-total lack of respect for property rights and the rule of law in Africa:
The story goes on to say that the seizure is part of a drive to “redistribute” land to people who lost what was rightfully theirs as a result of the 20th Century apartheid regime. Hmmm. It seems to me that on an abstract level relating to rectification of previous injustices, there is some credibility to this idea. However, the big problem is that the people who will get chunks of this land are unlikely to have much to do with the people who were allegedly robbed of said land in the first place, assuming that such a claim can be validated. (Of course if there are people who could claim that they or their ancestors were robbed of what was rightly theirs, then I have no objection in principle to some restitution). In practice, as we have seen all too clearly in nearby Zimbabwe, the spoils of any assault on white-owned farmland will go to the political hacks and cronies of the governing regime, and likely bring about a serious, possibly catastrophic loss of economic wealth and food in a part of the world, that is not, to put it mildly, greatly endowed with such things. Perhaps the president of South Africa should put this book on his reading list. Or perhaps he should remember to heed his own words. More than anything else, Africa needs stable, enforceable property rights, period, if it is clamber out of its current state. Sir Bob Geldolf and friends, please note. September 23rd, 2005 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are verbatim quotes by Tony Blair from the September 15, 2005 Plenary Session of the Clinton Global Initiative Conference. Tony Blair seems to have let the cat out of the bag on his new energy policy at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference last week. Blair said:
This must be a major disappointment to Kyoto enthusiasts, who say ten more Kyotos are needed for effective reduction of atmospheric CO2. On July 12, 2005, on the subject of the Gleneagles Summit, I wrote the following to a number of colleagues:
Allan M.R. MacRae September 22nd, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I love the internet. I went from this, which I posted here, to this, to this, to this, to this:  . . . to this:  . . . . which is the work of Ha Qiongwen. Of this particular poster, Stefan Landsberger says:
Personally I think the Red Guards were on to something. I think these delightful and amazing Chinese propaganda posters and China’s current, rampantly aspirational and bourgeois rise towards superpowerdom are cause and effect. I offered further thoughts along these lines in this ASI blog posting . This is the bit that is relevant:
If you follow the link in that and scroll down to the bottom, you get to this:  Red Guards eat your hearts out. (I now possess that book.) Did Ayn Rand have anything to say about these Chinese posters? She should have. September 21st, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, sort of… Actually I have long taken a similar view that without the distortions of the Common Agricultural Policy, many farm would and should go out of business or at least change what they do. My guess is that it would mostly be those who concentrate on the high end ‘premium’ end of the market (such as pandering to the demand for ‘organic’ food) who would survive. Remove the barriers to trade and let the agricultural economies of less developed parts of the world feed us. Does it really make sense to artificially keep so much of the First World under cultivation? September 15th, 2005 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just moved into a new flat. As I am now living alone, and in my last arrangement I was not, I find that there are a lot of basic odds and ends that I need but which I don’t have already. I particularly need items for the kitchen. One thing I needed was a microwave oven. While I did technically own a microwave oven already, that one is in Australia. So I went my local large Asda store, and looked for microwaves. They had a good, basic model of microwave oven on sale for £24.41. That is right, £24.41. (Excluding the VAT tax imposed by the British government, the price is even less – £20.77. That is well under 40 dollars). The prices of a great many electrical and electronic goods have collapsed over the last four or five years, but I still find it amazing. I can only have a modest meal in a London restaurant for that price, but somehow it is possible to make a microwave oven in China, ship it halfway round the world, bring it into a large London store, and sell it to me, while still making a profit, for such a miniscule price. The microwave oven I own that is still in Australia and that I bought in 1999 cost me more than three times as much. And through lower prices I am therefore more than $100 better off than I was in 1999, just through that one purchase. There is not much to be said, other than: Three cheers for free trade. And, finally Three cheers for Wal-Mart. September 11th, 2005 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Surfing the cable television channel briefly on Friday lunchtime, I came across a CNBC programme about oil prices, in which a couple of analysts fielded email questions from the public about why prices are so high. One guy claimed that the price of oil – currently about 70 dollars a barrel – was grossly inflated by those evil speculators and the “real” price of oil was more like 40 dollars. Okaaay, said one of the analysts. If that is the case, maybe the emailer should quit his or her day job and take up oil speculation if the “real” price of oil was far lower. Armed with this insight, the correspondent would make a killing, said the clearly rather bemused analyst. It is rare on television to see this sort of nonsense smashed out of the park in such a fashion. Certainly not likely on the BBC. While on the subject of nonsense about the role of speculators and prices, this is worth a read. September 11th, 2005 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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