Archive for February, 2011
Thursday, February 24th, 2011
Less Than Nothing
I’ve long maintained that we’d all be better off if what passes for the political left had never yet said anything about “consumption.” What it has said is much worse than silence. Harangues about “consumer culture” are part navel-gazing LSD trip and part major symptom of the very disease they purportedly want to cure.
For those who doubt this, I encourage you to read this report on the latest act of hopeless and phony pseudo-rebellion by the atrocious and simply ignorant author of some of the worst offenses.
Among his brain-dead howlers:
The whole culture needs to say, “Enough! Now we must serve the economy instead of expecting the economy to serve us.”
We currently spend $900 per capita to be shelled with unsolicited advertising, embedded in the cost of products and services. A culture that is less consumer-driven will tolerate less advertising and less debt.
Yes, shame on us, what with all our unreasonable demands that dictate what happens in our consumer-driven economy! Oops, wait a minute, I’m running late for my shareholders’ meeting…
Holy Jesus. With rebels like this, who needs capitalists?
And a post-script: If this clown understood marketing, rather than mere advertising, he’d know that $900 per person is not close to the half of it. Of course, he’s uninformed about and uninterested in actual institutions, so the thought that he’s radically understating the problem he thinks he’s attacking has never crossed his mind.
Monday, February 21st, 2011
Wealth Secrets: Warren Buffett’s Public Subsidy
The Province of British Columbia provides its residents the ability to buy public, not-for-profit automobile insurance.
In the United States, where public insurance is more aggressively opposed by the overclass, publicly provided automotive coverage is entirely unavailable. Consequently, the insurance is inferior and the premiums higher. And the record profits of U.S. insurance companies, which Advertising Age reports “reached $26.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010″ — where do those go?
Largely to folks like Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway empire owns Geico.
The basis for all those private-sector profits? Sheer waste: To promote brand awareness, Geico and its “competitors” engage in saturation advertising of their private monopoly-protected inferior product. According to Ad Age, advertising expenditure by insurers more than doubled between 2000 and 2009.
The overall sales strategy in pure Pavlov. With few differences between companies’ policies and no competition from the public sector, repetition-implanted name recall is everything:
[T]he average shopper can name just four insurance brands off the top of their head, according to J.D. Power. And the way to get on that list is to advertise — all the time. “There’s enormous overlap between the companies that advertise a lot and the companies that are growing faster,” Mr. Shields said. “It seems very much to work.” (Ad Age, February 21, 2011)
Such are the glorious “efficiencies” of capitalism.
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
Extraordinary Misery
As President Hope and Change proposes unpopular double-digit budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, what are his sponsors planning for back in the boardroom?
Check it out, and don’t miss the underlying report.
Draw your own conclusions.
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
Liberals Can’t Read Graphs
When I was a math student, and then again when I was studying social science, they taught me the principles of making and reading data graphs. When it comes to x-y line graphs, the basic idea is simple. The lines must take the best mathematical fit to the points that represent the known information, and judging trends is mostly a matter to reading the slant of the lines.
So, dig this very important graph, taken from Timothy Noah’s series on income inequality in the United States:
Notice how liberals read this: They describe the period from 1941 to 1979 as “The Great Compression.”
Now, look once again at the graph. During what period is there ever a downward-sloping trend line? A pre-schooler would see it immediately: 1941-1945 only.
From 1945 to 1979, the trend line is utterly flat, meaning that income inequality was staying the same, not compressing.
So, why do liberals always define “The Great Compression” as lasting until 1979? Because they are in the business of making excuses for corporate capitalism, which never does anything to equalize income and wealth.
Monday, February 7th, 2011
Overclass Charades, or Waiting for Zero
So, pretending that a mere harangue will get capitalists to stop hoarding cash, Black Reagan goes the Chamber of Commerce, where he pretends to ask:
“If there is a reason you don’t believe that this is the time to get off the sidelines — to hire and invest — I want to know about it. I want to fix it.”
In reply, the true and obvious answer gets mentioned by a Chamber member in attendance:
Mr. Obama’s suggestion that businesses can help the economy recover by spending their reserves was met with skepticism by some in the audience. Harold Jackson, a executive at Buffalo Supply Incorporated, a medical supply company, called it naive.
“Any business person has to look at the demand to their company for their product and services, and make hiring decisions,” Mr. Jackson said. “I think it’s a little outside the bounds to suggest that if we hire people we don’t need, there will be more demand.”
In other words, when all the money’s at the top, there’s no reason to stop hoarding it. Obama’s supply-side bailouts and apologetics are on exactly the wrong course.
Straight from the horse’s orifice, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Black Reagan and his moribund political party to get the point.
[Source: The New York Times, February 7, 2011]
