Archive for the 'Public Enterprise (Shouting Down, Crowding Out)' Category
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.
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
A Half-Thanks to Glenn Beck
Neo-Know Nothing Glenn Beck does us the service of highlighting the concept of “choice architects.” These are trained experts working behind the scenes to manipulate popular behaviors on behalf of secret agendas.
As always, Beck is too uninterested in reality to lay his hands on the bulk of the problem he thinks he sees: His version is that government regulators are the main choice architects, and that governmental rules are the main venue for the imposition of elitist choice architecture.
Of course, the real story is that corporate marketing campaigns remain far and away the largest source of secret, cynical, heedless, and often sociopathic behavioral engineering. In intentionality, tools, experience, funding, and ill effect, private-sector choice architects simply dwarf their public-sector counterparts.
This reality is, of course, a forbidden topic in Beck’s re-canned and over-heated version of the ruling ideology. There, capitalists are nothing more and nothing less than servants of freedom. Any fact or thought suggesting otherwise is treason, to such well-indoctrinated stooges.
Meanwhile, if Beck ever bothered to remain open to understanding his own sources, he might’ve noticed that the main connection between private-sector choice architecture and public authority is Obama-buddy Cass Sunstein‘s rather silly careerist effort to convince government bureaucrats to take it seriously and start hiring from the stream of students he and his business school-based co-author are casting upon our troubled waters. Indeed, an iota of thinking attention to their work confirms that big business marketing provides a very large share of the examples of the “libertarian paternalism” techniques they would like to see adopted as a tool in the public sector.
Meanwhile, have you ever wondered about the actual relationship between public rules and public welfare? (If you read this blog, I assume you have.) It isn’t quite what the capitalists and “libertarians” would have you believe.
Consider this description of 19th century English bread-selling regulations, from Bill Bryson’s newest book, At Home:
Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally.
Beck and his fellow market totalitarians would be forced by their own ideology to insist that the results of this draconian state regulation must have been the utter collapse of bread-selling in Britain. In fact, the result was this:
[Because of the harsh laws], bakers sometimes provided a little extra — the famous baker’s dozen.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Does the USA Really Have Public Broadcasting?
"Anchors," indeed!
One look at PBS or listen to NPR screams the answer. There are corporate sponsors on which the “public” endeavors are made to rely. These sponsors run ads in the “public” media they sponsor. In a nation of immense class and race polarity, where illegal wars, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and mass unemployment never end, we get Antiques Road Show and Nightly Business Report and the stuffedest of stuffed shirts mimicking corporate TV news on the one and only “public” television network?
In any event, the obviousness doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to analyze the beast’s behaviors.
Toward that end, take a look at this from FAIR.
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
“Nearly Any”
The New York Times today headlines an interpretive piece, the main claim of which is this:
Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter.
Translation: The overclass, as always, prefers Great Depression to a pro-labor shift in the distribution of power. This society remains entirely capable of employing all its able-bodied workers and thereby ending the present economic cliffwalk. What it lacks is a left coherent enough to demand what the elite won’t mention.
Friday, August 6th, 2010
The March of Marketing Surveillance
Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.
For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:
Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.
It is also increasingly powerful:
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”
Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.
Friday, July 9th, 2010
A Headline Worth 1,000 Words
“U.S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles“
Under that headline, The Wall Street Journal reports this:
U.S. companies are holding more cash in the bank than at any point on record, underscoring persistent worries about financial markets and about the sustainability of the economic recovery.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963.
And, of course, this:
The comfort of having cash on hand, though, comes at a high price companies may not be willing to pay for much longer. They are earning almost no interest on their holdings of cash, making it more difficult for them to achieve the returns shareholders typically expect from them. That will put pressure on companies to pare down the cash holdings eventually.
“Stockholders don’t want them to keep sitting on cash at a zero return,” said Paul Kasriel, an economist at Northern Trust. “They’re going to use it,” either to increase hiring and investment or to make payouts to shareholders in the form of dividends or share buybacks, he said.
Wanna bet which one it’ll be? Didn’t think so:
Earlier this week, retailer Target Corp. raised its quarterly dividend to 25 cents a share from 17 cents, saying that the company’s cash holdings were “well above the amount needed for optimal reinvestment in our core business.”
How fortunate for everybody that we love free markets and don’t begrudge people getting rich! And that we have a president who knows how things work, and that “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.”
