Commentary

The Gulf Spill: This ( “Beyond Pathetic”) is an absolutely not-to-be-missed article by Andrew B. Wilson, published in The Weekly Standard. He presents with much more evidence the thesis that I was trying to develop in an earlier blog post about the coporate culture of BP under John Browne. And there is a larger issue here: the dividing line does not run between corporations and government, but between pro-capitalists (businessmen and politicians) and--something else. My friend Rob Bradley calls them “political capitalists,” but I refuse to use that term because it was made popular in the 1960s by the infinitely odious Gabriel Kolko. Many people use the term “crony capitalists,” but that is wrong also--because it implies that a kind of capitalism involved. As a commenter on Ira Stoll’s blog “The Future of Capitalism” wrote: “Quit calling it crony capitalism. Just call it Cronyism—it's shorter, deletes the unimportant word, focuses on the important one. It is just the same as crony socialism or crony pflugerism. The issue is the cronyism, and it's the cronyism that causes all the rules of equal justice to break down.”

Jul 1, 2010

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Do you remember slam! that orange moon Just blazing big against the South Beach sky? We idled by those bumpy stuccoed walls, Still warm—in melon, pink, chartreuse. And I, I said, “The moonlight slips right through the bars, For trysts in gardens when a lover comes.” Insistent sambas, smells of rum, made night As musky as perfume the dancing warms. We followed sounds of crazy, happy Cuban Carcajada, right up an outdoor stair To where that moon punched pow! into that blue: You with shoulders silvery and soft and bare. Across the table, I fidgeted and grinned: At you? Those Cuban babes? Quien sabe? And you just said: “Oh God, it's getting late,” And our last moon, bam! was gone, gone away. spiderID=619

Jul 1, 2010

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Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.

Jun 30, 2010

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Ilana Mercer

Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605

Jun 30, 2010

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Honest Services A story I missed yesterday: Seth Lipsky (of the always valuable Future of Capitalism blog) has an article at the WSJ called “Conrad Black and the Criminalization of Business.” W hat I don’t understand is why, if people have a forum in which to speak out, their blogs are not hammering away, day after day, about the injustice of putting such men in prison. BRC intends to. I hope we can avoid being tedious. But we cannot forget the victims of anti-capitalism.

Jun 30, 2010

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Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?

Jun 28, 2010

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The Atlas Society Free Minds 2010 Summer Seminar is a week-long extravaganza of brilliant speakers and enthusiastic participants from all over the country, who come together to learn and to share the good life: the life of reason, freedom, and individualism--all within minutes of downtown Washington, D.C. When: June 30-July 8 Where: Embassy Suites, 1900 Diagonal Rd, Alexandria, Virginia (just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.) Who: The impressive line-up of speakers and topics includes: Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Ayn Rand collaborator and author Nathaniel Branden, on "The Missing Link in Objectivism," Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer will be speaking on "Life and Work wih Ayn Rand." Computer scientist Peter Voss will speak on "Advances and Applications of Objectivism in Artificial Intelligence." Neera K. Badhwar on "Analyzing Ayn Rand's Ethics." Law professor David N. Mayer on "Rediscovering Freedom's Constitution" Nigel Ashford on "Changing the World for Liberty." David Boaz of the Cato Institute on "Ayn Rand, Cato, and the Battle for Reason and Freedom." ....and more.

Jun 27, 2010

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The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.

Jun 27, 2010

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June 28, 2010 -- The new Atlas Society site is now live. Yes, we threw the switch and nothing blew up. We're delighted to be able to better serve our constantly growing web audience with a new clutter-free website. simple navigation, and streamlined architecture. Not to mention offering new tools like auto-podcasting and interactive webinars. For the remainder of the year new features and functionalities will be released. These include (but are not limited to): A much-improved online store (opening August 15th). For the first time, you'll be able to download mp3 files directly from the site. The product rollouts for the store will come in several waves, and the audio portion will steadily grow larger as we continue to convert classic lectures to digital format. Additional search functionalities. Video programs including live streaming.

Jun 25, 2010

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not returning U.S. President Barack Obama’s calls. I’m being theatrical. Obama is demanding that Germany pull its weight in the global-recovery effort by aping the U.S.: spending more and producing less.

Jun 24, 2010

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Ilana Mercer

There has to be some word that conveys a level of effrontery far beyond “gall,” “brass,” “nerve,” and “chutzpah.” We need a concept that is capable of referring to Saddam Hussein’s practice of shooting political opponents and then charging their relatives for the cost of the bullets. And we need this concept right now, in order to refer to U.S.

Jun 24, 2010

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Jeff Skilling Speaks Out. Fortune magazine carries a prison interview with the former CEO of Enron. Regime Uncertainty. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson is beginning to realize that demonizing business makes people reluctant to do business. “Given the housing and financial carnage, most of today's cautiousness and risk aversion-by both businesses and households-were unavoidable. But the Obama administration's anti-business rhetoric and controversial health ‘reform’ may have compounded the effect. These created uncertainties and, in the case of health ‘reform,’ raised the cost of future full-time employees. The administration believes these policies don't jeopardize the economic recovery. Historians may conclude that the goals were at cross-purposes.”

Jun 24, 2010

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A story by Don Clark and Kara Scannell (of the WSJ) suggests that the investigation into Dell (mentioned yesterday) will bring to light the question of Intel rebates. "Such rebates have been a focus of government antitrust suits against Intel in the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea, which allege that the chip giant has improperly used financial incentives to its customers to discourage major computer makers from buying chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices . Intel denies the allegations, arguing that the rebates it gives customers are a lawful form of price discounting to meet competition."

Jun 24, 2010

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BP CEO Tony Hayward testified before the House Energy and Commerc Committee. It did not go well. Given that the U.S. Attorney General has announced an investigation into possible criminal charges, it seems noteworthy that no one thought to read Hayward his Miranda rights. Indeed, the congressmen rather seemed to expect he should make a wide variety of assertions on the basis of which he and others might later be pilloried, sued, and jailed. The highlight of the committee session was the assertion by Rep. Joe L. Barton (Republican of Texas) that the $20 billion escrow account BP has agreed to set up under threat from President Obama was “a shakedown.” This is what is known in Washington lingo as a “Kinsley gaffe.” (The term arises from a remark by Michael Kinsley: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”)

Jun 24, 2010

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Environmentalists Seize a Chance to Oppose Human Production According to an NYT story , “BP officials said on Sunday that about 15,000 barrels of oil from the gulf spill was collected by its containment cap on Saturday, bringing the total since the device was installed to more than 119,000 barrels, or about 5 million gallons.” But the meaning our culture takes away from Deepwater Horizon spill will not be one of human triumph over adversity. Regardless of what engineering triumphs are performed, the message is going to be one of human impotence and need to reject industrialism.

Jun 24, 2010

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Repealer-General This is a truly statesman-like innovation, provoked by our governmental growth. We need a public official who has no responsibility except recommending laws and regulations to be repealed. Indeed, if we could invest the office with sufficient probity, I would like to see the gentleman given a sort of veto, which only a two-thirds majority could override.

Jun 24, 2010

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If they want to marry, why should the state prevent them? Here is a depressing story by John Crawley of Reuters, recounting the absurd political interference with the merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines.

Jun 24, 2010

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The first rule of politics: Treat the symptom, not the cause. From an Investor’s Business Daily editorial : “Overhauling the banking system without fixing Fannie and Freddie is like fighting terrorists without attacking the jihadi ideology motivating them.” Be adults? GE’s Jeffrey Immelt on Goldman : ““People need to tone down the rhetoric around financial services and stop the populism and be adults.” That is so 19th century.

Jun 24, 2010

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From Gail Collins of the NYT, another assault on Americans’ benevolent sense of life , comparing it to day-dreaming. “Americans have always raised their children to believe in the power of the dream. This is probably why hundreds of thousands of young people are certain they are destined to become the American Idol. Or Next Top Model. Or marry a Jonas Brother. A few of these dreamers grew up to run oil companies. They believed with all the power of their fierce, tiny hearts that they could drill farther and farther down into the ocean without ever having a really big accident.”

Jun 24, 2010

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Reading the New York Times is an onerous chore under the best of circumstances, and reading Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday business column “Fair Game” must be accepted as a penance worth centuries in Purgatory. Still, if one reads Our Gal Sunday long enough, some small pleasures can be found. Today, I found one. Nominally, it was just a 300-word story by wretched Gretchen with the headline “A.I.G. Executive Won’t Be Sued.” Talk about a non-story.

Jun 24, 2010

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