• A Potential Spark of Economic Intelligence In Government
• Real Economic Stimulus
• End The Fed (A Great Idea)
• Fed Adds 25K+ Units Of Dead Weight

This story highlights the type of mind that result from and thrive in an economy rife with Government meddling - Faux Capitalists.

[Ford CEO Alan Mulally] was a guest recently at this newspaper’s ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, where he outlined his efforts to revamp the struggling car maker. He said one problem is that America didn’t have an “integrated energy policy.” On the one hand, the government “regulated” smaller cars by “mandating average fuel mileage improvements,” but on the other hand “with low fuel prices and low interest rates over the years, the U.S. consumers have chosen generally larger vehicles.”

Mr. Mulally offered his own solution to the mismatch, artfully explaining that we needed to “involve the consumer in our energy policy.” In case anyone missed his point, Michael Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, the largest auto dealer in the country, was more explicit: “Mr. Mulally said it very elegantly last night and I will say it more straightforward. We need more expensive gasoline.”

In other words, they want to leverage illegitimate government force to compensate for the mediocrity (lack of market share) that results from previous illegitimate government force. Yet another example of the recursive nature of statist regulation, i.e., controls breeding controls.

So: The U.S. government mandates fuel-economy standards that force Detroit to make cars Americans don’t want to drive. When Detroit loses money on those cars, Washington throws taxpayer dollars at its mistake, and the car makers demand a tax increase that would prod Americans to buy the unpopular cars that Washington mandates. As for what the American consumer or taxpayer wants — or can afford in today’s economy — who cares? Welcome to government-run energy policy.

I would correct the last sentence… welcome to government run anything. The mindset of these mixed-economy barons inevitably serves to further blur the line between economic and political power that so many fail to see. When most American’s hear successful supposed Capitalists calling for such measures it only reinforces their confusion of the proper role of Government in a free nation’s economy.

Funny, but infuriating considering the underlying truth.

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.

“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.

With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner. [emphasis mine]

We know at least one way they can afford it. If a company wants to waste money by paying someone for idleness, that’s their choice, but to do so and then beg to be bailed with looted wealth is a tremendous feat of evil.

Through confiscation at gunpoint is the only way these companies will ever receive a penny from me.

And, apparently Ben Stein has tricked people into considering his economic perspectives, which are as flimsy as his “scientific” ones.

Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldn’t that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?

And what’s his moral justification?

Let’s stop the Depression before it starts. Let’s show some fairness and good faith to our own. Let’s bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?

Until this passage, I dismissed him as a pragmatist willing to compromise his principles for the sake of the moment, but here he reveals the opposite. These are his principles.

Ben is an altruist, his morality is vested (at least partially) in sacrificing himself for others. He is a collectivist, he has no issues with extending and enforcing his altruism (by force) on others, condoning their sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Therefore, Ben thinks it’s fair, by his altruistic-collectivist standards, for government to tax me at gunpoint and handout the loot to a crumbing company rank with incompetence and infested with professional moochers, or to a lazy, freeloading vagrant, or to an elderly person with no savings to live off of because they evaded financial planning for a lifetime. As long as someone’s needs, any needs, are nurtured, the ends justify the means for Ben.

Something is very wrong here.

Indeed.

Ford has an extremely efficient and productive manufacturing facility on the eastern coast of Brazil.

They’ve actually integrated members of their supply chain to operate within the same facility leading to an entirely different approach to building cars. Here in the US, the UAW won’t allow such a setup. Also different is the attitudes of their employees.

At Ford Motor Co.’s factory here, a group of Visteon Corp. workers connect the wiring in a dashboard module for a Ford EcoSport. Next to them, Lear Corp. employees are building seats for the same vehicle. A few feet away, Ford’s Diede Silva dos Santos applies trim to a Fiesta subcompact. She’s mastered seven jobs at the plant and is working on an eighth.

“If you do different jobs, it’s more interesting,” said Silva dos Santos, 24. “It gives me a chance to expand my knowledge. (It) makes me a more valuable employee, too, so that I will have a future here.”

All of them exemplify a different kind of worker in a different kind of plant for a Detroit automaker.

Contrast that mentality with the typical US union vibe where workers long for any type of leverage to keep their job other than adding value.

The subjective law that grants Unions their power must be abolished.

A potential answer for all the screams for fuel efficiency will likely never meet Americas highways.

Ford’s 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. But here’s the catch: Despite the car’s potential to transform Ford’s image and help it compete with Toyota Motor ™ and Honda Motor (HMC) in its home market, the company will sell the little fuel sipper only in Europe. “We know it’s an awesome vehicle,” says Ford America President Mark Fields. “But there are business reasons why we can’t sell it in the U.S.” The main one: The Fiesta ECOnetic runs on diesel.

………………..

Yet while half of all cars sold in Europe last year ran on diesel, the U.S. market remains relatively unfriendly to the fuel. Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline.

Other sources cite the tremendous costs and technical changes Ford would face trying to meet EPA approval. To put it in other terms - Ford can’t build and sell a product according to their terms, because the US Government violates property rights.

Yet another mindless antitrust crusade. I’ll be sure not to consider any AMD products for purchase from now on.

You should read the article, but this about sums it up:

In particular, the FTC wants more information on Intel’s practice of offering favorable pricing on chips to certain customers.

Sounds like smart business to me.

Socialist Paul Kanjorski [D-PA] further spearheads our descent into destruction with a gem of barbaric brilliance he’s named the “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008″. H.R. 5800 would establish a “Reasonable Profits Board” that would serve to determine if oil companies are bringing in too much money.

Since we’ve, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the founding principles for this nation, and are no longer chained by constitutional justification, this measure is fair game.

Here’s uncle Sam’s claim - “You don’t have a right to your profits, we do. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how you might reinvest your profits, we’d rather confiscate them by force as a form of pandering and income redistribution.”

It escapes me how any human could claim the right to dictate the appropriate profitability of another. Unless he’s the consumer, by what right can he tell another how much the product of his labor and resources should be worth in barter? A producer and his voluntary consumers are the only entities with any justifiable means to determine price. Any man that claims such determination can rightfully be made by anyone other than the producer and consumer, and then imposed by force, is an advocate of slavery.

The proper response to this meddling is for the victim (big oil) to simply say “no, we quit”. It would only take once, as the crumbling economy would send a message to congress reminding them who’s rightfully in charge - the men of production, not crooks and cowards who scheme their way into office and pander to stay there. Kanjorski and all the other rodents would scurry in a desperate attempt to officially retract the 13th amendment in order to fix their boo boo. I long for the then day where men proudly assert their right to the product of their labor. When the victims realize their sanction is the only power Washington thugs maintain, the sick little game that is American politics will be nothing more than a footnote in history.

So, keep pushing Paul. The more you push, the sooner those of us who understand life, liberty and property can rebuild the nation you’re doing your best to obliterate.

The Undercurrent’s latest article reviews the fuel of Capitalism - a force that is typically demonized, underrated, misunderstood and ignored by our culture - the profit motive.

Many people believe that without government regulation, pharmaceutical (insert any market) companies will dupe consumers and cut corners in order to make a quick dollar. They believe that the regulatory restrictions imposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (insert any government agency) are necessary to reign in companies whose greed would otherwise lead them to engage in a range of unscrupulous practices.

This view fails to recognize that the free market already has a means of rewarding integrity—the profitability of a good reputation.

[parenthetical emphasis added to make statement universal to any market or bureaucracy]

Laws which are written by those ignorant of this fact, designed to enforce morality on individuals, result in tremendous economic destruction and waste. Government essentially taxes citizens in order to fund the multitude of regulatory agencies that sink their fangs into the necks of businessmen, in order to keep them from taking (what they consider) unethical or immoral action. This tremendous undertaking, one which aspires to micro-manage millions of people in their endeavors ignores the fact that the motive of profit will eliminate wretched or incompetent individuals, and in a manner which is morally, economically, and justly superior. Individuals who make poor, short-sided or unethical decisions detriment the value of their barter, and more importantly, their reputation. Detract value from your product, or tarnish your reputation; and you won’t last very long in a free market.

Not only does it cost tremendous amounts of money to fund the variety of big-brother task forces, the larger, and more inconspicuous costs are the wider affects on the markets and our economy as a whole.

Last week’s grounding of American Airlines flights are a perfect example. The FAA induced groundings were due to a breach of the regulations pertaining to wiring standards, which obviously are important with regards to safety. The fact that most fail to see is that American Airlines already has a tremendous incentive for their wiring to not only be adequate, but to be as close to perfect as they can afford. In an industry already plagued by the remnants of 9/11, fuel costs, and our lazy economy, a catastrophic event and it’s associated overhead could easily send an airline limping down the road to their demise.

Why would anyone think that a successful airline could afford to be ignorant of the need for safety or the potential repercussions of failing to achieve it?

Instead, our government thinks that airlines need “incentive” to maintain safety, and those incentives come in the form of regulations, fines and if needed, seizure of their ability to operate. In other words, you don’t have a right to run your business as you see fit, because we’ve abandoned property rights in this country. Besides, we know how to run your business better than you do, so you’ll do it our way or cease to exist.

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I had heard the name John Allison in the context of reason, Capitalism and success before, but I was unaware of just how explicit his philosophic convictions were. This interview is the most inspiring conversation I’ve heard in some time. If more business leaders held these premises, and integrated them into their career as John has, the potential impact on the human race would be tremendous. For anyone who owns their own business or who’s in an influential position within one, implementing the core values or mission statement of BB&T could very well invoke monumental change. In fact, any group, entity, family or organization could benefit from the mindset of BB&T.

BB&T’s Core Values:

The great Greek philosophers saw values as guides to excellence in thinking and action. In this context, values are standards which we strive to achieve. Values are practical habits that enable us as individuals to live, be successful and achieve happiness. For BB&T, our values enable us to achieve our mission and corporate purpose.

To be useful, values must be consciously held and be consistent (non-contradictory). Many people have conflicting values which prevent them from acting with clarity and self-confidence.

There are 10 primary values at BB&T. These values are consistent with one another and are integrated. To fully act on one of these values, you must also act consistently with the other values. Our focus on values grows from our belief that ideas matter and that an individual’s character is of critical significance.
Values are important at BB&T.
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1. Reality (Fact-Based)
What is, is. If we want to be better, we must act within the context of reality (the facts). Businesses and individuals often make serious mistakes by making decisions based on what they “wish was so,” or based on theories which are disconnected from reality. The foundation for quality decision making is a careful understanding of the facts.

There is a fundamental difference between the laws of nature (reality), which are immutable, and the man made. The law of gravity is the law of gravity. The existence of the law of gravity does not mean man can not create an airplane. However, an airplane must be created within the context of the law of gravity. At BB&T, we believe in being “reality grounded.”
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2. Reason (Objectivity)
Mankind has a specific means of survival, which is his ability to think, i.e., his capacity to reason logically from the facts of reality as presented to his five senses. A lion has claws to hunt. A deer has swiftness to avoid the hunter. Man has his ability to think. There is only one “natural resource” - the human mind.

Clear thinking is not automatic. It requires intellectual discipline and begins with sound premises based on observed facts. You must be able to draw general conclusions in a rational manner from specific examples (induction) and be able to apply general principles to the solution of specific problems (deduction). You must be able to think in an integrated way, thereby avoiding logical contradictions.

We cannot all be geniuses, but each of us can develop the mental habits which ensure that when making decisions we carefully examine the facts and think logically without contradiction in deriving a conclusion. We must learn to think in terms of what is essential, i.e., about what is important. Our goal is to objectively make the best decision to accomplish our purpose.

Rational thinking is a learned skill which requires mental focus and a fundamental commitment to consistently improving the clarity of our mental processes. At BB&T, we are looking for people who are committed to constantly improving their ability to reason.
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3. Independent Thinking
All employees are challenged to use their individual minds to their optimum to make rational decisions. In this context, each of us is responsible for what we do and who we are. In addition, creativity is strongly encouraged and only possible with independent thought.

We learn a great deal from each other. Teamwork is important at BB&T (as will be discussed later). However, each of us thinks alone. Our minds are not physically connected. In this regard, each of us must be willing to make an independent judgment of the facts based on our capacity to think logically. Just because the “crowd” says it is so, does not make it so.

In this context, each of us is responsible for our own actions. Each of us is responsible for our personal success or failure, i.e., it is not the bank’s fault if someone does not achieve his objectives.

All human progress by definition is based on creativity, because creativity is the source of positive change. Creativity is only possible to an independent thinker. Creativity is not about just doing something different. It is about doing something better. To be better, the new method/process must be judged by its impact on the whole organization, and as to whether it contributes to the accomplishment of our mission.

There is an infinite opportunity for each of us to do whatever we do better. A significant aspect of the self-fulfillment which work can provide comes from creative thought and action.
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4. Productivity
We are committed to being producers of wealth and well-being by taking the actions necessary to accomplish our mission. The tangible evidence of our productivity is that we have rationally allocated capital through our lending and investment process, and that we have provided needed services to our clients in an efficient manner resulting in superior profitability.

Profitability is a measure of the differences in the economic value of the products/services we produce and the cost of producing these products/services. In a long-term context and in a free market, the bigger the profit, the better. This is true not only from our shareholders’ perspective (which would be enough justification), but also in terms of the impact of our work on society as a whole. Healthy profits represent productive work. At BB&T we are looking for people who want to create, to produce, and who are thereby committed to turning their thoughts into actions that improve economic well-being.
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I buy quite a bit of merchandise online. Between Brownells, and Stew-Mac, I usually get a package or two per week. The online shopping experience at Brownells is first class with one caveat - USPS. Their e-commerce system is well written and adequately sends notifications as your order progresses through the system. The notifications that alert you of the shipping of your order are great… unless you ended up with USPS shipping.

USPS generates a “tracking number” which is utterly useless. I cannot remember a single occasion where a USPS tracking number successfully retrieved tracking info. I think it’s all a huge facade so that USPS can appear to track in the same vein as DHL, UPS and FedEx.

More excellent service from yet another unconstitutional government entity.

As it is proven time and time again, in every single example, and despite all the money they take by force; private enterprise will always run circles around a government bureaucracy immune to the just laws of economics.