Sambal

Michael Moore says the US is not broke: all “we the people” need to do is take the money back from the fat cat billionaires.

What if we took this advice? Let’s imagine expropriating some of the wealth of the richest man in America, William Gates III. Forbes says he’s worth about $54 billion, of which $16 billion is his Microsoft stock. Let’s start by taking that.

OK, so now we’ve seized about 7% of Microsoft’s stock. That’s the largest single block of stock, which should give us some privileges like picking a board member or two. Unfortunately we don’t have actual control of the company because, well, the other 93% could easily outvote us. So we have to sell the stock in order to get cash.

MSFT is trading at $25.91 right now. If we dump shares on the market the price will drop somewhat – say ten percent. So we’ll clear about $14.5 billion dollars during our sellout, driving the MSFT share price to $23.32. (Incidentally, this will reduce the wealth of everyone else who holds MSFT stock by a total of about $22 billion.)

OK! Now we’ve got $14.5 billion in cash for “we the people”. That’s, uh, $50 per person. OK, here you go. Fifty bucks. That really helped a lot.

What were the secondary effects? Well, I’d guess for starters that any publicly-traded company which has substantial ownership by a billionaire will suffer a hit in stock prices: that would be Berkshire Hathaway, Oracle, Microsoft again (Paul Allen), Wal-Mart, Koch Industries (privately held), Bloomberg (privately held), Google, Facebook (limited trading), Apple… After all, if the government (we the people!) demonstrates a willingness to take Bill Gates’s stock and sell it, why would these others be safe?

Ding! What’s that I hear? It’s another delicious running-dog treat from my friends at Koch Industries. Gotta go, I’m already salivating!

Kling: “One point about the Great Substitution of leisure for work is that leisure escapes taxation. That raises all sorts of issues. ”

Non-consumption tax. Video game tax. Sitting around tax. Doing nothing tax. Mental activity tax.

Oh wait, that last one is basically thoughtcrime. What, did the US suddenly get Canada envy?

I didn’t realize I’ve been parsing it wrong all this time.

I thought it was like “No pain, no gain”.

Like “No justice, no peace”.

Like “No bishop, no king”.

Like “No latinos, no tacos“.

But apparently “No woman no cry” actually means “No my dear don’t cry.”

I’ve been posting to Facebook more than I’d like to; so I’m going to try to turn that into more short blog posts with less editing/polish.

Eric Scheie asks Boxer the horse, “What’s the glue that holds society together?“:

Is work personal and individualistic, or is it social and based on what’s good for the community as a whole?

And most important, what is work? […]

After all, we don’t want to end up being like Boxer the horse. Say what you will about him, but Boxer (the hard-working horse in Animal Farm) certainly was imbued with the work ethic. And after he had spent his life toiling and sweating to build the great workers paradise out of the sheer goodness and altruism in his strong heart, he inevitably found himself getting older as we all must, his physical health declined, and he suffered a workplace injury. Naturally, he had expected to get decent health care and then have a happy retirement at pasture, but the porcine ruling class death panels had something else in mind.

I would argue that you’re doing work when you’re producing value greater than what you’re consuming; otherwise, you’re doing leisure.

It’s almost but not quite a tautological definition, but it can lead to useful insights.

Writing articles and posting them online for others to read => work, to the extent that it’s valuable to your readers; but uncompensated.

Sitting in your armchair reading => leisure, probably, since it’s valuable only to you.

Sitting in your armchair reading and thinking about your next article/blog post => close to the line between work and leisure

In Eric’s example, rewiring houses => valuable work, even if you’re not paid for it.

The hard part, of course, is to figure out what the value is, price it, and monetize it.  As Arnold Kling points out, most employees these days are engaged in building organizational capital, not in direct production.  The marginal product of a fruit picker can be measured in fruit per hour; but What is the marginal product of a marketing executive who is developing a strategy for the firm to use social media?

One of the things I really like about being self-employed is that my marginal productivity is “closer to market” than it would be if I were on a salary. On the flip side, one of the things I give up is the possibility of more income if I had a job where my work aims and pay rate were vaguer.