We have financialised much of the economy, and made the difference between a life with and without capital so large that the temptations towards financial returns outweigh out moral senses (which are also sliding). The person of values selling the company to a PE firm (knowing what they do) should also bear some responsibility for the consequences of that PE firms actions on other stakeholders.
"...raise prices to the highest the market will bear, skimp on quality when the customers have no choice, and then convince them at emotionally vulnerable moments to make purchases they don’t need?"
A number of things are wrong in this statement and the article in general:
-Why wouldn't a business charge the highest price possible that people willingly pay?
-Skimping on quality ruins your reputation and competitors will take your customers.
-Under what circumstances would consumers have no choice but to use, specifically, your product or service instead of a competitor's?
-How do consumers get so "emotionally vulnerable" that they can't make effective decisions?
-It's condescending to claim that people buy things, "they don't need." Who, exactly is judging that?
-If one eschews using money as a measure of social benifit what other objective metric is there?
-Simply "doing good things" or some such is very subjective and leads to wasting resources of which we have a limited quantity.
-"Stakeholders" have nothing to say about a business if they don't a financial stake. The concept of "stakeholders" is silly, they don't have some moral or other type of right to influence that business.
This article assumes that businesses are evil and consumers are stupid and helpless. Typical liberal/progessive baloney.
Definitely noticed it in vet care. Medical care not so much because of insurance though major premium increases are the indicator. Plan sponsors need to wake up. For most Americans this would be employers or CMS.
Consumerism is dying. Mostly because the majority of consumers are dying off. The system kills itself. Consumerism and liberal democracies kill themselves off.
You can only have consumerism and liberal democracy if you're a rich country. Only rich countries can have these traits. These rich countries eventually get so rich and fat they kill themselves off or fade away into the night. Birth and rebirth.
Its an epistemological plague. Like Lagadoans looking for sunlight in cucumber seeds or creating food from excrement, we have been duped by these absurdists for centuries. Its everywhere. The biologist today looking for life in inert chemical interactions, or the physicist who holds onto the statistical math equation as if it were the holy grail, can't see past the brainwashing to even relate to the basic man on the street who worships God and who places greatest value on what he can't even see. Its worse with dollar obsessed economics, a monetarist is more like a French radical positivist, all that exists is that I perceive I can steal from you. Its the intellectual environment of a petty street criminal who blames the tourists for being naive. This amoral reductionism is a mental STD and college is the brothel.
On the left fringe we have weenie wannabe intellectual pinheads who can't change a tire, are easily offended, use silly pronouns, do hot yoga, and eat too much kale. On the right fringe we have armed militias in a cult of Don that deny science, sack the capital, get pardoned, are easily offended, threaten judges and other public officials with physical violence, play dress-up war in the woods, and eat too much gravy. I'd rather not hang out with either, but if forced to choose who to dine with, I'd force down the kale, even though I love the gravy.
Both fringes hate it, it's why they're on the fringe. Both parties enforce litmus tests and punish compromise. We need to relearn that our real enemies are not fellow Americans, but the authoritarian models who seek to destroy liberal (small L) democracy.
The far left owns academia, Hollywood, the deep state bureaucracies and letter agencies, education, most of the courts, most of the lamestream media.
I have real trouble believing the seriousness of people spouting woe about the far right.
Honestly framed, authoritarianism is not practically a both sides do it issue.
The right doesn't rig FISA courts, deplatform speakers, debank Canadian truckers, frame political opponents using the FBI/CIA, target parents and Catholics for harassments, institutionally racistly discriminate against males and asians/whites for 30 years, etc.
If your arguments fall on deaf ears, consider that maybe those ears heard slurs from major Leftist leaders (bitter clinger, deplorable, semi-fascists) one too many times to give the people who tolerated those lies, one iota of credibility.
Sorry, I'm just not that angry, so I won't respond to your laundry list. I've been in too many other countries to not appreciate what we enjoy here. I was a lifelong Republican until the party became a cult of one. I'm too independent to simply fall in line and salute one corrupt, lying politician, so the current R party ain't for me. Neither are the D's, they're too identity oriented. But it's not true the right has no power. The right controls all 3 branches of the federal government and more governors mansions/state legislatures, and has its own media ecosystem. The "deep state" is an ancient conspiracy theory. What we have is a civil service that both parties have helped build over a long period, it's far preferable to a politically controlled bureaucracy.
For me the breaking point was Don's lying about his election loss and his incitement of an armed insurrection. The fact the majority of the R party actually believes it, given the dearth of evidence, is funny, sad, and scary. I guess their TV's were broken that day... The peaceful transfer of power is the bedrock of a free society. Don is the first and only prez to break that trust. I guess I'd ask, if Joepa had done the same thing to stay in power after last years election, would you have supported it?
Before we ask our government to "regulate" PE, proprietary trading, hedge funds, etc. let's start with ending their subsidies. No reason for capital gains to be taxed at a different rate from ordinary income. We're kidding ourselves if we think that lower capital gains tax rates encourage any kind of productive investment.
This matches my experience with residential home repair, where local plumbers, electricians and HVAC companies have been swallowed by PE. With their new corporate overlords they have no interest in actually repairing your home fixtures and instead just want to sell and upsell you.
Not quite as sinful as what they do with drug rehab but same concept.
“If conservatism stands for anything, it is the proposition that what matters and is worth defending is not measured mainly in dollars.” I understand and agree with the second clause. You know who else would agree? Pretty much everyone I know to my left (and that’s pretty much “the left” since my politics are fairly centrist). The rejection of neoliberalism on the left is, almost precisely, driven by this sentiment. The difference between my liberal and conservative friends tends to be what they think matters beyond dollars - here, they disagree, quite fiercely. Where they agree is on valuing something more than dollars - this tends to be why they are in my circle of friends. Perhaps we are reaching the point as a society where the most important political division is not between those who believe in God vs. believe in man, but rather between those who value anything transcendent and greater than themselves vs. those who value only material goods and themselves.
"But this is true only if one believes all social value in an economic arrangement is codified from the start in explicit transactions with dollar values attached, so that dollar values increasing must mean social value increasing as well."
Meet Matt: "The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything
In the Booming Twenties, all decision-making is about protecting the value of financial assets held by older people. Therefore, the number must go up. And nothing else matters."
Maybe private equity is simply filling a vacuum where traditional social systems are breaking down. In Crawford's article he mentioned someone paying $85,000/year to send his kid to a private school. I would imagine it's becauae his local public schools don't teach anything of value to his kid.
Crawford also used an exmaple of private equity taking control of parking meters in Chicago. Could it be that Chicago govenment is so corrupt/incompetent that they have to farm out basic services?
"...raise prices to the highest the market will bear, skimp on quality when the customers have no choice, and then convince them at emotionally vulnerable moments to make purchases they don’t need?"
A number of things are wrong in this statement and the article in general:
-Why wouldn't a business charge the highest price possible that people willingly pay?
-Skimping on quality ruins your reputation and competitors will take your customers.
-Under what circumstances would consumers have no choice but to use, specifically, your product or service instead of a competitor's?
-How do consumers get so "emotionally vulnerable" that they can't make effective decisions?
-It's condescending to claim that people buy things, "they don't need." Who, exactly is judging that?
-If one eschews using money as a measure of social benifit what other objective metric is there?
-Simply "doing good things" or some such is very subjective and leads to wasting resources of which we have a limited quantity.
-"Stakeholders" have nothing to say about a business if they don't a financial stake. The concept of "stakeholders" is silly, they don't have some moral or other type of right to influence that business.
This article assumes that businesses are evil and consumers are stupid and helpless. Typical liberal/progessive baloney.
This is The Good Oren writing. On this particular topic there is probably 98% consensus among the US population that PE is a scourge on everything it touches. It's entire Reason for Being is grotesque and uncivilized. ("Moral arbitrage" is cleverly apt.) It is a solid indicator of the level of corruption of the two parties that no restraints have been put on PE. The interesting and possibly hopeful change is that the execrable Chip Roy of the even more execrable Freedom Caucus recognizes that PE is bad for mom and pop donut shops. If it's the donuts that gets to him rather than the principles involved, fine. As long as he's getting the picture that the "free market" is not only misnamed, it doesn't and can't exist as a thing without substantial federal regulation.
The Freedom Caucus is, among its misguided mandates, all about Shrinking Government. Whatever that actually means. That generally is interpreted to mean, in part, less regulation and fewer taxes by the Federal government. The cognitive dissonance Chip's 2.4K RAM brain chip must be experiencing has to be fairly extreme for him to make such a statement. What means are there besides Federal Government regulation (Which is the Opposite of Shrinking Government) to mitigate, stymie, thwart or ideally, Crush PE? Tax Policy? Please, Chip, I dare you to raise taxes to shape economic policy. I'd do it, but I'm not a Freedom Caucus buffoon. (other kinds of Buffoon, no doubt, but not that kind). I'd do far more than that. I would outlaw the practice. I would drive a silver stake through their vampire hearts. (metaphorically speaking, of course) The people with PE money would bitch and moan but I could not care less. They are already rich. Fucking assholes. Build something new. Or honestly make long term investments in worthwhile enterprises. But quit being parasites on the honest work of others.
So what's Chip gonna do? Probably continue to manifest an obnoxiously aggressive affect, look stern and show his belly to Trump. No disrespect. Well actually shit tons of disrespect. But that could change if Chip actually did something materially meaningful for the little guy. Going after PE's existence would get me to support Chip despite everything else. That's how loathsome PE is to me.
I also have to address something Oren does which I struggle to see as anything but disingenuous. When he says "Whether a conservative economics can reassert itself in the face of so many dollars remains to be seen." There's an assertion of "conservative economics" as what is actually correctly identified as Progressive economics. Conservative economics is by definition what he's railing against. Chicago School Libertarian Free Market Dogma IS EXACTLY conservative economics. Were my caps loud enough? If that is wrong, someone please point me to the wellspring of conservative economics that is the Progressive Economics Oren is advocating. As an economic and class oriented progressive I can have a productive discussion with a Burkean conservative. We want stability and well being. I would argue that his acceptance of a bottom impoverished class as part of a stable society is morally and practically not acceptable. But we both want a society with stability and material well being. I just want the well being more broadly distributed. As does Oren. That definitional dispute aside, the problem of the Good economics asserting itself in the face of so many dollars is THE problem. As I mentioned, corruption is effectively legal in politics. Who is against Big Money in Politics? Republicans? Uh, no, strongly not against Big Money Corruption. It's literally their Brand. Democrats? Uh, not so much either. They just try to be nicer about it. Unless, unless they are Progressives. Progressives are decidedly adamantly opposed to big money in politics. Just sayin'. I suppose Oren is going to say now conservatives are against legal Big Money corruption. If he were logically consistent he would. But that may be a bridge too far for now.
It’s about time a conservative economist starts saying what some of us progressives have been saying for decades. I never got an MBA because I realized just after Reagan first took office that the MBA was the single thing that was doing the most damage to the economy. These “paper pushers” destroyed the middle class and severely ratcheted up wealth inequality. Are we better off? Hardly.
We have financialised much of the economy, and made the difference between a life with and without capital so large that the temptations towards financial returns outweigh out moral senses (which are also sliding). The person of values selling the company to a PE firm (knowing what they do) should also bear some responsibility for the consequences of that PE firms actions on other stakeholders.
"...raise prices to the highest the market will bear, skimp on quality when the customers have no choice, and then convince them at emotionally vulnerable moments to make purchases they don’t need?"
A number of things are wrong in this statement and the article in general:
-Why wouldn't a business charge the highest price possible that people willingly pay?
-Skimping on quality ruins your reputation and competitors will take your customers.
-Under what circumstances would consumers have no choice but to use, specifically, your product or service instead of a competitor's?
-How do consumers get so "emotionally vulnerable" that they can't make effective decisions?
-It's condescending to claim that people buy things, "they don't need." Who, exactly is judging that?
-If one eschews using money as a measure of social benifit what other objective metric is there?
-Simply "doing good things" or some such is very subjective and leads to wasting resources of which we have a limited quantity.
-"Stakeholders" have nothing to say about a business if they don't a financial stake. The concept of "stakeholders" is silly, they don't have some moral or other type of right to influence that business.
This article assumes that businesses are evil and consumers are stupid and helpless. Typical liberal/progessive baloney.
Great article on a little discussed phenomenon which has changed the lives of millions of Americans without them even knowing it.
Definitely noticed it in vet care. Medical care not so much because of insurance though major premium increases are the indicator. Plan sponsors need to wake up. For most Americans this would be employers or CMS.
This is exactly what they are doing! Pure Evil - this is what they than them at Wharton, Princeton, and Harvard? MFers need to be brought down
Consumerism is dying. Mostly because the majority of consumers are dying off. The system kills itself. Consumerism and liberal democracies kill themselves off.
You can only have consumerism and liberal democracy if you're a rich country. Only rich countries can have these traits. These rich countries eventually get so rich and fat they kill themselves off or fade away into the night. Birth and rebirth.
Why is a liberal a liberal? Because they can be.
None of what you wrote is true.
Sounds like a bot
Its an epistemological plague. Like Lagadoans looking for sunlight in cucumber seeds or creating food from excrement, we have been duped by these absurdists for centuries. Its everywhere. The biologist today looking for life in inert chemical interactions, or the physicist who holds onto the statistical math equation as if it were the holy grail, can't see past the brainwashing to even relate to the basic man on the street who worships God and who places greatest value on what he can't even see. Its worse with dollar obsessed economics, a monetarist is more like a French radical positivist, all that exists is that I perceive I can steal from you. Its the intellectual environment of a petty street criminal who blames the tourists for being naive. This amoral reductionism is a mental STD and college is the brothel.
College is the brothel, love it so true! lol
The University = "The New Religion" (Religion of nihilism)
On the left fringe we have weenie wannabe intellectual pinheads who can't change a tire, are easily offended, use silly pronouns, do hot yoga, and eat too much kale. On the right fringe we have armed militias in a cult of Don that deny science, sack the capital, get pardoned, are easily offended, threaten judges and other public officials with physical violence, play dress-up war in the woods, and eat too much gravy. I'd rather not hang out with either, but if forced to choose who to dine with, I'd force down the kale, even though I love the gravy.
You don't have to put up with either fringe....they get the media's attention but most of us live in the middle and are working to make things better.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
And I would play dress up in the woods.
People are different.
Leftists just hate that.
Both fringes hate it, it's why they're on the fringe. Both parties enforce litmus tests and punish compromise. We need to relearn that our real enemies are not fellow Americans, but the authoritarian models who seek to destroy liberal (small L) democracy.
The far right has zero power.
The far left owns academia, Hollywood, the deep state bureaucracies and letter agencies, education, most of the courts, most of the lamestream media.
I have real trouble believing the seriousness of people spouting woe about the far right.
Honestly framed, authoritarianism is not practically a both sides do it issue.
The right doesn't rig FISA courts, deplatform speakers, debank Canadian truckers, frame political opponents using the FBI/CIA, target parents and Catholics for harassments, institutionally racistly discriminate against males and asians/whites for 30 years, etc.
If your arguments fall on deaf ears, consider that maybe those ears heard slurs from major Leftist leaders (bitter clinger, deplorable, semi-fascists) one too many times to give the people who tolerated those lies, one iota of credibility.
Sorry, I'm just not that angry, so I won't respond to your laundry list. I've been in too many other countries to not appreciate what we enjoy here. I was a lifelong Republican until the party became a cult of one. I'm too independent to simply fall in line and salute one corrupt, lying politician, so the current R party ain't for me. Neither are the D's, they're too identity oriented. But it's not true the right has no power. The right controls all 3 branches of the federal government and more governors mansions/state legislatures, and has its own media ecosystem. The "deep state" is an ancient conspiracy theory. What we have is a civil service that both parties have helped build over a long period, it's far preferable to a politically controlled bureaucracy.
For me the breaking point was Don's lying about his election loss and his incitement of an armed insurrection. The fact the majority of the R party actually believes it, given the dearth of evidence, is funny, sad, and scary. I guess their TV's were broken that day... The peaceful transfer of power is the bedrock of a free society. Don is the first and only prez to break that trust. I guess I'd ask, if Joepa had done the same thing to stay in power after last years election, would you have supported it?
Before we ask our government to "regulate" PE, proprietary trading, hedge funds, etc. let's start with ending their subsidies. No reason for capital gains to be taxed at a different rate from ordinary income. We're kidding ourselves if we think that lower capital gains tax rates encourage any kind of productive investment.
This matches my experience with residential home repair, where local plumbers, electricians and HVAC companies have been swallowed by PE. With their new corporate overlords they have no interest in actually repairing your home fixtures and instead just want to sell and upsell you.
Not quite as sinful as what they do with drug rehab but same concept.
“If conservatism stands for anything, it is the proposition that what matters and is worth defending is not measured mainly in dollars.” I understand and agree with the second clause. You know who else would agree? Pretty much everyone I know to my left (and that’s pretty much “the left” since my politics are fairly centrist). The rejection of neoliberalism on the left is, almost precisely, driven by this sentiment. The difference between my liberal and conservative friends tends to be what they think matters beyond dollars - here, they disagree, quite fiercely. Where they agree is on valuing something more than dollars - this tends to be why they are in my circle of friends. Perhaps we are reaching the point as a society where the most important political division is not between those who believe in God vs. believe in man, but rather between those who value anything transcendent and greater than themselves vs. those who value only material goods and themselves.
"But this is true only if one believes all social value in an economic arrangement is codified from the start in explicit transactions with dollar values attached, so that dollar values increasing must mean social value increasing as well."
Meet Matt: "The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything
In the Booming Twenties, all decision-making is about protecting the value of financial assets held by older people. Therefore, the number must go up. And nothing else matters."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-number-go-up-rule-why-america?r=2ji82l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I see little link between profits and ethics in this administration.
They starve children to save money for billionaires.
The others, they sexually abuse.
Maybe private equity is simply filling a vacuum where traditional social systems are breaking down. In Crawford's article he mentioned someone paying $85,000/year to send his kid to a private school. I would imagine it's becauae his local public schools don't teach anything of value to his kid.
Crawford also used an exmaple of private equity taking control of parking meters in Chicago. Could it be that Chicago govenment is so corrupt/incompetent that they have to farm out basic services?
Privatization of the parking meters in Chicago have more corrupt and incompetent than the local government.
Thanks. Then why on earth do they do it? Kickbacks?
Knowing Chicago probably some forms of kickbacks. I think in reality though they needed to make a budget shortfall very quickly.
I just discovered Oren Cass about one year ago and very much like his writing. He reminds me of Karl Marx a lot.
"...raise prices to the highest the market will bear, skimp on quality when the customers have no choice, and then convince them at emotionally vulnerable moments to make purchases they don’t need?"
A number of things are wrong in this statement and the article in general:
-Why wouldn't a business charge the highest price possible that people willingly pay?
-Skimping on quality ruins your reputation and competitors will take your customers.
-Under what circumstances would consumers have no choice but to use, specifically, your product or service instead of a competitor's?
-How do consumers get so "emotionally vulnerable" that they can't make effective decisions?
-It's condescending to claim that people buy things, "they don't need." Who, exactly is judging that?
-If one eschews using money as a measure of social benifit what other objective metric is there?
-Simply "doing good things" or some such is very subjective and leads to wasting resources of which we have a limited quantity.
-"Stakeholders" have nothing to say about a business if they don't a financial stake. The concept of "stakeholders" is silly, they don't have some moral or other type of right to influence that business.
This article assumes that businesses are evil and consumers are stupid and helpless. Typical liberal/progessive baloney.
Many say that Leftism is a religion based primarily on envy.
This article just confirms that thesis.
This is The Good Oren writing. On this particular topic there is probably 98% consensus among the US population that PE is a scourge on everything it touches. It's entire Reason for Being is grotesque and uncivilized. ("Moral arbitrage" is cleverly apt.) It is a solid indicator of the level of corruption of the two parties that no restraints have been put on PE. The interesting and possibly hopeful change is that the execrable Chip Roy of the even more execrable Freedom Caucus recognizes that PE is bad for mom and pop donut shops. If it's the donuts that gets to him rather than the principles involved, fine. As long as he's getting the picture that the "free market" is not only misnamed, it doesn't and can't exist as a thing without substantial federal regulation.
The Freedom Caucus is, among its misguided mandates, all about Shrinking Government. Whatever that actually means. That generally is interpreted to mean, in part, less regulation and fewer taxes by the Federal government. The cognitive dissonance Chip's 2.4K RAM brain chip must be experiencing has to be fairly extreme for him to make such a statement. What means are there besides Federal Government regulation (Which is the Opposite of Shrinking Government) to mitigate, stymie, thwart or ideally, Crush PE? Tax Policy? Please, Chip, I dare you to raise taxes to shape economic policy. I'd do it, but I'm not a Freedom Caucus buffoon. (other kinds of Buffoon, no doubt, but not that kind). I'd do far more than that. I would outlaw the practice. I would drive a silver stake through their vampire hearts. (metaphorically speaking, of course) The people with PE money would bitch and moan but I could not care less. They are already rich. Fucking assholes. Build something new. Or honestly make long term investments in worthwhile enterprises. But quit being parasites on the honest work of others.
So what's Chip gonna do? Probably continue to manifest an obnoxiously aggressive affect, look stern and show his belly to Trump. No disrespect. Well actually shit tons of disrespect. But that could change if Chip actually did something materially meaningful for the little guy. Going after PE's existence would get me to support Chip despite everything else. That's how loathsome PE is to me.
I also have to address something Oren does which I struggle to see as anything but disingenuous. When he says "Whether a conservative economics can reassert itself in the face of so many dollars remains to be seen." There's an assertion of "conservative economics" as what is actually correctly identified as Progressive economics. Conservative economics is by definition what he's railing against. Chicago School Libertarian Free Market Dogma IS EXACTLY conservative economics. Were my caps loud enough? If that is wrong, someone please point me to the wellspring of conservative economics that is the Progressive Economics Oren is advocating. As an economic and class oriented progressive I can have a productive discussion with a Burkean conservative. We want stability and well being. I would argue that his acceptance of a bottom impoverished class as part of a stable society is morally and practically not acceptable. But we both want a society with stability and material well being. I just want the well being more broadly distributed. As does Oren. That definitional dispute aside, the problem of the Good economics asserting itself in the face of so many dollars is THE problem. As I mentioned, corruption is effectively legal in politics. Who is against Big Money in Politics? Republicans? Uh, no, strongly not against Big Money Corruption. It's literally their Brand. Democrats? Uh, not so much either. They just try to be nicer about it. Unless, unless they are Progressives. Progressives are decidedly adamantly opposed to big money in politics. Just sayin'. I suppose Oren is going to say now conservatives are against legal Big Money corruption. If he were logically consistent he would. But that may be a bridge too far for now.
Apart from that quibble, great article this time.
It’s about time a conservative economist starts saying what some of us progressives have been saying for decades. I never got an MBA because I realized just after Reagan first took office that the MBA was the single thing that was doing the most damage to the economy. These “paper pushers” destroyed the middle class and severely ratcheted up wealth inequality. Are we better off? Hardly.