Category Archives: Business

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Why Writers Are The Worst Procrastinators

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An interesting (and dismaying) excerpt from Megan McArdle’s new book:

About six years ago, commentators started noticing a strange pattern of behavior among the young millennials who were pouring out of college. Eventually, the writer Ron Alsop would dub them the Trophy Kids. Despite the sound of it, this has nothing to do with “trophy wives.” Rather, it has to do with the way these kids were raised. This new generation was brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy.

As these kids have moved into the workforce, managers complain that new graduates expect the workplace to replicate the cosy, well-structured environment of school. They demand concrete, well-described tasks and constant feedback, as if they were still trying to figure out what was going to be on the exam. “It’s very hard to give them negative feedback without crushing their egos,” one employer told Bruce Tulgan, the author of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy. “They walk in thinking they know more than they know.”

When I started asking around about this phenomenon, I was a bit skeptical. After all, us old geezers have been grousing about those young whippersnappers for centuries. But whenever I brought the subject up, I got a torrent of complaints, including from people who have been managing new hires for decades. They were able to compare them with previous classes, not just with some mental image of how great we all were at their age. And they insisted that something really has changed—something that’s not limited to the super-coddled children of the elite.

“I’ll hire someone who’s twenty-seven, and he’s fine,” says Todd, who manages a car rental operation in the Midwest. “But if I hire someone who’s twenty-three or twenty-four, they need everything spelled out for them, they want me to hover over their shoulder. It’s like somewhere in those three or four years, someone flipped a switch.” They are probably harder working and more conscientious than my generation. But many seem intensely uncomfortable with the comparatively unstructured world of work. No wonder so many elite students go into finance and consulting—jobs that surround them with other elite grads, with well-structured reviews and advancement.

Today’s new graduates may be better credentialed than previous generations, and are often very hardworking, but only when given very explicit direction. And they seem to demand constant praise. Is it any wonder, with so many adults hovering so closely over every aspect of their lives? Frantic parents of a certain socioeconomic level now give their kids the kind of intensive early grooming that used to be reserved for princelings or little Dalai Lamas.

All this “help” can be actively harmful. These days, I’m told, private schools in New York are (quietly, tactfully) trying to combat a minor epidemic of expensive tutors who do the kids’ work for them, something that would have been nearly unthinkable when I went through the system 20 years ago. Our parents were in league with the teachers, not us. But these days, fewer seem willing to risk letting young Silas or Gertrude fail out of the Ivy League.

The combination of the self-esteem movement and the demand for credentials has been a disaster.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Risk To Liberty

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It doesn’t come from the welfare state, but from central planning:

Obamacare provides the illustration of this, as I think many people have intuited. The “economic problem,” of course, is inescapable in health care. The supply of health care is scarce (only so many resources can be dedicated to it relative to other ends in society) and the demand is pretty close to unlimited. Somehow or other we have to decide how to allocate these scarce means among all the different ends–preventive medicine, end-of-life care, primary research, specialists v. generalists, etc.

Now one possibility that–thank goodness–we have historically rejected in the United States is the idea that certain people should just feel a moral obligation to die for the good of society. You do hear this sometimes–that some people should voluntarily forgo life-extending treatment for the “good of society”–and it sends chills down my spine. This is essentially the Maoist approach.

The alternative is to come up with some way of allocating scarce resources among competing wants. The myth of Obamacare is the same problem repeated: it rests on the idea that we can simply change the means of health care delivery (central planning of health insurance) but it will not require determining the ends at some point–i.e., in the end who gets treated and what treatments are covered and which are not. So, for example, the core of Obamacare is the system of cross-subsidies for some treatments (maternal care) and the expense of others (unmarried or infertile people). So infertile people have less money for things that they want to do (such as join a health club) because they now have to pay more money for things that the central planners have decided is more important than whatever they would do with their money.

And of course, E. J. Dionne remains clueless, as always.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President’s Limiting Principles

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Are there any?

…yesterday the president issued an executive order (probably preempted by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Service Contract Act, Davis-Bacon Act while violating the Walsh-Healey Act) raising the minimum wage for employees of certain federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. He did so, according to the text of the Order, to increase productivity and improve the economy. If a $10.10 minimum wage for a narrow sliver of the workforce will improve the economy, why not raise it to $20.10? Come on, boost it to $50.10 and really get the economy humming. A Mercedes in every garage.

Then there’s Obamacare. The president’s granted so many waivers and extensions completely contrary to the plain text of the statute it’s hard to keep track. He’s ostensibly done so to, among other things, give individuals and businesses time to comply with the law and avoid some of the immediate costs associated with compliance. Again, why stop with Obamacare? Why not extend this year’s income-tax filing deadline to 2017? Give taxpayers more time to comply and adjust to the costs of compliance. It’s the right thing to do.

Why indeed is $10.10 the right number? This complete arbitrariness reminds me of the story of how Roosevelt determined the daily price of gold:

…the exposure to investors that Morgenthau was getting through the gold purchase project of 1933 was already teaching him something. Investors didn’t like the arbitrariness. It took away their confidence. One day Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he’d done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number. “If anyone ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers etc., I think they would be frightened,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. And they were: In the second half of 1933 a powerful stock rally flattened.

There is no more basis for the $10.10 number than there is for Roosevelt’s lucky number. But there are no limiting principles, as far as I can see. This is the totalitarian impulse.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Arbitrary Health-Care Mandate

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“My whim is my command“:

…the sudden demand that businesses stop adjusting for regulatory policy is nearly the height of hypocrisy for this administration, which has repeatedly offered short-term gimmicky tax credits for business decisions that boost its policies, including an ill-considered credit for hiring that ended up costing taxpayers millions for hiring decisions that would have been made anyway. Suddenly, the Obama administration has to take action outside of the law because employers respond to regulatory signals more predictably than one-off credits.

In other words, it’s a demonstration of arbitrary power, of precisely the kind predicted by Hayek. And it’s no longer just opponents of the ACA noticing.

At National Journal, Major Garrett blasted the latest unilateral changes in enforcing statutory law by noting, “The Affordable Care Act means what it says and says what it means. Until it doesn’t. … [T]he arbitrary is the norm.”

The editorial board at The Washington Post blasted Obama for his “increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law. “ Garrett’s colleague Ron Fournier and the Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers both declared their patience at an end to the arbitrary changes and continuing incompetence from the Obama administration – and all of these people support the law in principle.

The attempt to create a command economy in the health-insurance market has failed, in the same manner that Hayek predicted, and resulted in the same arbitrary use of power to attempt to compensate for those failures. The demand for businesses to “self-attest” that they aren’t following standard business principles foreshadows the later stages of unreality that will take from F. A. Hayek to George Orwell on a long enough continuum.

This is what tyranny looks like.

[Update a while later]

“Obama is legislating without the legislative branch. This is corrosive of self-government, counter to our constitutional system and contemptuous of the rule of law.”

Nothing new for him.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

National Review

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No, it is not doomed:

By the likes of The Week, Salon, and Politico in quick succession, we are said to be in “deep trouble,” likely “doomed,” facing a “wipe out.”

This is in part a tale of lazy reporting and even headline cribbing.

None of the writers of these articles ever called National Review. They didn’t ask what our chances in court were, or even bother to get basic facts about the case right. Damon Linker of The Week, the one who got this meme rolling, made rudimentary mistakes without trying to check them, and then lectured us about journalistic standards.

You’d think people who write about media and the law would know, instinctively, to consider this factor: libel insurance.

You’d think that, until you realize that they’re leftist hacks, and idiots.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Why Republicans Are The Stupid Party

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Reason #2436:

The plainness of the usurpation of power on the part of this administration is obvious, and one wonders how many Democrats — some of whom surely have respect for the rule of law — will continue to abide it. Would any Democrat want a Republican president to view the law — or the scope of executive power to “adjust,” “peel back,” or ignore the law — in this way?

The account, however, also highlights problems on the other side of the aisle. It says, “GOP lawmakers, who oppose the law, seized on the delay to argue the administration should relax other key provisions, including the requirement that individuals carry coverage or pay a penalty, which has been in effect since the beginning of this year.” The New York Times provides an almost identical account: “Republicans denounced the unilateral move as a violation of the law and called on the White House to throw out all of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage mandates.”

This is exactly the wrong response. Republican lawmakers should be insisting that the Obama administration execute the law as written — and should start holding high-profile hearings in the House to have administration officials explain why they don’t think they need to execute the law as written, while having constitutional experts explain why they do. Secondarily, Republicans should insist that the Democratic Senate pass, and Obama sign, actual changes to the law itself — which have already been passed by the House with a fair amount of Democratic support — to delay the individual mandate alongside the employer mandate that the business lobbyists are so “pleasantly astounded” they were able to get delayed in clear violation of the written law itself.

Yes. The Republicans need to continue to insist that the administration follow the law, not just on principle, but to force the Democrats to lie in the bed they unilaterally made. If the Dems want to fix the law, they need to change the law, with both houses of Congress, not “adjust” it.

[Update a few minutes later]

More ObamaCare unraveling:

…it is hard to figure out just where the Obama administration is going with all of this.

For employers with more than 50 workers this is a delay not a fix. Employers will only now up the pressure to change the law completely, knowing they have the administration on the political run over these issues. And, small employers will still have to comply with the very costly minimum benefit mandates––really the biggest complaint they have had. Just exactly what is the Obama administration accomplishing with a delay?

What will the administration back off on next? Given the very small exchange enrollment so far coming from the ranks of the uninsured, will they next postpone or eliminate the individual mandate?

No one has been more critical of the various requirements in Obamacare that I have.

But to make an insurance system work you have to have a set of consistent and consistently applied rules. You can’t have some people choosing to be out today and in tomorrow. You can’t have a system where insurers price products based upon one set of conditions and then you keep backing off on the conditions consumers and employers have to follow.

The administration really has three options:

  • Full speed ahead––enforce all of the original rules. Just take the political heat believing you have crafted a system that will work. This is what they have been telling us for almost four years now!
  • Do a comprehensive and rational fix that provides for a modified system for everyone learning from the mistakes that were made.
  • Let it unravel one step at a time caving in to every constituency that threatens a vulnerable Democratic Senator and end up with a worse mess.

Looks to me like they are on track for number three. Ironically, I don’t think these delays will do the Democrats one bit of good for their vulnerable Senators. These aren’t permanent fixes and these concessions will just reinvigorate the people complaining that their cause is justified.

Yes. They’re panicking. And because they’re incompetent, they’re just flailing and playing it by ear at this point, even though they’re completely tone deaf.

[Update a few minutes later]

Adding irrationality to lawlessness:

The officers’ responsibility is to the owners of the company, the shareholders. The business exists to create value, not to provide employment – employing workers is a function of the value added to the enterprise, not the need to create a more favorable election environment for the statist political party. Corporate officers who overlooked material tax consequences would be unfit to be corporate officers.

What is illegal and irrational is not a company’s commonsense deliberation over its costs, it is Obama’s edict. And look what attends this one: criminal prosecution if Obama’s Justice Department decides the business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.

Think about that for a second. The waiver is illegal. It flouts the language of the Obamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now. There is nothing in the law that empowers Obama to waive the mandate, much less to attach lawless conditions to such a lawless waiver. A business that seeks the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax (in lieu of providing the required coverage) is in violation of federal statutory law, regardless of its compliance with Obama’s outlaw edict. The payments required by the statute, after all, are owed to the public, not to Obama – he’s got no authority to deprive the government of these funds just because it would harm Democrats to collect them.

Yet, Obama proclaims his illegal waiver with impunity – Congress apparently unwilling to stop him. You, on the other hand, will be prosecuted for breaking the “law” if you do not comply to Obama’s satisfaction with the illegal and irrational condition he has unilaterally placed on his illegal waiver.

This is tyranny, plain and simple.