Category Archives: Libertarianism

Yves here. Naked Capitalism contributor Andrew Dittmer, perhaps best known for his series on libertarianism (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and his responses to reader comments) has returned from his overlong hiatus to interview the authors of the highly respected new book, Private Equity at Work.

Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt have produced a comprehensive, meticulously researched, scrupulously fairminded, and therefore even more devastating assessment of how the private equity industry operates, including its deal and tax structuring methods, its impact on employment, and whether its returns are all they are purported to be. Their work was reviewed in the New York Review of Books; we also discussed it in this post.

Earlier this year, Andrew spoke with Appelbaum and Batt, and the first part of their discussion covers the problematic relationship between private equity funds (general partners) and their investors (limited partners) and how private equity affects other businesses.

In some cases, Appelbaum and Batt bending over backwards to be evenhanded. For instance, they attribute the explosion in CEO pay not to the leveraged buyouts industry (private equity before it was rebranded in the 1990s) but to an article by Michael Jensen in the Harvard Business Review that argued for paying CEOs like entrepreneurs. While narrowly true that the Jensen article was the proximate cause of the shift in big corporate pay models, having lived through the 1980s and the way that LBOs captured the attention of the business press, it is hard to imagine Jensens thesis being taken seriously in the absence of the LBO boom. The maximize shareholder value theory of corporate governance was first presented in a Milton Friedman New York Times op-ed in 1970 and had not gotten traction with the mainstream. It was the wave of takeovers of overly-diversified conglomerates in the 1980s and the easy profits garnered by breaking them up and selling off the pieces that seemed to prove the idea that too many CEOs didnt have the right incentives to run their businesses well (and in fact, its also true that the business press of the 1970s decried American management as hidebound and much less good at working with labor than the Japanese or Germans). But as weve seen since then, equity-linked pay has produced rampant short-termism and facilitated looting by executives. Even if the old pay model was problematic, its replacement has performed even worse, save for the CEOs themselves.

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic as well as teaching undergraduates. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience

Interactions of General Partners (GPs) with Limited Partners (LPs)

Eileen Appelbaum: Rose and I did a briefing at the AFL for the investment group. We had investment people from both union confederations who are concerned about the fact pension funds are putting so much money into private equity. They told us that they had never been able to see a limited partner agreement until Yves Smith published them. The pension fund people are so afraid of losing the opportunity to invest in PE. Some general partner could cut them off for having shared the limited partner agreement. Unbelievable.

Andrew Dittmer: In general, LPs seem to have a pretty submissive attitude toward GPs. Where do you think this attitude comes from?

Rosemary Batt: One cause is the difference in information and power. Many pension funds dont have the resources to hire managers who are sophisticated in their knowledge of private equity firms. They dont have the resources to do due diligence to the extent they would like to, so they need to rely on the PE fund, essentially deferring to them in what they say.

Eileen Appelbaum: I think that there is a reluctance to question this information or to share it with other knowledgeable people they are afraid that if they do, they will not be allowed to invest in the fund because the general partners will turn them away.

The rest is here:
Andrew Dittmer: Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt on How Private Equity Really Works

Theresa May is pushing a terrorism bill through parliament which will place a legal duty on universities to ban radical speakers. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

In the 1860s when the Austrian ambassador complained to the home secretary, Sir George Grey, about Karl Marx and other revolutionaries, he received a brief and dismissive reply: Under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators.

Not quite what the current home secretary would have replied, I suspect. Theresa May is rushing yet another terrorism bill through parliament. This will place a legal duty on universities to ban radical speakers mere discussion in the words of her Liberal predecessor, who probably also took a more favourable view of being labelled radical.

Fifty years ago Malcolm X came to speak in Oxford, an episode now recalled to stir the sentimental memories of the universitys alumni. Today, of course, he would never have made it to Oxford; the UK Border Agency would have turned him back at Heathrow. After all even the very silly, but vile, Julien Blanc, the seducers guru, has been banned.

Malcolm X would probably have fared better in his homeland. The United States remains a nation of laws girded by a constitution, despite police shootings and protest riots. Sadly the United Kingdom is rapidly becoming a nation of ministerial discretion and direction, ever wider administrative powers that would probably have more than satisfied the 19th-century Prussian and Austrian bureaucrats who were so worried about Marx.

Under Mays new legislation, universities will have to follow the guidance issued by the Home Office. If they fail to follow it, the home secretary will be able to issue them with directions. Far from being regarded as institutions in which the most vigorous (and contested) debates should be encouraged, higher education institutions are now to be treated as fertile ground for the radicalisation of gullible students by supporters of extremism.

This is not the first time the government has introduced legislation to require universities to ban extremist speakers, although paradoxically the first political intervention back in the 1980s was to stop universities, and student unions, banning rightwing speakers, extremists of another ilk.

But this initial, and rather one-sided, libertarianism was quickly succeeded by more authoritarian interventions. Until now, the centrepiece has been the Prevent strategy, begun under Labour and revamped by the current government.

The 2011 white paper asserted the governments absolute commitment to defending freedom of speech. But, in the very next sentence, it argued that preventing terrorism meant that extremist (but non-violent) views had to be challenged by the administrative measures it then outlined. We have travelled a long road from Greys reply to the ambassador.

There is so much wrong with the new legislation. The key terms such as radicalisation, extremism and terrorism will be defined by politicians who are advised by securitocrats, cowed by tabloid-inflamed public opinion and influenced by electoral advantage.

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Anti-terror measures will make us the extremists we fear

Defining Libertarianism

By: kerry pratt

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Defining Libertarianism - Video

FFF Needs Your Help: How I Discovered Libertarianism (video #2)
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By: The Future of Freedom Foundation

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FFF Needs Your Help: How I Discovered Libertarianism (video #2) - Video

It doesnt want to pay its taxes, it doesnt want to pay a living wage, it doesnt want to pay publishers, distributors or authors its time to act, says JIM JEPPS

Today has become known as Black Friday, an import from the US, where the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy reaches peak stupidity. Things have got so frantic in the US that in last two years running two people were shot in separate incidents over wide-screen TVs, parking spaces and for their rights to spend like an enraged bull.

Large corporations use the day to focus US attention on filling their coffers to the extent that advertising for goods and services becomes indistinguishable from down-the-line propaganda for capitalist consumerism.

Ever the more level-headed neighbours in Canada responded in 1992 with an activists annual Buy Nothing Day where they advocate taking a day off rampant consumerism and perhaps reassessing how happy our possessions really make us anyway.

So indistinguishable from big politics has Black Friday become that this week in Ferguson pastor Jamal Bryant, who was arrested last month for protesting against police violence, has declared a total boycott this weekend. He said: If a white officer kills a child he is still worthy to work? Black children matter. Black lives matter ... our generation stand because they refuse to roll over ... marching is good, praying is necessary (but) we need a clear economic agenda ... this Friday will be Black and Blue Friday, on this coming Thanksgiving black people will not be marching to stores, but marching against injustice.

The pastor declared: Lets shut it down. We are standing with the workers of Walmart at thousands of stores across the country who will not be working because they deserve a liveable wage. We declare war on poverty, we declare war on injustice and we declare war on anybody who does not respect black children. We are going to keep our money to ourselves until the red, white and blue salutes the black in this country.

In Britain most of us who encounter Black Friday do so via Amazon, which artificially ramps up sales as as it tries to get us to do our Christmas shopping entirely through them. As its near monopoly strengthens it is threatening the very existence of independent stores particularly book shops. Its estimated that one book store closes a week and thats a trend that will continue unless we resist it.

Some booksellers in Britain are hitting back against tax-avoiding Amazon with a cheeky Black and Red Friday, calling on people to boycott the online retailer this Christmas.

Nik Gorecki of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB) and left bookshop Housmans said: The public is waking up to the bad business practices of Amazon and a new boycott Amazon campaign this year has been gaining real momentum. This year the Alliance of Radical Booksellers is asking you to help spread the word about the alternatives to Amazon and support the alternative by way of your local radical bookshops.

As Uli Lenart, of Bloomsburys Gays the Word bookshop says: In spite of the complex and powerful dominance of multinational corporations the secret to society safeguarding our independent, local booksellers and businesses is really quite simple. Support them by spending in them even if it is just once a year at Christmas and they will continue to flourish and provide a humane and heartfelt local community service.

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Morning Star :: Only a boycott will stop Amazons persistent abuse of its workforce

By Jack Straw For The Daily Mail

Published: 20:03 EST, 27 November 2014 | Updated: 06:44 EST, 28 November 2014

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Facebook and Google have a 'cultural arrogance' in their dealings with governments, claims former Home Secretary Jack Straw (pictured)

Greek mythology has it that Nemesis was the God who exacted divine retribution against those guilty of hubris, the sins of overconfident pride and arrogance.

Despite its antiquity, that parable from the classics still has resonance today, reminding us that those who over-reach themselves tend to get their come-uppance.

And if ever there were major corporations who deserve a fall because of their puffed up vanity and self-serving ambition, it is internet giants like Facebook and their ilk.

This week, Parliaments Intelligence and Security Committee blasted an internet service provider for its failure to inform our Security Service, MI5, that Michael Adebowale, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, had posted messages on the internet that should have rung major alarm bells.

Go here to see the original:
Facebook's arrogance and Snowden's hypocrisy put us all at risk: From an ex-Home Secretary, a devastating attack on ...

Oct. 1, 2014 5:15 p.m.

When President Obama recently said the world is safer and less violent than its ever been, the usual knee-jerk antagonists mocked him.

But Fox News pundit John Stossel, whose uber-libertarianism often rubs me the wrong way, SAYS Obama got it right:

Americans now face beheadings, gang warfare, Ebola, ISIS and a new war in Syria. Its natural to assume that the world has gotten more dangerous. But it hasnt.

People believe that crime has gotten worse. But over the past two decades, murder and robbery in the U.S. are down by more than half, and rape by a third, even as complaints about rape culture grow louder.

Terrorism is a threat. But deaths from war are a fraction of what they were half a century ago, when we fought World War II and the Korean War, and Chairman Mao murdered millions. Despite todays wars in Iraq, Syria, etc., last decade saw the fewest deaths from war since record keeping began.

(Snip)

We wax nostalgic about the past, but the past was much nastier than today. Fifty years ago, most Americans my age were already dead.

Continue reading here:
If youre pining for the good old days amid todays turmoil, youre fooling yourself

News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 8 of 10, made with Spreaker)
Source: http://www.spreaker.com/user/letstalkfreedom/news-libertarianism-and-obama.

By: Robert Cancel

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News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 8 of 10, made with Spreaker) - Video

News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 7 of 10, made with Spreaker)
Source: http://www.spreaker.com/user/letstalkfreedom/news-libertarianism-and-obama.

By: Robert Cancel

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News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 7 of 10, made with Spreaker) - Video

News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 1 of 10, made with Spreaker)
Source: http://www.spreaker.com/user/letstalkfreedom/news-libertarianism-and-obama.

By: Robert Cancel

Read the original:
News, Libertarianism and Obama (part 1 of 10, made with Spreaker) - Video