Let's Talk Insider Trading

This is not as complicated a topic as the technocrats of business make it out to be (great news). This topic simply boils down to what information is, who (if anybody) owns it, and the simple use of moral principles.

First of all, I assume, as always, a propertarian approach to life. That means that everything that can be owned is PRIVATE PROPERTY. Collective ownership is twisted, illogical, and unethical for a variety of reasons. Everything falls into a framework of individual ownership through either personal production, exchange, or salvage.

Now, with that being said, can trade secrets and "insider knowledge" be considered property. The answer is a resounding "NO!" In order to believe that it is requires adherence to the concept of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a bad idea, just like collective ownership, for many reasons. Take for example, the musicians who believe they own their songs. The literal implication of this is that they believe to have ownership, and therefore sole rights, to an amalgamation of sounds. How in the world could anybody own sound though? That makes no sense and neither does intellectual property. Nobody owns ideas. Nobody owns music, noise, poetry verses, or anything of the like.

Trade secrets are as un-ownable as music. How can anybody own information?

However, since trade secrets and information ultimately do not belong to anybody in particular, there's an easy temptation to think that everyone has a right to them (the so-called rights of the collective), that they have to be fully disclosed to all parties as if life were nothing but a giant courtroom. There is no basis for that conclusion; not ethically; not logically.

Therefore, I conclude that insider trading is perfectly fine since nobody owns knowledge and nobody is obliged to disseminate it. The only thing that is problematic is LYING about information because lying is fundamentally immoral regardless of any trading involved.

Just because information can give a huge advantage to one party does not mean there is anything wrong. This is just another caveat emptor situation. If you know you're going into a business situation and you have a deficiency of knowledge, you would be advised to enter carefully or avoid the business situation altogether.

Again, lying about information is wrong. The free market solution to market liars is to cease doing business with them. Nonetheless, there is no reason to punish anybody on the basis of insider trading, which is nothing more than capitalizing on superior organizational ability and information management. Capitalism is dependent on wealthy owners who know better ways to put capital to use. When the state enforces the distribution of information, it effectively socializes it and puts it in the hands of those who may not know how to utilize it best.

Punishing and criminalizing insider trading is nothing more than socialization of opportunity when in fact opportunity should be free and accessible to those who work to earn them. Opportunity is not free. The market is not about ameliorating everyone's knowledge gap. Knowledge has to be earned like everything else even though nobody owns it. We should do away with all laws that penalize insider trading.

Why a College Degree is Worthless

This one is a little more "rant" oriented and contains traces of auto-biographical information.

I'm pleased to see that this topic gets more and more coverage all the time. I find myself in a similar place as JS Kim, an investment firm manager who "attributes zero of his success as an entrepreneur to the formalized education process, his four years of education at an Ivy League institution or the attainment of a double masters in business administration in public policy."

I made the same mistake as him and achieved the pointless, end-of-your-name alphabet soup, only I didn't do a double masters. Mine was only in public policy and not from an Ivy League school, but rather a crummy public school (ECU). I've learned economics and business, like Kim, completely on my own, no thanks to the seven years of higher education or the K-12 indoctrination. If I'm as smart as him, maybe I'll be successful as an entrepreneur someday. Unfortunately, all of my degrees are statist, they pigeon-hole me, are a source of great shame, and I had a particularly surreal time going from a political science PhD program to an emergency backup plan: master of "public" administration.

The fact that American education is not only worthless but counter-productive, cruel, humiliating, entropic, and mind controlling should be abundantly obvious to everyone nowadays. Nonetheless, there are still those fools who seek to re-affirm the grandeur of achieving a college degree. Let me provide just a couple quick reasons to avoid "schooling" past 12th grade in America.

~College Degree Holders Are Largely Unskilled Workers~

Unless you've learned something closed to a trade, your college experience has probably left you unskilled aside from the ability to write a little better than average (this is a stretch at many colleges though). Engineers, accountants, doctors, chemists, and the sort can consider themselves skilled. Liberal arts majors cannot.

The only skills that college professors are willing to teach are statistics and a rundown version of their research methods. Contrary to what the professors tell you, companies are not banging the door down looking for graduates who know how to use SPSS and SAS. The ultra-quantitative way of thinking may have had a lot to do with the downfall of the financial institutions, and little has changed (due to the moral hazards of the bailouts), but that doesn't mean the average college graduate from big-state-U is going to find themselves that kind of opportunity. It's always been a very exclusive club.

It also doesn't matter how many internships one does. Even that very rarely leads to substantive skills. The current business plan of American higher education is to produce young workers who are good at glorified paper-pushing activities. Since the economy is shedding these jobs (and for good reason), anyone who has been educated under this decadent status-quo is in a world of trouble. Tomorrow's jobs, believe it or not, will require a great deal of skill. That's what happens when there is a market correction: unproductive labor becomes obsolete.

~Student Loan Bubble~

You can't give good treatment to this topic without mentioning the debt burden of today's college graduates (and dropouts). Last time I checked, the average debt load upon graduation is somewhere around $20,000 to $30,000. As Peter Schiff has pointed out on numerous occasions, this all has to do with the easy-lending policies of the federal government. Just like with the real estate bubble, the government has turned the higher education system into a monster by allowing people to borrow at teaser rates, with very little requirements, and no down payment.

I've mentioned in previous posts that colleges have little incentive to keep the costs low. They fully realize that, due to societal pressure, most young people will pay whatever it takes to get a college degree. This is where you hear bizarre stories about folks going six figures into debt in order to pay for an art degree. The money issue, like in every other situation, is going to be the Waterloo for higher education. The colleges that cannot change with the times, cannot even get their staffs to quit taking 2-hour lunches, and do not provide meaningful training are going to see their revenues dwindle and be forced to shut down operations. With the way things are now, university administrations have no ability (or backbone) to tell the spoiled-rotten professors they have to take a pay cut. The economics and politics of the situation will leave universities with no choice but to disband.

Good News: there is light at the end of the tunnel. I DO have a job, which has nothing to do with my educational attainment and I have the opportunity to start from the bottom and prove myself as a productive individual. You can do this as well. You CAN recover from the stigma of a college education. Let your individuality, talent, and critical-thinking abilities propel you into a better career. Oh, and for God's sake, move to a non-communist country. It's good for career development.

The NFL and Statism

I started to write this while watching Monday Night Football, which went into rain delay.

My argument this go around is that the NFL is more than happy to exercise statist tactics. While it may be true that the NFL is a private, non-profit sports league, that hardly makes it innocent and virtuous. It basically brings out the ugliest aspects of all its substituent franchises, some of which are owned by unscrupulous folks connected to the federal government (see Redskins). It's the same old story: big businesses are not evil because they exploit folks through the free market, it's because they're connected to the powers that be.

How does the NFL use statist tactics? You may have heard someone refer to it as the "No Fun League." This is no joke. Just like the state, the NFL has rules that control absolutely everything, usually for no reason other than to generate revenue through fines, the NFL's version of taxation. The fines are truly insane too. Terrell Owens recently got in trouble for tweeting within 90 minutes of a game (he made an announcement about a giveaway promo to a lucky fan who wore his jersey to the game). Other players have been fined for text messages, endzone celebrations, and numerous other on/off-field rules (some are concurrent with the equally corrupt NCAA).

The league might be voluntary, but it's also a de facto monopoly due to numerous sports regulations that make it impossible for competitors to offer a better, consumer/employee-friendly alternative. This is true across sports where wealthy owners do not have to buy their stadiums since cities will force the taxpayers to pay it for them. Good luck competing with franchises that are able to get some of the loftiest subsidies in town. As a consequence, like every other business that does this kind of thing, the NFL becomes a creature of the state.

What are some other special rules that help the NFL? Well, first of all, the NFL is not a business in its own right, it's a sports league, a non-profit organization that fosters the competitive endeavors of its substituent franchises. The government classifies it as a 501(c)6 non-profit group, a nice designation to have that allows it to escape tax burdens. As you may have noticed, the state rarely hesitates to provide unfair tax advantages to its buddies at the expense of everyone else. The 501(c)6 status is the same privilege granted to real estate boards (who are very dominant in local politics) and the so-called Chambers of Commerce. It's nice to be part of the state's list of priveleged operations that gain the non-profit designation. And you wonder why churches are so corrupt nowadays?

Again, the Marxists have things totally backwards. It's not private companies that use, abuse, and alienate employees, it's the fascist ones. NFL teams, under the banner of the omnipotent NFL, treat their players like dog meat, allowing them to generate concussions at break-neck speed. The NFL only puts superficial protective measures in place. If a player gets a concussion, they're only really required to have an independent doctor take a look at him. It comes as no shock that this step gets fudged over in order to make sure the player gets back on the field as soon as possible. The WWE has a similiar problem when it comes to concussions, something that may have had an impact on Chris Benoit's murder/suicide episode. If any other non-politically-connected business tried to get away with this disregard for employees, OSHA would put them away in no time. The rules do not apply to everybody though.

By the way, here's a recent LRC article that illustrates some of the same problems but focuses more on the college level.

~Sports and Over-Leveraging~

During the pre-game of the Vikings/Jets game I heard commentators talk about how the Vikings organization has all the chips in with the expensive veteran, Brett Favre, along with newly acquired WR Randy Moss. Truth be told, the concept of "all-in" gambling amongst sports teams hoping for "a championship now" is reflective of the short-term thinking that plagues not only pro sports teams, but many American companies these days. Many sports franchises, like the Stanley Cup champion, Chicago Blackhawks, mortgage their entire futures all for a chance of winning here and now. It is a sign of over-leveraging brought on by money printing, which leads to credit expansion, along with favors from municipal governments that routinely dole out money for new stadiums.

Ironically, now would be the time for teams to focus on long-term contracts, much the way the New Jersey Devils did with Illya Kovalchuk. The crazed money printing of the Fed means that teams stand to gain a lot by locking players into long-term deals that pay in dollar amounts bound to be devalued severely by the time the latter years of the contract are paid. In other words, $100,000,000 (as long as its not paid competely up front) will be worth less and less as its paid out annually to the player. Teams can take advantage of rapid inflation with multi-year obligations just like other debtors can get away with allowing inflation to wittle away their debt.

Nevertheless, the tendency for sports teams to go nuts with huger, yet shorter contracts in every league is a sign of the times. Large businesses are still drinking the punch from the Fed and all of its money-creating, credit expansion. Once the plug is pulled on the dollar, the jig is up for pro sports teams. I expect this bubble to burst just like all others related to borrowing and government handouts. When it does, good bye mid-market teams.

Good bye statist sports!

Greenville City Planners Want "Smart" Growth

This blog post is addressed particularly to my friend's in Greenville, NC.

Has anyone else noticed the obsession with "building up downtown," "greenways," "bike paths" and a general disdain for popular businesses like Wal Mart?

Well, you're not alone because Greenville, like many cities run by liberal and closet-liberal city council members, is really hell bent on something called "Smart Growth."

What is Smart Growth?

• An urban planning scheme that places an emphasis on city officials controlling where and to what extent growth occurs throughout a city
• Ultra-Green Environmentalism
• A preference for downtown development over suburban development
• A disdain for what is considered suburban sprawl (think McMansions, all over the place)
• In larger cities, a desire for vertical development (skyscrapers; everybody living in studios)
• Driving up the value of inner city properties to attract new wealthy taxpayers, but, at the same time, burdening poorer residents with rising housing costs
  
• AKA "New Urbanism"
• A pathology of needing to stick with the city's land usage plans at all costs
• A tendency toward pedestrian downtowns as opposed to drivable downtowns (lots of inconvenient one-way roads)
• A hatred of automobiles, which are to be supplanted with public transit

Why is Smart Growth a problem?

First of all, in Greenville's case, last year's new ordinances for regulating the bars (which really provide a cartel for existing, powerful establishments) fits perfectly into the smart growth fixation. The whole idea is turning downtown (they re-named it "uptown") into a lefto-granola-eating utopia. Instead of bars, fast food, and chain businesses, there would be lots of cafes, artsy establishments, vegetarian restaurants, and other high cultural venues that appeal to upper-middle class yuppies. Gone are the plebeian waterholes, to be replaced with public transit and trendier items for pretentious pseudo-professionals. Basically, the Greenville city council would like the place to look more like Cary, NC (or worse). This all relates to our masters' desire to force upon us what they think is the correct way to live culturally.

To be honest, this has not worked for very many places at all. The trend in America, for a long time, has been to move away from larger cities and head southwest. That has not stopped utopian city planners and council members from continuing Smart Growth even amidst fiscal turbulence. Part of the problem is the environmental industrial complex. Without naming names, I can guarantee that at least one or two Greenville city council members consider bike paths and green space to be the most important issue. These folks are either ideological nuts or stand to benefit financially from building greener. This is not about making the town prettier. Suburban sprawl may appear unappealing to some, but it's not anything other than an aesthetic problem (plus, it's a result of the Fed's credit-driven housing bubble more than anything).

The urbanists hate the suburbs largely because it means people might have to use automobiles to get to work (oh no!).The other problem for Greenville residents, particularly those looking for jobs, it the fact that the council is hostile toward allowing businesses like Wal Mart or Home Depot to come to town. Since those businesses do not fit the leftist/environmentalist model for economic growth, and they offend some of the neighborhood associations who finance the campaigns of council members, they are unwelcome in Greenville.

I would advise you, as an informed individual to educate yourself more on the topic of Smart Growth and its consequences for REAL growth. A good article that talks more about it can be found here. The good news is not every elected official is on board with the social engineering of Smart Growth. There are a few who are mildly pro business in a non-corrupt way. However, it looks like the general direction for Greenville and other cities is toward the downtown worship of Smart Growth.

The Warfare State: the Biggest Issue for Libertarians

I just realized that I've been doing an anti-state blog and have yet to have a good post about the American warfare state. I'm sorry. I should've done one sooner, but at least I can say this is still a fairly new blog.

The reason this is such an important topic is because war is the very lifeblood of the state. I'm sure you've heard that phrase before if you're familiar with the anarcho-capitalist/radical libertarian movement. I've actually had a lot of contact with the American military as a former Air Force brat. You don't realize the utter stupidity of the ONGOING Korean conflict until your dad has to deploy to the dreaded place for an entire year. He made multiple trips to the Persian Gulf but none of them were individually as long as the trip to S. Korea.

Even as a young child I could sense that there was at least something a little strange about American foreign policy. At one point I was told that the Gulf War was finished; that we won. I asked if Saddam Hussein had been defeated since he was, after all, the "bad guy." He wasn't, but I did not realize until years later that the reason he was not defeated was because the U.S. does not fight traditional wars for the purpose of "winning." No, instead the goal is to a) show off our military might and intimidate international deviants, b) turn a huge profit for the military-industrial complex, c) use it as an excuse to destroy civil liberties, and d) all of the above.

Also, as a former military brat, I can attest to the occupied-country's sense of indignation toward Americans who hog their land for military purposes. It was always a rather big thing in Okinawa, a 60-mile long island over-run by about a dozen or so U.S. military bases, including Kadena, the largest in the Pacific theater. Every once in a while, I would hear about the locals wanting to have sound-proof walls to muffle the jet blast. There were always a few Okinawan politicians who used "getting rid of the bases" as part of their platforms. The various Vietnam War movies have it correct when they illustrate the relationship between GIs and sex workers. On Kadena, it was pretty common knowledge that Gate 2 Street, leading off the base, was a complete red light district by nightfall. Wanton, underground sex goes well with the military lifestyle.

People tend to forget that there are not only a handful of bases left in S. Korea, but also in Germany and Japan as well. The occupation of Germany, thought to have ended in 1949, has never entirely rescinded, not as long as four installations remain. This just corroborates another point about how much land is wasted for military adventures. So much of our debt could be paid off if we simply sold the land that is possessed by the state yet hardly used (military and civilian alike).

Oddly enough, I don't know that I have as many clever insights to contribute to the libertarian anti-war school of thought. It's been so well covered already (see Murray Rothbard, Karen Kwiatkowski, Lew Rockwell, Butler Shaffer, and a whole lot more for a good dose). I'll admit it's rather difficult to convince the same lay people who don't have a clue about the number of countries in the world that the 700-some-odd U.S. military bases are absurd. I try to imbue people with Facebook statuses that put things into perspective. How well that works is anybody's guess.

ECU Raises Tuition; No Recession for Professors

A lot of people have been completely insulated from the recession and have enjoyed "business as usual" with but a few distractions or pitfalls. Bankers, for example, have had it better than ever financially. What about college professors?

At eastern North Carolina's largest school, East Carolina University, tuition is going up and no cuts are to be made to academics. Check out the Chancellor's take on the budget and tuition increases. This is going on everywhere in the country and is not limited to public universities (although, those may be the first to fail if this situation continues). At ECU, the raising of tuition is nothing new. It happens every year as a result of unlimited student lending (see the parallels to the housing bubble) and the fact that the state legislature gets pressured more and more to reduce funding. The university knows it can get away with raising tuition as long as people can take out more loans with impunity and without risk. What's new? Now, you will see even deeper cuts to administrative staff (meaning longer lines and lower service), but NOT any reductions to pay and benefits of professors.

I no longer have access to ECU's faculty salary information (you have to have a school user name), but unless things have changed, the average faculty member makes well north of $50,000 per year and much higher in certain departments. What happened to Americans having to cut back and take lighter paychecks? This has not been the case at ECU or hardly any other universities. The burden is always absorbed by the customers. God forbid ANY university abolish the tenure system and kick some of the six-figured, leftist blow-hards out and balance the university's budget.

In effect, the tenure system is a form of unionization that allows senior members to hold the rest of the world hostage. As long as there's a mis-informed demand for college and an academic cartel allowing the tenure system, this problem will not go away and costs will sore even worse than health care prices. The other irony of all of this is that there is an enormous market of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there who would gladly take a job at a university for less than the cost it takes to pay tenured-for-life losers who cannot even be troubled to publish in the irrelevant journals their younger peers do. It's time to ditch the dead weight.

Peter Schiff was right once again. Education has been something I've followed closely for years now and I knew there was a bubble for some time. I was happy to see that Schiff joined in the criticism of the student-loan induced bubble. The costs of education are spiraling because of these awful no-risk loans that were designed to make things more affordable for the poor. ECU has made it clear that academics is the LAST area that will be touched by any kind of financial hardship. They would like you to believe this is because of a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, it has more to do with a commitment to the very powerful, shadowy union of the professors, who will never take a pay cut even as their universities desperately need to streamline.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in America

Everyone likes that movie - or at least almost everyone. Many have tried to diagnose societal ills and use that movie's title as a framework for doing so. I'm no exception.

I can think of three types of people in America: normal/well-intentioned folks, authority sluts, and entitlement sluts. They comprise the good, bad, and ugly respectively. Fortunately, the "good" is the largest category demographically, even during the evil mood of times likes these. They definitely do not have power though. You could think of them as a very silent majority. Most normal people may not have the most sophisticated understanding of our world's problems and may be prone to falling for the traps set by the other types of folk (sub-prime mortgages, credit cards like crazy, global warming), but they are good at heart. Deep down, most have a respect for private property and believe that everyone should work for what they get.

Then there are the authority sluts, the ones who either think they have a divine right to boss people around or are just sociopaths. This refers to lots of people in power and particularly police officers. Granted, not all people in power are authority sluts (some are just opportunists). You can tell the individual who has an authority trip by the way they treat others. They operate in accordance to very loose rules and quite often don't bother to find any justification for their ruthlessness at all. A great example of this is the officer who takes you down to the station for "insulting an officer" or "disturbing the peace." It seems like hardly anyone gets in trouble for real crimes these days. One's only hope is that these types encounter someone who is more powerful than they are and busts them down a notch.

The entitlement sluts are irritating in many obvious ways. It's one thing to prefer making an honest living by oneself, self-employed. It's quite another to think that everyone else owes you this regardless of how well your business does. I always think of the farmers who whine for subsidies (although most subsidies go to bigger companies) because they feel entitled to be farmers just like their fathers and grandfathers. It matters not whether anyone wants to buy their crops. Then, of course, there are the Americans who are part of an entire class of entitlement insanity, the Americans who draw from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I don't refer to those who receive these "services" reluctantly yet disagree with them. Here I criticize those who think it's a god-right even though it's predicated on stolen wealth. This is the second-largest category. Entitlement sluts think that their standards of living cannot slip any lower than their recent plights, and, if it so much as appears to do so, then the rest of the world has hell to pay. If there's not hell to pay, they'll at least cry about it for a while.

These are in a way ideal types. It is easy to think of examples of overlap between authority and entitlement sluts. Nevertheless, as a psychological framework, I think this breaks people down into neat categories as well as anything else. It would be nice to think of everyone as INDIVIDUALS. Regrettably, this current social order has been thrust onto us by the way society has been shaped through years of American fascism. In a free market society, people would be more identified by what they do to contribute (baker, shoemaker, car salesman, dentist). The status quo is not the way I want it. It is just how I'm calling it based on what I've seen. The American population is fairly neatly situated into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.