First of the Month

I watched TV last night. Arnie is getting better at reading his lines. The Republican National Convention was a very interesting contrast between the governator and the two bubbling bushy-twins from Yale. Politics makes interesting bedfellows. It was actually a refreshing combination to include trained speakers with you typically awkward humans.

Unfortunately, I suspect I would be tossed into that category of economic girlie men. It seems to me that the biggest problems we face are with big business. To much economic power is concentrated in too few hands.

In this regard, I've been reading Corporation Nation by Charles Derber. Unfortunately, most of the literature on the problems with big business is coming from the leftest camp. The left answers all problems with greater centralization of power in political hands.

The problem is that our current problems arise largely from the centralization of economic power that occurred during the New Deal. Derber correctly points out that the people who are getting the hand outs during the current privatization process are the same group that worked to build the beast. The prime example is Enron...a company so rife with political connections that they were able to create a business that externalized their risks on unwitting third parties...the state and the people.

Derber is too blind to see that it is the collusion between government and business that led to the inequities that he wants to use for more centralization of political power.

Quite frankly, we are not going to come up with a solution the current inequities in corporate America as long as the debate is dominated by twisted arguments coming from the left.

Speaking of economics. The first of the month is money grubbing time. It looks like my various money grubbing efforts scaped past the thousand dollar mark. My costs are about $200 a month. My little business might soon break the illusive minimum wage mark.

Discouragingly though...most of the money came through a single mysterious transaction. Someone bought 256 boxes of business cards from the Vista Print ad. The commission was $376. I suspect that transaction will get reversed. The other big winner for the month was Sears Home Center. They seem to reverse about 1 in 5 transactions. It takes several weeks for reversals to show up...so my celebrations are premature.