Mick Jagger is Smarter than Bruce Springsteen

Terence Corcoran has a good column in the Financial Post about how the Internet is transforming ticket sales and the predictable complaints emanating from all the usual suspects--governments and ignorant rock stars who seem pathologically incapable of understanding basic economics. Typical of this mentality, tired old lefty Bruce Springsteen is apparently very unhappy that tickets for his concerts are being resold at much higher prices on the Internet than he would like.

Here's the problem, Brucie. You are very, very popular. People like your music. A lot of people. Heck, even I like your music and would consider paying to see you live, and I think you are a jerk. Unfortunately, you are in short supply. There is only one of you, but lots of us, and only so much time in your life to devote to playing concerts and a limited number of venues in which to stage those concerts. To put all this in economic terms, you are a scarce resource for which demand is high; as a result, the price of a ticket to see you will be relatively high no matter what you do. Try as you might, there is nothing you can do about this short of (a) producing crappy music so that no one wants to listen to you anymore; or (b) refusing to go on tour at all. You've already tried to set the price of your tickets at between $90 and $250 and look what happened. People started reselling them on the Internet at their true market value, which was much higher. You could go on tour for free, but even that wouldn't help, because the venues in which you perform cannot handle all of the people who will want to attend, so they will have to be weeded out in some manner. So instead of buying tickets, they will end up standing in line for hours and probably even days to be admitted to your concerts, meaning they will pay with their time, rather than their money. Free concerts and plays are held in Central Park in New York City every summer and this is exactly what happens. People are forced to get in line usually a day in advance to wait for a "free" ticket. Many people pay others, often homeless people, to stand in line for them. It might be a good way to generate jobs for homeless people, but it's silly to claim that the tickets are "free" unless you consider people's time to be worthless. You could tell everyone that you will put on free concerts for the next ten years, non-stop, and it still would not prevent people from paying the market price for your tickets, because people will want to see you now and in the venue of their choice.

You see, Bruce, prices simply reflect the value people place on different goods and services, not just the goods and services that they actually purchase, but the goods and services that they forgo by spending their money on some things and not others. When people buy your tickets, it means they believe that the tickets are more valuable than all the other things on which they could have spent that money. If it makes you feel better, the free market is the the fairest, most "democratic" means of allocating resources ever devised. And the real beauty of it is that you don't have to do a damn thing to make it work; all you have to do is shut up and sing.

Bruce, if you really want to be the "man of the people" that you seem to think you are, then stop complaining and let the people freely choose to pay whatever they want for your tickets. They are big boys and girls; why not treat them like adults rather than the numb-skulled proletarians you seem to think they are. Learn a lesson from your fellow rock star, Mick Jagger, who, when confronted with fact that Rolling Stones tickets were selling on the open market for thousands of dollars, just said, “They’re like fish ... market price.”

America Punk'd

What is it with America being terrorized by children?

Did you catch the fact that the Somali "pirates" were a bunch of teenagers with AK-47s? When I read this, the first thing that occurred to me was that the 9/11 terrorists were also fairly young. This isn't entirely surprising, I suppose. Radical movements, like street gangs, are often populated by disaffected young people. But what is with the most powerful nation in the history of the world getting terrorized and hijacked by a bunch of punks?

Considering this, I wonder whether it is time to start a revolution. If a bunch of kids from the bronze age can terrorize America with surplus AK-47s and a crappy motor boat, why couldn't a bunch of militiamen fighting for America's founding principles conquer Washington, D.C.? (Note to Dep't of Homeland Security: I am not advocating armed rebellion, here; just making a point. Don't get your jack boots in a tiff).

The difference, of course, is that you can only bring America to its knees today if you are fighting against its founding principles. If you are weak little punks hailing from a backward nation that refuses to enter the 19th century, let alone the 21st, you can easily shame our President into genuflecting before you, apologizing for leading the strongest, most productive nation on earth, and allowing you to kick us in the ass for years while saying "thank you sir, may I have another." If you are fighting for freedom, individual rights, and the pursuit of happiness, our government would stamp you out like a bug. According to the morality of today, only the truly weak and pathetic can force America to turn the other cheek, for, as the good book says, the meek shall inherit the earth.

Still, if we got together a bunch of fat, bald guys and made them wear those silly pointed hats . . .

On the Day Before Tax Day, Some Bad News and Some Good

As you prepare to file your income tax return tomorrow (if you have not already done so) and perhaps to make a check out to the U.S. government, consider for a moment what some of your money goes to pay for.

USA Today reports that "Two United Nations agencies spent millions in U.S. money on substandard Afghanistan construction projects, including a central bank without electricity and a bridge at risk of 'life threatening' collapse, according to an investigation by U.S. federal agents." Apparently, with the aid of a grant from Uncle Sam, the UN ran a "quick impact" program designed to upgrade infrastructure in Afghanistan and other "developing nations." This program "was designed to demonstrate results and promote confidence in the reconstruction effort, but the report suggests it did the opposite." As one contractor said, "the program was 'ill conceived from the beginning. This was a political idea to do quick impact projects that would look good.'"

Sound familiar? This is Keynesianism on an international scale. Make work projects, however ill-conceived, wasteful, and criminally incompetent, will somehow make us all richer. Remember the levies in New Orleans? I'm pretty sure they were built as part of a "quick impact" program run by ward healers in the famously corrupt city. When I think of the government running the health care industry or car companies or the banks, I think of examples like this, or the DMV, or the VA Hospitals, or countless others, and I wonder: do those who support this really, truly believe that this time it will be different?

Of course, there are no satisfactory answers to questions like this other than to recognize that, at this point in history, those who support gigantic government really don't care one way or another whether it will succeed. Half of them think it is right to give government control of everything; the other half are happy to oblige them and take control. All of them studiously avoid examining the nature of their actions or the consequences.

So I am happy to report some good news on the government front, namely that it still employs a few competent, highly trained individuals who excel at their jobs. Today's Washington Post reports on the demise of the three Somali "pirates" at the hands of three Navy snipers. While the lifeboat they were in bobbed in heavy seas during the night, and the kidnappers became more and more antsy and unglued, the Navy commander concluded that Captain Richard Phillips, their hostage, was in imminent danger and gave the order to remove him from harm's way. Three shots rang out, three pirates were dead, and Captain Phillips was safe.

If you have ever done any shooting, you will know how difficult it is to hit a target that is standing still during broad daylight. Even taking the time to get comfortable, wait until your heart rate has slowed and your breathing is under control, settle the cross hairs on the target, and gently squeeze the trigger, placing a bullet on a particular point even a relatively short distance away is damnably difficult. Now try it at night from one ship on rough seas when the targets are on a small craft bobbing on the waves a hundred feet away, and you can imagine what these snipers achieved. As one senior military official succinctly put it, "Three pirates, three rounds, three dead bodies." Nicely stated.

Bravo, gentlemen. If I could divert some of my tax dollars to you, I would gladly do it. You make us proud.

Jesus and the Tax Man

It is entirely fitting that Easter should come this year a scant three days before tax day. The holiest day for our primary religion followed closely by the holiest day for those secular religionists who pray at the alter of big government. On Easter, the magical Jesus Christ allegedly rose from the dead after supposedly dying for all of our sins. On tax day, our newly anointed president gets to spend our hard-earned wealth for all of our sins. Christians just tithed 10% or more to a magical, supposedly all powerful God on Sunday, and on Wednesday we all get to be forced to tithe another 30% or so to an allegedly magical, all powerful government. Hallelujah! We are saved.

I spent Easter weekend with my family being productive. When the weather warms, the grass begins to green, and the trees and flowers bloom, I am moved to get my hands dirty, not my nose. No prostrators we, the ground of liberty family kept our heads in the air, albeit at times with our knees on the floor (mimicking the pious in form only, but, I assure you, entirely for practical purposes; to clean a child's room, sometimes one must assume the perspective of the very short), and cleaned house, performing the amazing logistical feat of switching two little girls' bedrooms, and managing to clean and reorganize those two and a third. The weekend began with the house in that precarious state of barely controlled chaos, roughly the equivalent of a Jenga tower in a late state of play, and ended in a slightly more controlled state of chaos, with lots of toys and books and mysterious plastic thingies stowed in bags and boxes for sale, storage or donation (once again, an entirely pragmatic nod to the pious, Caesar being good enough to allow a tax deduction for things given away that cannot be sold). We celebrated the conclusion of our productive weekend in that distinctly American way--hiding, finding, and then eating chocolate eggs and other sweet, yummy goodies.

The kids loved their new rooms, especially the youngest, who just turned four and is now the proud mistress of her own bedroom, no longer forced to share a corner in the family office and guestroom. Most importantly, she has graduated from the converted crib to a full-fledged big girl bed with a pink lace canopy above it. There she sat, at the end of the day, playing and singing softly to herself, alone and very, very happy. Her very own space in her very own room. We adults call it private property; kids call it "mine." The level of understanding is vastly different, but the pride and contentment at having a space of one's own is very similar.

It is hard to allow the concept of "sin" into the same universe in which that little girl--indeed, this entire family--exists, and yet both the religious and the secular altruists would heap sin upon our entire weekend. We are atheists, for starters; we did not attend church, and, indeed, spend a good part of the weekend amusing ourselves by making fun of Jesus (Dad even proposed renaming Easter "make fun of Jesus day" but Mom was not a big fan of focusing on the negative, and preferred instead to mark the holiday as one standing for productivity). Some religious sects would stone us just for that. We decided to spend the weekend selfishly enjoying life instead of prostrating ourselves before some magical being in the sky and his tiresome, preachy son. We worked entirely for ourselves and felt enormous pride, a cardinal sin according to the religious and the secular alike. We hope to profit from the eventual sale of the items we've decided to discard, and if we donate anything, it will be for the express purpose of obtaining a tax write off, not to help the poor or the homeless or fat people or stupid people or people who can't pay their mortgages or the auto industry or animals or any of the other millions of "brothers" whose keepers we are supposed to be. We enjoyed yummy chocolate. We threw lots of things in the garbage and didn't recycle anything.

Fortunately for the altruists, tax day approacheth. Today, I experienced a few moments of darkness while contemplating the many hundreds of thousands of dollars I have been forced to pay to governments at all levels, the hours, days, and months of my life that I have been forced to work for the benefit of others, all for the privilege of having them throw up obstacles to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, erect a multitude of new offices and send hither swarms of officers to harass us and eat out our substance, and generally work hard to ruin the government we have instituted among men, and the civilized society that it sustains.

Then I returned home to find my four girls happily going about their lives, as if to say we never had to take any of it seriously did we. My family, in my home, on my property. My life. Those are ideas, ultimately, and they will survive their material expressions no matter how hard those who tax us try to take them away, provided we don't give them up willingly. They can tax the home, the property, the income, the belongings. But they cannot tax my soul unless I let them. And I don't.

Ayn Rand in the Financial Post

The Financial Post has two good articles involving Ayn Rand. In the first, FP editor Peter Foster defends Atlas Shrugged against some of the more common leftist misstatements about the book and about Objectivism, such as that Alan Greenspan's sell-out of Objectivism shows that Rand and Atlas were wrong. In the second, Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Center criticizes Obama for failing to understand that government is the problem, not the solution. Ayn Rand is gaining more and more traction in the media everyday, which is good news for all.

AIG Shrugged?

Yesterday's NY Times published the resignation letter from AIG executive Jake DeSantis ("Dear AIG: I Quit" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?_r=1&ref=opinion) to CEO Edward Liddy. Mr. DeSantis worked in the financial products division of AIG and received one of the now-infamous bonuses that has inspired members of Congress and the President of the United States to lead an angry mob of citizens, talking heads, public chatterers, and state attorneys general to do everything short of storming AIG's gates with pitchforks and torches and hauling their executives off to be burned at the stake. (By the way, would the denunciations of AIG executives by politicians constitute "fighting words" under the First Amendment that could be banned or regulated? But I digress.) Mr. DeSantis is fed up with being denounced as evil by his elected representatives for simply receiving a bonus to which he was contractually entitled and which he was repeatedly assured he would receive even after the government bailed out AIG. He's also angry at Liddy for essentially throwing DeSantis and his colleagues to the wolves during Liddy's show trial before Congress last week.

DeSantis spent 11 years at AIG. He had nothing to do with the credit default swaps that brought down the company, and, as he points out, most of the people who did have long since departed. As DeSantis says, "After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials." As a result of that persecution, according to DeSantis, "The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to 'name and shame,' and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press." Unfortunately, DeSantis makes a cardinal error. Because he is financially secure and thinks, like many people, that those in his profession often make too much money, he's decided to donate his bonus to charity. He claims that he is not motivated by guilt, but he has nonetheless bought into the altruistic premise that motivates the mob mentality against him and the others who have received these bonuses.

If you want a sense of this mob mentality, read the comments to the piece on the NY Times's website. There are over 900 comments. I didn't read all of them, but based on my rough sampling, the vast majority are critical of Mr. DeSantis. Here's a sample.

"I would respectfully suggest that Mr. DeSantis not let the door hit him on the butt on the way out. He can preen all he wants about how his grotesque levels of past compensation were fully justified, but they weren't. What we have in this letter is the infantile whining of a overstuffed baby who just had the teeth pulled from his mouth. Good riddance!"

"Mr. De Santis and his cohorts believe, sincerely, that they are entitled to their outrageous riches."

"Mr. DeSantis received, in one check and after taxes, more than I will earn in my professional management position in the next 7 years. . . . He points out that he's contributed to profitable business for AIG; he ignores the fact that he helped AIG earn those profits using other people's money."

"This gentleman still thinks he deserves this obscene compensation because he worked hard!!! He worked in the company for ten years creating this bubble, he should return all the bonuses he has received and dedicate the rest of his life to charitable work. He needs to be reeducated in the new reality."

Reading these comments, I can't help but wonder whether it is too late to save America. The level of blind hatred for wealth and those who create it, the level of pure envy, to say nothing of the level of economic ignorance in these letters is striking. Then I remind myself that these are readers of the New York Times, which represents the worst of the worst of envious, man-hating leftist thought, and that not all Americans think this way.

If you have trouble understanding why altruism--the code of self-sacrifice--is evil, read these letters. Ask yourself how a code that is allegedly motivated by benevolence and love of one's fellow man can result is such venom directed at a man who worked hard and believed that his company would honor its contractual obligations. And note that none of the letters are satisfied with Mr. DeSantis's decision to donate his bonus to charity. Why? Because he committed the irredeemable sin of making money and refusing to apologize for it. He is still wealthy, and thus has so much more to sacrifice before he can be considered moral. Indeed, he has a lifetime of sacrifice left to atone for his sins.

If you want to understand more about these issues, and, indeed, what is happening to the world, read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Mr. DeSantis's letter and the AIG bonus issue call several scenes to mind. In one, Francisco D'Anconia is trying to convince, Hank Rearden, a steel producer, that he has accepted a moral code that is leading to his and other producers' destruction. Rearden has produced a new alloy that is stronger than steel. It was used for the rail of a new line of railroad company Taggart Transcontinental. Here's an excerpt, slightly edited for space:

Francisco: "Are you proud of the rail of the John Galt line?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it is the best rail ever made."

"Why did you make it?"

"In order to make money."

"There were many easier ways to make money. Why did you choose the hardest?"

" . . . in order to exchange the best of my effort for the best effort of others."

"[H]ave you achieved it?"

. . . "No."

"Have you made any money?"

"No."

"When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?" Rearden did not answer. "By every standard of decency, of honor, of justice known to you--are you convinced that you should have been rewarded for it?"

"Yes" . . .

"Then if you were punished, instead--what sort of code have you accepted?"

Later in the scene, Francisco asks Rearden what sort of person he wanted to see use his rail. Francisco lists a number of examples, then gets to this:

"Did you want to see it used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude--so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?"

"I'd blast that rail first," said Rearden, his lips white.

People often accuse Ayn Rand of creating caricatures of those she criticized in her novels. No one really acts like the altruists that Rand depicts in her novels, they claim. No one really says those things.

As evidence that Rand did not exaggerate at all, I give you the 917 New York Times readers who commented on Mr. DeSantis's letter. You be the judge.

Obama’s Moral Crusade

Daniel Henninger points out in his WSJ column on March 12th (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123681860305802821.html) that that President Obama’s intent to raise taxes on the “rich” has much less to do with finding a way to pay for the stimulus package than with righting the alleged moral wrong of “inequality.” Here are a few representative quotes from the budget statement that make Henninger’s point:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not. They have taken risks and piled on debts that while seemingly profitable in the short-term, have now proven to be dangerous not only for their individual firms but for the economy as a whole."

"There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few."

"For the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the Nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy. Technological advances and growing global competition, while transforming whole industries—and birthing new ones—has accentuated the trend toward rising inequality. Yet, instead of using the tax code to lessen these increasing wage disparities, changes in the tax code over the past eight years exacerbated them."

"By 2004, the wealthiest 10 percent of households held 70 percent of total wealth, and the combined net worth of the top 1 percent of families was larger than that of the bottom 90 percent. In fact, the top 1 percent took home more than 22 percent of total national income, up from 10 percent in 1980."

Got that? No one really earns their income or creates wealth, they merely take a share of the “national income” and the “Nation’s wealth.” The middle class have allegedly “played by the rules” and taken only their fair share, but the rich have not. They have somehow gamed the system—perhaps by causing too many “technological advances” and “birthing” too many new industries, which allow them to create—oops, earn—oops, how about “appropriate”—even more of the nation’s wealth, thereby increasing inequality. The tax system has contributed to this inequality, presumably by failing to apportion enough of the “national income” to the middle class. The solution, of course, is for the government to tax the rich at a higher rate, so the middle class can enjoy more of the loot—oops, spoils—oops, umm, how about “largess.”

None of this has anything to do with solving America’s economic problems, unless you believe that the problem is capitalism itself, which Obama and his ilk obviously do. Capitalism is based on the fact that humans must think, work, and create things in order to survive. Capitalism recognizes that wealth is limited only by the capacity of individuals to think and to devise new ways to solve problems, and it ensures them the freedom to do so—to live, work, enjoy the fruits of their labor, trade, be creative, and lead happy, fulfilling lives. Obama’s budget envisions a very different system, one in which wealth simply exists and the primary purpose of government is to distribute it among the various social classes according to whether they have “played by the rules.” If the “playing field” tilts too far in favor the rich and they acquire too much wealth, the government must tilt it back by confiscating that wealth for the benefit of the poor and middle class.

In short, those who think President Obama wants to raise taxes to solve America’s economic problems are only half right. He does want to solve a “problem” as he sees it, but that “problem” is the principle on which America was founded—that individuals have the moral right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that government is instituted among men to protect those rights. Obama would like to replace it with some variant of the Marxist principle, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. In fairness to Obama, most other politicians and intellectuals in this country share his essential views, including, unfortunately, many conservatives. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the dirty little secret of the American left is that it wants a dictatorship. Judging by their tepid opposition to President Obama’s budget and his economic policies, the republicans seem content to stand by and urge caution as we journey down the road to serfdom. Obama is giving us the next great leap toward that goal. The question is whether Americans will recognize that in time.