On Feb 24, 7:01 pm, Jeffrey Turner <jtur...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Man, Friedman could bull**** with the best of 'em, eh? The wealthy
> are taking out payday loans because their consumption is outstripping
> their income? Transitory v. permanent income? Right.
I note that his work on the marginal propensity to consume was one of
the
elements for which he won the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic
Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, AKA the Nobel Prize in Economics.
You're digging a deeper hole.
> > Economists across the political spectrum agreed with Friedman's
> > refutation of Keynes; as the liberal Paul Krugman of Princeton (and of
> > the New York Times op-ed page) noted recently, Friedman's ideas on the
> > subject provide the foundation "of how economists think about spending
> > and saving to this day."
>
> Really? Do tell.
I just did. If you're interested in refuting Friedman there's
probably a Nobel Prize in it for you if you pull it off.
> > The idea that the work will be done by others is faulty, I think. We
> > want the work to be done by the most productive people possible;
>
> Why? Who is the most productive person on an assembly line?
The guys on the assembly line aren't making your notional $5 million a
year.
That's more like someone such as Steve Jobs, who turned around
Apple in the course of making their stockholders billions, made
Pixar a successful company, and along the way created jobs for
thousands of employees. He could have punched out of either
or both of those companies easily enough, but I don't think Sculley
or Gil Amelio where quite the drop-in replacements you envision.
> > In the entrepreneurial world--say, starting up a new
> > technology company--there are a limited number of people who can pull
> > off the job.
>
> Really?
Yes. It takes some skills and mindsets that few have. The majority of
the world are happy enough to go to work, collect a paycheck, and
go home.
>
> "Over the last year, dozens of new technology-based firms have started
> operations in Berkeley, and City officials expect the trend to
> continue."
"Dozens" out of a population of a few million in the East Bay. Many of
them have prior startup experience.
To pick one of the companies listed in the link, Ask Jeeves,
it was founded by Gruener and Warthen.
----
It wasn't his first. Gruener, who had both a UCSD bachelor's and
master's (UC-Berkeley, '77) in political science with an emphasis on
technology, had started two businesses by the early '80s. His first
had never taken off, but his second, a small communications software
business in Berkeley called Virtual Microsystems, had attracted
venture money and achieved modest success.
....
Though Warthen left the company after a few years to start a desktop
software company and then a software outsourcing business,
----
Both of the founders had started up other companies.
> > (As some people have put it, there are only 5,000 people
> > in Silicon Valley, and they just keep rotating into new companies.) If
> > you exclude them from the market via 100% taxes the companies will
> > simply not get off the ground. Joe Blow coder or accountant is not
> > going to have the skills to pull it off.
>
> That's nonsense.
Take a look at the rosters of a few startup companies. Picking a few
at random
from Kleiner-Perkins' list of funded companies,
http://www.fortifysoftware.com/company-partners/team.jsp
Before settling on security, Brian spent a decade in Silicon Valley
working at huge companies and small startups.
...
Prior to founding Fortify Software in 2002, Mr. Thornton led key
development efforts at E*TRADE, guided a major architecture redesign
effort at eBay, and served as an interim executive and investor to a
number of other successful startups.
....
Mr. Marshall has an extensive background in working with customers in
high technology companies. He co-founded and served as CEO of
Photoloft, the world's first Internet photo sharing site
http://www.amyrisbiotech.com/management.html
Previously, Mr. Melo was a director with Ernst & Young in San Jose,
California, and a management team member for several Northern
California start-ups,
....
During a ten-year term with Symyx Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMMX) as
Executive Vice President and CFO, having joined as its twentieth
employee, Ms. Hilleman grew the company from seed stage to over $125
million in profitable revenue and more than 500 employees.
She was the second employee and Vice President at Geron (NASDAQ:
GERN), taking the company through a successful IPO.
----
And so on. Troll through the "management team" link of any VC-funded
startup. You'll almost certainly see prior startups in teh resumes of
the major cor****ate officers that are doing it. The saying in the VC
world is that you fund people, not ideas, and the best people have a
track record of startups. In the physical sciences they'll have an
academic or three along to act as CTO, perhaps straight out of the
classroom, but if you're going to get funding the VCs want to see
prior startup work among the management team, even if in a failed
company. And very often the same people are rotating through the
startups, maybe going from CFO to CEO or CTO to CEO, but it's the same
set of people. They're basicly serial entrepreneurs.
> The Laughable curve doesn't hold. You want to show us the poor economy
> from the 1950s, when the top marginal tax rate was over 90%?
Who says it wouldn't have been better without the high marginal rates?
In fact there were a raft of deductions back then, which lowered the
effective rate at the cost of distorting the economy by paying people
to look for deductions.
> Sob. So everyone else has to suffer so that some million-a-year prick
> in a pin-stripe suit can get everything he wants?
What the hell business is it of yours what A wants to pay B? You
aren't
either party. Next thing you know you'll be telling them what ***ual
positions are moral or not.
|
