Mammon category archive

A Quibble:

We are not in a period of “hyper-inflation” in any classic sense of the term.

That’s a misdirection play, and I contemn Farron for perpetuating it.

We are in a period of legitimate price increases due to supply disruptions caused by a world-wide pandemic (remember the pandemic?) accentuated by a war of aggression started by a would-be Czar and exacerbated by the accompanying uncertainty.

Byt, yes, companies are using this to camouflage price-gouging. Farron’s comments about predatory corporations looking to maximize revenues by any means possible without regard to the common good are quite on the mark.

The damage done to the commonweal by predatory practices justified by the glorification of stockholder returns as promoted by the “Chicago school of selfishness economists” is incalculable and unending.

The Portland Press-Herald’s Victoria Hugo-Vidal makes a cogent argument that it is, in significant part, the latter. Here’s a bit:

I’m not an economist, so I’m not qualified to speak on macro market forces that are contributing to why the homebuying economy is so out of whack right now. But I have been on the Planning Board of the town of Buxton for two years now, so I am qualified to speak about one major factor contributing to the lack of homes to purchase; to use a highly technical term, the demand is way humongously larger than the supply. You might think of it as NIMBY-ism. I think of it as the HOME factor: Homeowners Oppose Most Everything.

Every time someone proposed building more than two houses at once in town, the neighbors would come before the Planning Board and swear up one side and down the other that it was going to ruin the neighborhood . . . .

Deep-cover frolics.

Pretty damned far.

The Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell excoriates a proposed law designed to perpetuate poor pay and poverty in Florida.

The EFF’s Konstantinos Komaitis takes a long, detailed look at the who-shot-john over Joe Rogan and Spotify; he thinks he has identified the problem.

Therein lies the crux of the problem. Spotify and other platforms have double standards for content creators. Even now that Spotify has responded to the concerns of medical professionals and artists by publishing its Platform Rules on “deceptive medical information,” it has given us no reason to believe these rules will not be discriminately applied and enforced depending on the artist at the receiving end. If the artist is popular like Justin Bieber or directly profitable like Joe Rogan, then the rules may not apply; but, if the artist is someone that is not as popular, then Spotify’s policies will apply and, they will apply, faster than the blink of an eye.

Follow the link for his reasoning.

Peter S. Goodman takes a long look at the “truck driver shortage.”

Many of those he spoke with said that the issue is not a shortage of truck drivers per se; there are many more qualified drivers than job openings. Rather, it is that employers treat their truck-driving employees like dirt.

A snippet:

“There’s no silver bullet for fixing this,” said Robert Costello, the trade association’s (American Trucking Associations–ed.) chief economist. “We need to get more people into the industry.”

Some experts counter that the very notion of too few drivers is bogus.

As the trucking association itself noted, more than 10 million Americans held commercial driver’s licenses in 2019. That was nearly triple the 3.7 million trucks that required a driver holding that certification.

“This shortage narrative is industry lobbying rhetoric,” said Steve Viscelli, a labor expert at the University of Pennsylvania who previously worked as a truck driver. “There is no shortage of truck drivers. These are just really bad jobs.”

In case you aren’t clear on the “Pinkertons” reference . . . .

Last week, I mentioned a column by Greg Kesich in which he expressed a fear that we are entering a new “Gilded Age.” At the time, I said I thought we were already well into it.

Well, my two or three regular readers, I rest my case.

At the Portland Press-Herald, Greg Kesich argues cogently that we are on the verge of a new “Gilded Age.”

Personally, I think we are already well into it.

. . . unless they sign your paycheck.