Red Clay Citizen

Unions vs. Walmart

What happens every time a union tries to put a collar around the neck of the largest employer in North America?  One of two things:  The union vote fails or the vote passes and Walmart shuts the doors on that store.  Why, you may ask?  Because Walmart knows that setting up a third party as a defacto staffing agency and giving control over your company to a leadership team concerned only with continually increasing union dues is bad for business. 

Question:  Have you ever seen any butchers in Walmart?  Several years ago you might have until the butchers voted to unionize whereupon management decided to sell only precut meat in the stores.  So what do you do if you are a union and you can't crack the Walmart nut through secret ballot elections?  You get rid of the secret ballot via card check.

 As usual, Red Planet Cartoons has a picture that says a thousand words:

States Gives Grant to Outsource American Jobs

Economic incentives have gone too far when companies whose primary job is to outsource American jobs are getting tax breaks from the state of North Carolina. Today, HCL Technologies announced that it was expanding its operations in Wake County, with the intention of creating 513 jobs. In return, HCL will be rewarded with a state grant worth as much as $5.07 million.

According to Governor Mike Easley (D), "These jobs are a good fit for our economy and critical to the 513 families who will benefit from them." Easley seems oblivious to the fact that many of these jobs are going to be devoted to outsourcing American jobs.

Reads HCL's website: "Having made a foray into the global IT landscape in 1999 after its IPO, HCL Technologies focuses on Transformational Outsourcing, working with clients in areas that impact and re-define the core of their business."

Translation: HCL's core business is outsourcing American jobs. Current clients include Boeing and Merck, which recently built a vaccine plant in Durham.

Approximately 3,000 of HCL's 55,000 employees actually work in the United States. And, again, their main job is to convince American companies to outsource and offshore American jobs. As for those 513 jobs being created in North Carolina, how many are going to go to H1-b and L-1 guest workers from India and elsewhere?

HT: Ron Woodard of NC Listen

A Petition to the N.C. General Assembly

As necessary, replace "France" with "N.C.", "sun" with "cost-effective energy" or "imported furniture" and so on.)

A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

Gentle[folk]:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your -- what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice -- your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds -- in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

(Read on...)
Max Borders - channeling Frederic Bastiat

Libertarianism for Progressives

Print and read.
-Max Borders

WhoTube? Complexity and Economics

Wanted to share these video entries to the APEE/MBM Communicators contest. Check 'em out while gnoshing your lunch, maybe learn a lil something:

Part One

Part Two

Thanks,
Max Borders

Cooperation without Centralization

I love this fable. If you've never read "I, Pencil," you should.
-Max Borders

The Relationship Between Trade & Peace

My dear friend Michael Strong has a wonderful paper up detailing the relationship between peace and free trade. (Michael is co-founder along with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey of FLOW -- one of the coolest groups around advocating for conscious capitalism and social entrepreneurship.) Check it out.
-Max Borders

Ghetto Nihilism: Reflections on MLK Day

Civitas just had NPR's Juan Williams as a guest speaker. In his open forum discussion, he laid out a case against ghetto nihilism similar to this one made by Rod Dreher (whom I usually cannot stomach). Williams' basic point is that the black community must say "enough" to the adoration of no-account rap stars, pull itself up by the bootstraps, and stop buying into the victimology propogated by people like Al Sharpton, (not to mention so-called "scholars" in our institutions of higher education).

When it comes to all the trouble in the inner cities (gang violence, poverty, etc.) the problem many conservatives like to point to is a bankrupt culture - or set of cultural icons, such as hiphop stars and badboy athletes. But we should ask: are these causes or symptoms?

There are two major factors that could lead to all this death and ghetto nihilism in the black community, of which music and culture are probably just symptoms (albeit reinforcing symptoms):

a) the welfare state, which incentivizes people to live at subsistence poverty and abnegate personal responsibility;

b) drug prohibition, which creates high-profit margins on a black market. Gang wars are the result of protecting those markets and associated turf. Simple economics;

c) guilty white folks in academe who perpetuate the notion of institutionalized racism and the contemporary peddlers of race-baiting who feed upon such narratives;

When one considers all of these factors, it's a recipe for total failure in any urban community. But there is no political force in the world that will ever fully deny ghetto kids welfare checks. Nor is there a force strong enough to see decriminalization through. So these problems - particularly those in the urban black communities - are going to be with us for a long time to come. (One could say something similar about rural whites dependent on welfare and meth.) We can talk all day about Snoop Dog or lay blame at the feet of black athletes, but role models will never emerge from a community that the government has set up to fail.
-Max Borders

From Leftist to Libertarian?

Interesting interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods on his evolution from democratic socialist to compassionate free-marketeer. Mackey reminds us that even our most altruistic values are still values and we can create markets in them.
-Max Borders

Economic Freedom Index

Heritage's Economic Freedom Index is out. (I wish they would do this for the individual states within the US.) Not suprisingly, Hong Kong is still the most economically free place in the world. The US is 5th, behind Singapore, Ireland and Australia.
-Max Borders