Category Archives: markets

Let’s Increase Taxes

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…and the costs all of us must bear from that. But the real story is this…proposal…Hillary Clinton has dreamed up for her Presidential campaign.

The centerpiece idea would require drug makers to devote a sufficient portion of revenue to research and development. Those that don’t would risk losing federal support, such as research grants or an R&D tax credit.

Never mind that drug companies already spend 15%-20% on R&D. This fine businesswoman, who’s never run a company in her life and who was dead broke when she left the White House, says that’s not enough. Never mind, too, that she has studiously avoided saying how much is enough.

This is just another Democrat who hasn’t met a tax she didn’t like. This is just another Democrat who thinks Big Government knows more about running a business than the businessmen, who have to operate in a competitive environment or fail.

The EU Wants a New International Trade Court

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The proposal is described in Tom Fairless’ piece in The Wall Street Journal. I want to focus on a couple of comments in that article, though.

Campaigners [for the proposed new trade settlement court] claim that the current system constrains governments and leaves policy makers vulnerable to legal proceedings from overseas investors.

Kind of like those impertinent American companies do with the US government.

And

[O]pponents [of the existing trade settlement system] warn that large US companies could use the dispute-resolution mechanism to challenge European laws and regulations on labor, food and the environment.

As a matter of principle, what’s the downside of either of these?

Only Big Government proponents fear government being held to account by its…lessers.

Price Supports

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It seems there’s a glut of milk (among other farm produce) in the European markets, and milk prices are falling.

Milk producers want EU governments to prop up prices by giving more money to farmers who voluntarily cut production.

Social Democrat countries like France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy actually think this is a good idea.

What those good folks carefully decline to discuss, though, is their rationale for requiring consumers to pay artificially higher prices, instead of letting market forces take those prices to an equilibrium empirically agreed between the farmers and the consumers—without government as intervening middleman.

Oh, wait….

Whose Phones Are They?

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Apple Inc’s move to make it easier to block ads on iPhones and iPads is troubling publishers and heightening tensions with its Silicon Valley neighbors.
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Putting such “ad blockers” within reach of hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users threatens to disrupt the $70 billion annual mobile-marketing business, where many publishers and tech firms hope to generate far more revenue from a growing mobile audience. If fewer users see ads, publishers—and other players such as ad networks—will reap less revenue.

Yeah, and? I sympathize with publishers and tech firms and…ad networks…over their loss of revenue from their ads not being viewed—about as much as I sympathize with other advertisers over the loss of revenue from their bulk snail mail brochures going unread directly from my mailbox to my trash can.

My house is my own, and advertisers have no authority, no right, to enter it to pitch their wares, or for any other reason at all, without my prior permission to come in. If I wanted to be a curmudgeon about it, I could—quite legally and morally—take steps to prevent them from entering my property at all to gain access to my doorbell. That I don’t is only because such a measure would interfere with the access to my door that my friends and those friends who are still strangers should have.

So it is with my cell phone. It’s my cell phone, not those advertisers’, and if I don’t want them to clutter up my phone with their digital brochures, then they have no choice but to comply with my wish that they not come knocking at all.

Here’s Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next:

The ad-blocking problem is real and growing, and ad-blocking on iOS is only going to accelerate it.

Problem for whom? Not for the property owners. We’re not your piggy bank.

I don’t often agree with Apple, but on this question I say a hearty well done.