redistribution of wealth

19Jul/110

EPIC RANT: O!ministration is greatest impediment to businesses creating jobs

Delivered by hotelier Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, in an earnings report conference call conducted this week. During the call, where the questions varied from inside-baseball share price and profit matter to the overall outlook for the market's his company has properties in, Mr. Wynn called out the Obama administration for being, "The Greatest Wet Blanket To Business And Job Creation In My Lifetime". Here's a taste from the transcript:

I believe in Las Vegas, I think its best days are ahead of it, but I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President, and nothing will get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year, that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.

And I'm saying it bluntly that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our health care costs escalate. Regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, you know -- that keeps using that word redistribution.

Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they're frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet. And until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change.

And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it, are going to sit in fear of the President. And you know, a lot of people don't want to say that. They say oh, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal. And it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe's ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, they're holding too much money. You know, we haven't heard that kind of money except from pure socialists.

Everybody is afraid of the government. And there's no need -- there's no need, you know, soft pedaling it. It's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessmen, and Republican businessmen, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid, I support Democrats and Republicans, and I'm telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody is going to be sitting on their thumbs.

[emphasis-ed]

Wow...Pretty brutal stuff, eh? Brutally honest, that is... The full transcript is posted at Seeking Alpha. And RCP has audio of the rant posted as well, if you'd prefer to get the full flavor that his tone of voice imparts to the verbiage.

Oh, and as an aside, when Wynn compares the administration to straight up socialists he's speaking from experience; in the call he mentions that it's his companies 5th year operating a casino in Macau; the property with the greatest growth prospects in his organization right now. For the geographically challenged among us, Macau is located in Communist China.

Although a long outspoken critic of the administration's regulatory policies and general business unfriendliness, it's nothing new. Other prominent businessmen such as Mort Zuckerman, no wingnut by any stretch of the imagination, has made many similar points, albeit couched in less strident language, for some time. Indeed, Mr. Obama's class warfare schtick seems to be wearing a bit thin on even his old pal Warren Buffet.

It's painfully clear to all but the most partisan kool-aid drinkers that this administration's economic initiatives have failed miserably, as many knew they would being mere re-runs of past failed progressive policy prescriptions. And the breadth and magnitude of this failure really calls into question whether the President want the economy to recover, or would prefer the crisis environment, such being more conducive to implementing his radical transformative agenda under the guise of it being urgently necessary for the good of our nation. Given that he's clearly pursuing such a strategy in the current debt talks, it's getting increasingly more difficult to extend him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he has nothing but good intent, with respect to his larger social and economic agenda.

[Cross posted at The Conservatory]

Rocketman

Tagged as: Business unfriendly administration, Obama, redistribution of wealth, Socialism No Comments

21Jun/110

VDH on the metaphysics of contemporary theft

As usual, an excellent essay by Victor Davis Hanson over at Pajamas media, in which he uses some anecdotes of criminal behavior to illustrate how, as a nation, we are nearing a tipping point where those who are unjustly preyed upon will tire of the usurpation of the fruits of their labor and simply stop working to acquire the things that the thieves covet.

He sets the stage by relating three personal experiences, the theft of a chain saw, the vandalizing of irrigation pumps via theft of the electric lines that power them-simply to sell the copper in the wires for its scrap metal value!, and a neighbors home, vacant and for sale, that had all of the appliances stolen stolen from it's kitchen.

A majority would believe the thieves took things for drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an iPhone or DVD, rather than out of elemental need (e.g., the thief hawked the chainsaw to purchase the family’s rice allotment for the week). In this view, contemporary American crime arises not so much then from Dickensian poverty, as we see in South America or Africa, but out of a sense of resentment, of boredom, from a certain contempt for the more law-abiding and successful, or on the assurance that apprehension is unlikely, and punishment rarer still. After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, and the government itself sympathize with, even romanticize those forced to take a chainsaw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs...gangbanger A shoots up gangbanger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis

Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

He then goes on to make a fascinating connection between the parasitism of the petty criminals and the parasitic ideology of the progressive left. Just as the criminals don't really want equal opportunity, but just to get "stuff" without laboring for it, so too are the professional malcontents among the progressive Democrats not really interested in "social justice", the "green agenda", or any of the other connivances and talking points the usual suspects blather about; such talk is merely carefully scripted lines meant to be delivered as part of a stirring performance meant to elicit an emotional, and not rational, response on the part of folks who, by-and-large, are too lazy to think matters through themselves. I mean, why waste time gathering information and reasoning one's way to the heart of a matter when you can have your outrage du jour provided in a convenient soundbite; so you can get back to watching American Idol instead. But VDH sums it up better than I ever could:

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.

That does not mean it has not done a lot of damage and will not do even more in the next two years; only that it never quite wanted to see cap and trade legislation enacted, blanket amnesty, Guantamo shut down, or Predators ended; these were simply crude slurs by which to demonize Bush, ways of acquiring power and influence, but not a workable plan of living. Note that Obama is now zealous on just those issues which he could have easily rammed through his Democratically controlled congress in 2009-10 when he had large majorities, such as amnesty and cap and trade.

You cannot fly to Costa del Sol on solar panels. The light switches might not go on at Vail without coal burning somewhere. The Holder or Obama children might not be safe in the Stockton or Parlier city schools. Some right-wing nut in the Dakotas is still necessary to pump the oil to refine the gas for Air Force One; there is no golf without an irrigation system and a supply of either ground or surface water.

In short, the currently insulted class is necessary and Obama knows it.

These are only some of the more choice excepts. As I often say, make sure you read the whole thing. As with most of Hanson's essays, you'll be glad you did.