_______________________________________________
- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
(emailed weekly,
from Gilder Publishing,
for friends and subscribers)
_______________________________________________
| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 311.0/September
21, 2007
SIGN-UP A FRIEND FOR FREE!
HEADLINES:
- The
Week / Forbes Picks Sagamore for Telecosm Conference
- Friday Feature / Gilder on Basic Economics
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Those Silly Moon-bats …
- Readings /
SPECIAL OFFER
|
|
The
Week /
Forbes Picks Sagamore for Annual Telecosm Conference
Richard D’Errico, The Business Review (Albany, NY) (9/14/07): An
annual high-tech conference spearheaded by Steve Forbes, president and CEO of
Forbes, is coming to upstate New York after a decade on the West Coast.
The
11th annual Gilder/Forbes conference is scheduled for Oct. 16-18 at The
Sagamore in Bolton Landing [NY].
The
event brings CEOs, chief technology officers and other senior executives
together to debate and discuss future technology. Several hundred people are
expected to pay $1,995 to attend.
Forbes,
who also is Editor in Chief of Forbes magazine, said having the
conference on the East Coast, after years at venues such as Lake Tahoe, was a
positive sign about the conference's reach.
Forbes
said New York was chosen because of its promising technology sector.
"We
are familiar with what's happening and this is one of the good legacies of
[former Gov.] George Pataki," Forbes said.
Forbes,
a former Republican candidate in the U.S. Presidential primaries in 1996 and
2000, is currently national co-chair and a senior policy adviser to Rudolph
Giuliani's 2008 campaign.
"New York, as a whole, if it got its economic act together, the area could truly take off in terms of what's happening in high-tech," Forbes said. "What needs to happen? Where does one start? Taxes. Much too high. Politics, spending, still out of control. And regulations are still pretty heavy-handed. And if they could take an ax to some of that stuff, there's some beautiful areas and a lot of universities, plenty of intellectual capital that could provide the foundation for some pretty exciting things."
He
said Pataki's support of high-tech, including the investment of millions of
dollars into the state University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and
Engineering, is showing signs of progress….
Michael Relyea, who is overseeing the development of the Luther Forest
Technology Campus, said he is looking to see what role local economic
developers might play in the conference. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has said
it plans to build a $3.2 billion computer-chip plant at Luther Forest…. [READ ON]
Register FOR
TELECOSM ONLINE today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
|
The Gilder
Telecosm Forum |
Friday Feature / Basic Economics
Gilder Telecosm
Forum Member (9/15/07): George, I
went to High School Theodore A. Burczak. What exactly is he writing about? I
made a “C” in Economics and I got lost in the write-up when you mix Socialism +
Private and Democratic altogether.
About Socialism after Hayek, by Theodore A. Burczak: Socialism
after Hayek reinvigorates the socialist quest for class justice by rendering it
compatible with the social and economic theories of F. A. Hayek. Theodore A.
Burczak advances a new vision of socialism that avoids Hayek's criticisms of
centrally planned socialism while adhering to a socialist conception of
distributive justice and Marx's notion of freely associated labor. In contrast
to the socialist models of John Roemer, Michael Albert, and Robin Hahnel,
Burczak envisions a "free market socialism" in which privately owned
firms are run democratically by workers, and governments engage in ongoing
redistributions of wealth to support human development, yet markets are
otherwise unregulated.
Theodore A. Burczak is Associate Professor of Economics at Denison
University. Visit his website at: www.denison.edu/economics/faculty/burczak.html.
Nick Tredennick, Gilder Telecosm
Forum (9/15/07): Hayek and Marx are oil and water. Free markets and socialism are oil and
water.
The reviews you cite make the thesis sound suspicious. Reviews use terms
such as "free market socialism," "class justice," and
"abolition of exploitation." These terms imply that there's some
judge of class justice or some measure of exploitation and that there's some
authority that will determine redistribution of wealth.
There is a market cost for for social injustice. Prejudicial hiring practices,
for example, create wage differences that competitors will exploit. The
consequent competitive advantage will discourage prejudicial hiring.
Exploitation is generally the pejorative term for profit. Someone thinks
the price of labor's services is too low. But it is profit that provides the
incentive for efficiency, invention, and improvement. Except in unusual
circumstances, competition will cause the price of labor's services to rise to
its market value.
George Gilder,
Gilder Telecosm
Forum (9/15/07): A
remedy for such toxic sludge is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell (Basic
2007), who was trained as a Marxist in his youth and is one of the world's
leading interpreters of Hayek. I am giving the Sowell text to all my kids.
The key insight is that entrepreneurial startups are already controlled by
their workers, who are also owners. Any further extension of
"democracy" to such economic entities turns them into cumbersome
bureaucracies. And taxing and redistributing profits eliminates the ability of
the owner-workers of small companies to expand.
This entire Hayekian socialist concept is further evidence for my point in
response to Bret's excellent post on the "Big Boom." The belief that
demand drives economic growth allows theorists to imagine that demand can be
redistributed without damage. The notion that markets precede entrepreneurial
creativity prompts the idea of market socialism. Markets must be
entrepreneurial and profit driven to be effective in promoting growth.
To read more posts by
George Gilder, Nick Tredennick, and the Gilder Telecosm Forum members, visit http://www.gildertech.com/ and log on today.
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Those Silly Moon-bats …
Bret Swanson, Disco-tech blog (9/13/07): Quick, Jon
Chait, which raving supply-side moon-bat wrote this today?
”In the past 50 years, there have been two macroeconomic policy changes in the
United States that have really mattered. One of these was the supply-side
reduction in marginal tax rates, initiated after Ronald Reagan was elected
president in 1980 and continued and extended during the current administration.
The other was the advent of "inflation targeting," which is the term
I prefer for a monetary policy focused on inflation-control to the exclusion of
other objectives. As a result of these changes, steady GDP growth, low
unemployment rates and low inflation rates -- once thought to be an impossible
combination -- have been a reality in the U.S. for more than 20 years.”
Yes, of course, it was that frothing fringe dodo named Robert E.
Lucas, Jr., winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize.
In 2007, U.S. GDP will approach $14 trillion, tax
revenue will easily top $2.5 trillion, and the budget deficit will drop towards
a trivial 1% of GDP. Despite recent volatility, domestic stock markets remain
near all-time highs achieved earlier this summer. Riding a worldwide surge of
tax cuts, free trade, and innovation, global output this year will surpass $50
trillion. But in reading Jonathan Chait’s new book The Big Con, one
would assume that the Reagan and Bush economic programs had plunged the U.S.
into depression and the global boom did not exist.
One would have to assume. Because in this book about “crackpot economics,”
Chait has remarkably little to say about economic growth, tax receipts,
budgets, or the epochal story of globalization. With all the global evidence
refuting Chait’s predetermined conclusion that supply-side economics doesn’t
work, he retreats to a political analysis of the Republican Party and petty
defamation of some of the era’s most important economic thinkers….
Read my complete review of Jonathan Chait's book The Big Con:
http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/09/the_big_boom.html
Check out the Disco-tech blog: http://www.disco-tech.org/
__________________________________________
Readings /
Announcing
"The Observatory:" sine scientia ars nihil est
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070919-announcing-the-observatory-sine-scientia-ars-nihil-est.html
‘Don’t Cut,’ Says Wesbury
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2007/09/dont-cut-says-w.html
Hands On with the TI Cellphone Projector
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/20/hands-on-with-texas-instruments-cellphone-projector/
The Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
Top 10 Laughably Bad Tech Ads
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9781224-1.html
Canadian dollar climbs to parity with greenback
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/09/20/canadian_dollar_climbs_to_parity_with_greenback/
Deutsche Telekom to Offer iPhone in Germany
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/technology/20iphone.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
__________________________________________
FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
ADVERTISING INFORMATION
The Friday Letter is mailed each week to more than 40,000-plus
subscribers and friends of Gilder Publishing, including industry leaders,
financial professionals and individual investors. For information about
advertising, contact Linda Bentley at lbentley@forbes.com.
PLEASE NOTE: The appearance of an advertisement in the Friday Letter
does not indicate an endorsement for the product and/or service by George
Gilder, Gilder Publishing LLC, or the Friday Letter staff.
FEEDBACK AND PROBLEMS
For technical problems, or to send letters to the editor, please
e-mail info@gilder.com.
MAILING ADDRESS
Gilder Publishing, LLC
ATTN: Friday Letter
291A Main Street
Great Barrington, MA 01230
_______________________________________________
The Friday Letter is published weekly for subscribers and
friends of Gilder Publishing. If someone you know would enjoy it, please feel
free to forward a copy.
Gilder Publishing makes the Friday Letter available for free. To
help defray some of the costs of producing this information on a weekly basis,
we will from time to time be sending you offers from companies we think you'll
be interested in. These offers will not come more than once a week. If you do
not wish to receive this related information, please opt out of this process at
the link below and we will not share your name with companies outside of Gilder
Publishing.
To SUBSCRIBE please visit http://www.gilder.com/
To UNSUBSCRIBE please go to http://www.gilder.com/fridayletter/unsubscribe.php
Trouble subscribing or unsubscribing?
Email info@gilder.com
http://www.gilder.com/unsubscribe/specialproducts.php
To SUBSCRIBE please visit http://www.gilder.com/
To UNSUBSCRIBE please go to http://www.gilder.com/fridayletter/unsubscribe.php
Trouble subscribing or unsubscribing?
Email info@gilder.com
_______________________________________________
Copyright 2007 Gilder Publishing LLC