Review of Hostile Takeover (book)
I highly recommend David Sirota's Hostile Takeover -- just not for the reasons Mr.Sirota would probably prefer. First, it's considered a "must read" by Al Gore. Secondly, it gives clear insight into how some American liberals view economics and the world in general. To which I say, good for them. I love an open dialog with people of all political values. Mine are all over the place.
Mr. Sirota's book outlines a number of problems with our society and prescribes specific solutions for them. His general thesis is that big corporations have taken over government and his general solution is to make government more powerful, which he assumes will thwart these big corporations. Like many people, he fails to see that people who do stuff will always have the upper hand in any system over people who don't do stuff. The more powerful you make the government, the more able it is to be corrupted and abused by corporations -- which tend to be run by people who do stuff.
Let's outline some of his solutions:
On Taxes his solutions include:
- When cutting taxes, give everyone the same amount back literally. As in, if you cut taxes, give everyone say $1000. I'm all for this as soon as we all pay exactly the same "literally" in taxes. Historically, money is exchanged for goods and services. The millionaire paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in taxes is getting the same services as the person who pays basically nothing. Why should a tax cut literally be the same? When Mr. Sotira and his wife travel Europe on vacation while some of us stay home and work (and are taxed on that work) why should I be punished for that and he rewarded by the government?
- Fix the "regressive" payroll tax. This is almost on the same page where he says tax cuts should be literally the same. By regressive, his complaint is social security taxes are capped after $95,000 or so. But social security and medicare are, in theory, set up so that the user has their own account. It is not supposed to be where rich person is paying for poor person's retirement. How about if we get rid of the payroll tax entirely then? I'm for that. But what he seems to favor is having the middle class and the rich paying for ever increasing entitlements for the poor who aren't earning them.
- Limit the home mortgage deduction to $500,000. Right now, you can deduct interest on your mortages. But people like Mr. Sirota think that houses that cost over $500,000 shouldn't get to deduct this interest. Besides the obvious problem of creating a disincentive for buying larger houses which has negative economic consequences, it's a slap in the face to the people who already pay the most in taxes. It's such a petty class-warfare proposal because it literally sets the tax code up to punish the very people who do the most good in our economy.
He also has the usual stuff such as raising taxes on the rich which is always a signal to me of people who don't really understand the American economy but instead let ideology guide their principles.
Before you get offended, let me explain: businesses and rich people don't treat taxes the same as the middle class. The rich and businesses treat taxes as just another expense and when you raise those taxes, you're simply increasing their expenses which in turn increases the incentive to outsource or automate jobs that were once done by Americans.
He also has solutions to the problem of wages:
- Raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Why stop there? Why not raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour? It's such an easy fallacy to crush because anyone can see that if you were to raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour the result would be a disaster. So raising it to say $10 an hour would simply be what? A smaller disaster?
- Use tax policy to tie executive wages to worker wages I love Marxist rhetoric. Worker wages. Executives don't work you see. But anyway, he argues that taxes should be tied to the ratio between the highest paid executives and the lowest paid workers. Hey, why stop there? Why not have a ratio between the minimum wage clerk at Barnes and Noble and the amount pompous, clueless left-wing authors make? Why should the store clerk make what amounts to $15,000 a year while Mr. Sirota makes big bucks off the sale of the book he wrote? Heck, most book store clerks have to stand 8 hours a day whie Mr. Sirota probably was sitting while he typed up his book. So it wasn't even real work.
It's worth noting that Mr. Sirota's "evidence" to back up his solutions and the "myths" he attempts to debunk tend to simply be columns written by other liberals. It's like when a religious person tries to use the bible to prove the validity of the bible. It rarely occurs to liberals to actually ask business people -- you know, the people who hire and fire workers, what works and what doesn't.
Mr. Sirota's myth busting usually simply involves insulting conservatives and "right wingers". A typical example was his "myth" that increasing minimum wage eliminates low wage jobs. In it, he complains that the data that backs this myth comes from "right wing sources" (you see, to a liberal, ideology is what matters). Next time he's checking out his own groceries at the store, he should ask a store manager what prompted them to replace those minimum wage checkout cashiers with machines. Ask the owner of a Dairy Queen or a Block Buster or manager at a mall store how minimum wage affects jobs. Of course, maybe they're all "right wingers".
The book is 350+ pages of this kind of thing. I know this is rude but his book is just full of empty, philsophical tripe. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the consequences of his beliefs in the real world. Mr. Sirota essentially argues for the virtual enslavement of the highest producers of our society and then is shocked, shocked, when those same producers end up moving their assets overseas to escape.
We live in a society where political belief has replaced actual deeds in determining the morality of the individual. The quasi-socialist like Mr. Sirota can feel morally smug because he believes (strongly) in government programs he'll likely pay little for while condemning me and my capitalistic ilk who actually pay for these programs, pay for most of the charties, create most of the jobs and provide most of the products and services he seems to feel entitled to.
Mr. Sirota's book is the result of someone with a keen intelligence that is unpolluted by real-world experience in the topics he feels strongly about. Which means it's a very good book outlining the mind set of left-wing intellectuals with regards to dealing with a mixed market economy.
X-Play has reviewed Sins of a Solar Empire with a resounding "4 pirates out of 5!" We lost a star (or pirate) due to not including a campaign in with the game.![sinstitle_black[1]](https://draginol.stardock.net/images/SinsofaSolarEmpirelogo_13EF4/sinstitle_black1.jpg)
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