money

I like Matt Taibbi. He’s an excellent journalist for Rolling Stone, and he’s written several interesting books.

Today, on Twitter, he announced a little “contest,” asking people to create a logo for him so he could use it as a Twitter avatar, and on t-shirts, to promote his next book.

The “prize?” A copy of the book, and a couple of t-shirts.

I replied, pointing out that he was asking someone to do design work for free.

Mr. Taibbi pointed out that he had paid a designer to design the book; that this wasn’t, apparently, as important, at least not important enough to merit compensation.

As a freelancer, I find it insulting when people expect anyone to work for free. Especially because it is increasingly common, and the reason cited is often that you’ll get “exposure.”

I wasn’t the only person to respond in this way to Mr. Taibbi’s offer, but I seem to have been the first. He clearly thought about this, then, few minutes later, he offered to “throw in a $500 prize,” which, to me, is a perfectly valid way to resolve the issue. But Mr. Taibbi became irked. A few minutes later, he gave up.

Rather than say, “Oops, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have expected people to work for free,” he just saw it as people being “upset.” He didn’t apologize; that would be an admission that he had done something untoward…

It’s a shame when an author of his calibre – notably one who wrote a book entitled Griftopia – thinks that he can just trawl Twitter to get himself a logo. I think given the amount of money he earns as a journalist, he could afford to pay a designer. Sure, he’s just looking for a “scribble,” he says, but the idea behind that scribble has value.

It’s a shame that an author like this thinks that he can grift his Twitter followers and Rolling Stone readers into doing a job for him. It’s a shame that anyone thinks they can do this. Freelancers have a hard enough time earning a living without this sort of grift.

What must they be making, then, of suggestions that everyone should have their tax returns made public?

Publishing everyone’s tax details would make the new measures superfluous. In fact, if PAYE details were made publicly available, it would be technically possible to work out the relative incomes of employees in all companies — even ones too small to be affected under the government’s proposed regulations.

What would that mean in practice? One potential answer lies in the example of Norway, where tax returns have been public since the 19th century. In fact, until fairly recently, it was possible to read Norwegians’ tax details online — leading, perhaps predictably, to a rather voyeuristic interest in tax affairs, with tabloid newspapers often using the records to find easy stories.

Before Norway switched from an open system to one requiring registration, there were even concerns that burglars might use the nation’s records to find potential victims.

I was thinking about this yesterday. Back in the late 1980s, I spent a year in Oslo. I used to hang out in a big bookstore in the center of town (Tanum, on Karl Johans Gate), because they had an excellent selection of books in English. I recall, at some point during the year, seeing a big table with huge piles of a drab looking book that everyone was picking up and buying. I asked someone what it was, and found that it was a register of everyone’s tax information: how much money they made, and how much they paid in income tax. I found it fascinating that this country was so open about people’s income.

So with what’s going on in the UK – politicians are publishing information about their income and the taxes they pay, as a result of the Panama Papers leak – I wondered if other countries would ever do something like this.

This article asks the following question:

If the UK followed Norway and made all tax returns public, what would it mean for pay inequality?

It’s interesting to wonder if this would help pay equality; or equality in general…

Source: Should we publish everybody’s tax return?

Naive heirs of the super-wealthy are putting their family assets at risk by flaunting their lavish lifestyles on social media, cyber-security experts have warned.

Sites like Instagram have increasingly become the place for brash, affluent youngsters to boast of their supercars, yachts and private jets.

But they are unwittingly exposing their families to scrutiny from fraud investigators and criminals.

You have to love this. The selfie generation getting its comeuppance.

Source: Super-rich caught out by children’s Instagram accounts

“One thing clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest when you talk to many people in corporate America. It’s an idea that completely removes responsibility from many corporations in our society. It’s an idea that threatens not only our constitutional democracy, but also every value Christians hold dear and every value we hold dear from modernity and post-modernity.   

It’s an idea so bad that Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, called it ‘the dumbest idea in the world.’

The idea, called shareholder value theory, is that the sole purpose of publicly-held corporations is to return profit to shareholders.

Customers be damned. Society be damned. Families be damned. Results be damned. America be damned. 

Where did this idea come from?”

In a long, detailed article, a look at why the focus on the Libertarian idea of “shareholder value” is dumb. It leads to a short-term approach, a focus on the value of a company through its market capitalization (Google is now bigger than Apple, FWIW), and turns the stock market into a spectator sport, something it isn’t and should not be.

This point in the article is interesting:

Privately held companies, which are free from the pressures of shareholder value theory, invest more and create more value than publicly-held companies. Privately held companies invest 6.8 percent of total assets, compared with 3.7 percent for publicly-owned companies. Rather than invest, publicly-held companies are more likely to spend money on stock buybacks.

Why? Because once again, their mission is driven solely by short-term profit to shareholders rather than long-term value.

I really don’t see the point in Apple buying back so many of their shares. Sure, they pay less dividends, but the buybacks haven’t kept the shares from dropping. (One can argue that Apple’s share price highlights how illogical the stock market is…)

I would say the second dumbest idea in America is the lack of single-payer health care. Not just because of the cost involved with having a for-profit health care system, but because for many people health care is tied to their jobs. This gives people less incentive to change jobs, or to try their hands at setting up their own businesses. If you run a business, you don’t want people staying in your company simply because they’re afraid to lose their health care. (I know there are systems in place that allow you to hold on to your health care for 18 months if you leave your job in the US, but that’s not enough for some people.)

Source: How to really make America great again: Get rid of ‘the dumbest idea in the world’