Tag Archives: Entrepreneur

News

Communist Venezuela introduces energy rationing in 2010

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Story here from Breitbart. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Oil-rich Venezuela ushered in 2010 with new measures rationing electricity use in malls, businesses and billboards, as Hugo Chavez’s government aimed to save power amid a crippling drought.

The new regulations came into effect January 1, with businesses required to comply with reduced consumption limits and authorities warning of forced power cuts and rate hikes if the measures are not followed.

[…]The power crunch is expected to have an impact on a wide variety of businesses, including cinemas, casinos and bingo halls.

Establishments failing to comply with the measures could face outages for a period of 24 hours, and up to 72-hour suspensions “in case of recidivism,” according to the decree.

The regulation also orders businesses to institute savings plans aimed at shedding consumption by at least 20 percent, a measure that will be evaluated monthly by the newly-created ministry of electricity.

Tariff surcharges of up to 20 percent could be imposed on violators.

Rationing is also to apply to lighted advertisements.

[…]In 2009 there were four nationwide blackouts, with daily failures common in several cities.

Communism produces economic decline by encouraging entrepreneurs to flee or to stop producing, since the state views what these producers produce as something to be seized and distributed to buy votes. If no one wants to start any businesses, then there won’t be any jobs for the people. People end up depending on the state for bread, with all that that entails. The left wants equality of life outcome regardless of choices, (except for themselves).

I don’t see any difference between the intelligence and policies of Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama. Hugo is just further along the road to serfdom, in my opinion. Obama just has more capitalism and Judeo-Christian morality to undo. After Obama passes government-controlled rationing of health care, he’ll probably move on to government-controlled rationing of energy. By then, Chavez should be rationing births, housing, food and water.

News

Senate Democrats contemplating new $40 billion tax on health care innovation

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TigerHawk has a post about a tax being considered for medical device companies. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

As we have long predicted on this blog, the health care “reformers” propose to finance at least part of the “savings” or new benefits — it is impossible to know which — by decreasing the rate of return on medical technology. There are many ways in which this might be done, but the Senate Democrats are proposing to do so directly, by levying a “value added tax” on medical device companies according to their proportion of U.S. sales. This tax would be without regard to profitability, so it would amount to a capital tax on start-ups and a massive income tax surcharge on profitable companies, varying as net margins do. In the case of my own mid-sized company, the tax would be the equivalent of a roughly 20% surcharge on our net income (in all likelihood raising our economic tax rate well above 50%) or 50% of our research and development budget, depending on how you want to look at it.

Any way you look at it, the proposed tax is a calculated effort to divert capital from the medical technology industry to other uses in the economy, because new medical technology drives costs that are now going to be assumed by the government (or at least will be if the Senate leadership gets its way). Of course, innovative medtech also extends and saves lives, and makes them more comfortable and more productive. Which is, after all, the point of medicine.

Know what would be great? If a bunch of silver-spoon bureaucrats invented something that might actually save lives instead of meddling in the financial affairs of medical innovators.

Some of the companies that would be affected are listed in this Wall Street Journal article.

Commentary

How the siege mentality of Christians hurts us all

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Here is a profile of the undisputed champion of gay rights activism, Tim Gill. (H/T Jennifer Roback Morse)

Read the article, and then answer this question: where is our Tim Gill? Why are we raising the next generation of Christians to build higher and better walls between faith and knowledge?

Excerpt from the article:

Tim Gill is best known as the founder of the publishing-software giant Quark Inc., and for a long time was one of the few openly gay members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. He was born in 1953 to one of Colorado’s well-known Republican political families. (The town of Gill in the north-central part of the state is named after them.) After earning a degree in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gill founded Quark in his apartment in 1981, in the manner of other self-made computer magnates like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, with a $2,000 loan from his parents.

[…]In 2000, he sold his interest in Quark for a reported half-billion dollars in order to focus full-time on his philanthropy.

Even as he has shied from the spotlight, Gill has become one of the most generous and widest-reaching political benefactors in the country, and emblematic of a new breed of business-minded donor that is rapidly changing American politics. A surge of new wealth has created a generation of givers eager to influence politics but barred from the traditional channels of participation by recent campaign-finance laws designed to limit large gifts to candidates and political parties. Like Gill, many of these figures are entrepreneurs who have made fortunes in technology.

[…]Gill’s principal interest is gay equality. His foundations have given about $115 million to charities. His serious involvement in politics is a more recent development, though geared toward the same goal. In 2000, he gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns.

Not everyone has to be like Tim Gill, be we all have to try to have an influence in the most effective way possible. And that means being realistic about what it takes to have an influence. Some things just don’t work.