In an editorial last week Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote about a supposed “economic revolution” happening in Cuba. It seems the Cuban government has just liberated the economy to allow individuals to buy and sell houses. This marks a huge step forward from the existing (since 1986) policy of allowing individuals to own homes, while limiting their property interest to exchanging those homes, not buying and selling them.
The “right to buy and sell homes”?! You’d think a truly liberal government would be granting the right to wear hats in this advanced age. As long as the government is in the business of holding tight to the reigns and meting out nominal positive rights, a liberal economy is a long way off.
Here is a letter to the editor I sent to the WSJ arguing just that:
Dear Editor: To paraphrase Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s question in her Monday editorial: “What it will mean when Cubans are allowed to ‘buy homes’?” (“Is Cuba Going Capitalist?” The Americas, August 15). Raul Castro touts an economic revolution in Cuba, but as O’Grady points out, this is a government that has turned chicken into an endangered species in its own country.
The Cuban government has a long way to go to embrace a liberal economic worldview. In fact, Cuba’s emerging “capitalism” is just another verse of Cuba’s same tired song. Even in this “capitalist revolution,” Cuba still does not embrace the natural rights underlying economic freedom. Instead, that tropical big-government sinkhole is continuing to violate individuals’ natural rights by assigning rights to individuals, just like it has for years.
The New York Times gives an accurate summary in its “Cuban capitalist revolution” headline: “Cubans Set For Big Change: Right to Buy Homes” (Aug. 2). Sure, the right to buy homes is an important right, and this marks a huge step from the previous (since 1986) policy that Cubans could finally own homes but could not buy or sell them.
Granting the right to buy homes is a step in the right direction, but there is no revolution happening here. A revolution requires a change in mentality. Liberty belongs with individuals, and the revolution Cubans are waiting for is a dramatic shift towards natural rights.
By doling out one right at a time, the Cuban government keeps a tight hold on the liberty cake, leaving individuals to fight over scraps. As long as the government is in that business, a liberated Cuban economy is a long way off.
Kathryn Ciano
After two years on the real estate market, Martha Stewart’s beautiful Tribeca penthouse finally sold this week for $8.6 million, a cool two-and-a-half times what Martha paid for the condo in 1999.
Alexis Stewart, the media mogul’s daughter, initially listed Martha’s “Ice House” for $12.95 million in 2009.
This weekend Tribeca begins its film festival, an annual event started in 2002 to bring attention and financial support to areas in lower Manhattan I wrote over at The Washington Examiner:
A lot has happened in Tribeca since 1999 — lower Manhattan suffered after the 2001 9/11 attack, but in 2006 Forbes ranked Tribeca’s 10013 zip code as New York City’s most expensive.
And a lot has happened for Martha Stewart since 1999. After the media magnate was convicted of insider trading in 2004 she spent five months in a West Virginia federal prison camp. Despite speculation that this would be the end of Martha’s “omnimedia” empire, the entrepreneur (and former model) bounced back ahead of projections.
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After Atlas Shrugged debuted to devastating debuts, producer John Aglialoro told the Los Angeles Times that he is considering ending the project without producing the second and third parts of the trilogy that were part of the original Atlas plan.
“Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?” Aglialoro asked.
“Critics, you won,” said John Aglialoro, the businessman who spent 18 years and more than $20 million of his own money to make, distribute and market “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” which covers the first third of Rand’s dystopian novel. “I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2.”
“Atlas Shrugged” was the top-grossing limited release in its opening weekend, generating $1.7 million on 299 screens and earning a respectable $5,640 per screen. But the the box office dropped off 47% in the film’s second week in release even as “Atlas Shrugged” expanded to 425 screens, and the movie seemed to hold little appeal for audiences beyond the core group of Rand fans to whom it was marketed.
Ranked by Forbes Small Business as the 10th richest executive of any small publicly traded company in 2007, John Aglialoro has reportedly spent $20 million over the past two decades working to make Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged into a big screen trilogy.
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Monday morning the Supreme Court rejected Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s request to speed up the process for a ruling on Virginia’s health care appeal.
By rejecting Virginia’s unusual request, the Court denied Cuccinelli’s request that its appeal bypass usual legal procedures to go directly before the nation’s highest court. Instead, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear Virginia’s appeal, scheduled for May 10.
So far five federal judges have heard challenges to Obama’s sweeping healthcare overhaul. Judges in Florida and Virginia have declared the law unconstitutional, while Democratic appointees in Michigan, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. have upheld Obamacare.
Virginia’s chief complaint with Obamacare is the individual mandate. Twenty-six states joined Florida’s appeal that Congress grossly overstepped its authority with this unprecedented requirement that individuals buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the government if they do not purchase coverage.
No justices sat out of Monday’s denial of fast-track process. Yet the slow route is new for Obamacare, a highly contested sweeping legislation that passed only when then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi invoked a bizarre, constitutionally-dubious “deem and pass” procedure that unseated civics as we know it and “deemed” the bill popular rather than put it to popular vote the way the American Constitution requires.
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Tax Freedom Day is the first day in the calendar year when the nation has paid enough to fund its annual debt burden. Everything you’ve earned up to this point goes directly to the government. A free sandwich is as good a way as any to celebrate finally arriving at the point in the year when you can spend what you earn on things you actually care about.
Mother Jones created a great visual of the national tax burden, represented in beers and burritos:
And here’s the explanation, also from Mother Jones:
The 2010 tax bill for a typical American family earning $50,000 comes out to about 1,752 Chipotle burritos. From that, the feds spent about 2,811 bottles of Bud Light on defense, 244 packs of cigarettes on Medicare, and 13 Red Bulls on energy spending. Unfortunately, it does not show how many decaf soy lattes went to NPR.
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In further proof that communists never won the culture war in China, they merely shut down culture altogether, the Chinese government decided this week to enforce an outright ban on the popular “time travel” genre of Chinese films.
The reason? Chinese officials claim that using history as a basis for fiction “disrespects history.”
I wrote in today’s Daily Caller:
Forget for a moment the implications of a government whose reins on free speech are so tight that a top-down committee can ban an entire popular film genre.
What makes this story interesting is the fact that Chinese filmmakers — and the film-consuming Chinese public — are so interested in finding a connection to another time and place.
China has banned Google and Facebook and Twitter. Traveling to another time is the only chance many Chinese have of exploring at all.
The Chinese government is not banning time travel because it wants to protect history. It is banning time travel because letting anyone besides the Chinese government tell any story threatens the Communists’ death grip on Chinese culture.
Communists never won the culture war in China; they merely silenced the opposition. Even the memory of opposition is a threat to the Communists’ hold on power; banning time travel is the Chinese government’s attempt to wipe out any memory of the time when China was free.
Indeed. Free society relies on discourse and the arts to bolster transparency and individual expression. People in China have no access to Google, Twitter, or Facebook, and the yuan only goes so far in travels abroad.
Time travel is a popular film genre because it is a last bastion of hope for communism-quashed imaginations. Free governance thrives on free speech; count your blessings that we live in a society where individuals can still do so much to protect the freedom we have.
Yesterday’s NYT cautions that “jobs are scarce” in small business as American entrepreneurship declines:
Here’s the explanation the NYT includes from the pessimistic chart’s author, Scott Shane:
68,490 more businesses closed in 2009 than in 2007, an 11.6 percent increase in the business closure rate. But in 2009, 115,795 fewer employer businesses were founded than in 2007, a 17.3 percent decline in firm formation.
How ironic; government started growing like crazy and small businesses had to shutter their doors.
In 2007 the bailouts started. Those were an awful lot of taxpayer dollars taken directly from potential-entrepreneurs’ pockets and dumped into flailing — or failing — big businesses’ bloated books.
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Next time someone tells you that only the left side of the aisle cares about feeding hungry Americans, remind them that it’s green special interests and Michelle Obama’s size-awareness campaign that’s making it harder for Americans to feed their families.
Food inflation is here, folks. Food costs the same; there’s just less of it.
The New York Times ran an article this week complaining that consumers are up in arms because shrinking grocery packaging means they can’t feed their families. It’s a terrible thing that goods cost money; no question about it.
Yet if food manufacturers tried to fix the problem from the consumers’ side of the problem, we’d have a bail-out situation. Manufacturers would be losing money on under-priced, over-sized food packages. It would only be a matter of time before grocery suppliers go out of business.
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Faced with budget shortfalls and a steep $20 million annual operating cost, this week Virginia decided to sell naming rights to its 42 highway rest stops.
While I’ve argued against WMATA’s proposal to sell naming rights to Metrorail stations, sponsorship of highway rest stops presents more opportunities for semi-private proprietorship. This could benefit both the commonwealth and travelers.
I defend Virginia’s decision in The Examiner:
Tacking business names onto rest stops — “Aflac Travel Plaza,” for instance — would allow businesses to target a clear but diverse audience: drivers. And not just any drivers; rest stop users are not commuters, but travelers. Marketing to this group has long relied on radio ads and billboards; sponsored rest stops (especially with corporate partnerships!) represents a whole new approach to grabbing roadtrippers’ eyeballs.
Rest stops will bear corporate names, so companies will have a sense of proprietorship over the areas. Insurers like Aflac don’t want those eyeballs to fall on messy or poorly-stocked pitstops (or, for that matter, “culturally insensitive” remarks from its duck-voiced mascot). Sponsoring businesses will be incentivized to keep the soda machines stocked and the restrooms clean.
Rest stop users occupy a different “traveler” demographic space from, say, high speed rail aficionados. Products that naturally appeal more to highway users than to urbanites (like beef jerky manufacturers) can tap the surge in ad response that has lately belonged primarily to urban coupons.
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It’s a new era in fast food. Last decade everyone was asking which food was the healthiest. Now growth is global, and it all comes down to dominance. The bigger they are, the bigger they’ll get.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Subway has trumped McDonald’s in the US and abroad, though McDo continues to rule in sales dollars:
At the end of last year, Subway had 33,749 restaurants worldwide, compared to McDonald’s 32,737. The burger giant disclosed its year-end store count in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late last month.
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Subway has achieved its rapid growth, in part, by opening outlets in non-traditional locations such as an automobile showroom in California, an appliance store in Brazil, a ferry terminal in Seattle, a riverboat in Germany, a zoo in Taiwan, a Goodwill store in South Carolina, a high school in Detroit and a church in Buffalo, New York.
“We’re continually looking at just about any opportunity for someone to buy a sandwich, wherever that might be. The closer we can get to the customer, the better,” Mr. Fertman says, explaining that it now has almost 8,000 Subways in unusual locations. “The non-traditional is becoming traditional.”
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