Good reported on Wednesday that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is starting a grant program to encourage kids to “stop out of school.” Thiel is offering up to 20 winners, under the age of 20, $100,000 grants to fund new businesses. He argues that schools are not be the best value for individuals, and he asserts that students don’t learn enough about entrepreneurship. (video interview below)
While I applaud Thiel for investing in the next generation of innovators, it addresses an interesting question: If students and parents are paying thousands of dollars for a college education, and taxpayers are subsidizing tuition increases, are students getting what they pay for?
When some students graduate in debt and without a job, maybe Theil’s idea will be the way of the future where companies sponsor students to develop their own ideas and add value to the economy. It certainly is preferable to forgiving student loan debt if students work for the government, a program that has no potential to bring us out of the recession.
I revoke my previous apology to the Swiss, and reiterate my previous disapproval. As evidenced by the latest outcome in the U.S. tax case involving UBS, we have moved beyond troubling and into something much worse.
...the world’s largest wealth manager in terms of assets, agreed to pay a $780 million fine and disclose information about some of its clients to settle a landmark U.S. tax case.
As I said in my older post: “In direct contradiction to their own legal view of tax evasion. Even though some may argue that this is moot because the U.S. does not consider a financial transaction as something beholden to privacy rights, the Swiss do–and besides, the U.S. view is wrong. A person’s financial records should be considered as sacred as their medical records.”
And with an eye toward history, let us not forget:
One issue of the time that reinforced the passage of this law [Swiss Banking Secrecy Act] came during the era of Hitler when a German law stated that any German with foreign capital was to be punished by death. Swiss banks were watched closely by the German Gestapo. It was after Germans began being put to death for holding Swiss accounts that the Swiss government was even more convinced of the need for bank secrecy.
Reading the comments on left-leaning blogs, you hear cheers and a tinge of jealousy about the whole thing. No matter if UBS did or did not help people avoid U.S. taxes, I cannot read this without envisioning a slippery slope argument. If the current climate continues, it won’t be too far-fetched to imagine laws like that of WWII Germany criminalizing and imprisoning people for choosing where to put their own money. And I won’t even mention the new Treasury Secretary. Oops
In Toronto, city officials have been waging a slow campaign against street hot dog vendors, many of whom, notes National Post columnist Kelly McParland, are “immigrants supporting families in the great Canadian tradition.” That a city government would go after such hard working people is bad enough. Now Toronto city officials are trying to smother the vendors in a blanket of paternalism. Says McParland:
Some time back, Councillor John Filion suggested tourists would appreciate a wider variety of street food, and championed a loosening of restrictions. It wasn’t a bad idea; though Filion was mainly interested in a healthier diet, there were obvious opportunities for Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Latino or other ethnic foods, not to mention vegetarian alternatives. Given Toronto is jammed with immigrants, suggestions wouldn’t have been hard to come by.
So what happens? The predictable: The city took Filion’s proposal and squeezed the life out of it. First it considered buying its own fleet of carts for $700,000 and leasing them out at $450 a month. Then it realized it would be more fun to stick the expense on the vendors, and came up with a plan to sell new carts to vendors for between $22,000 and $28,000. If they couldn’t afford to pay cash, they could lease the carts for $7,056 to $8,796 per year, at a minimum interest rate of 12.5%. For that outlay, a limited number of vendors would be allowed to sell something besides hot dogs. What exactly they could sell isn’t clear: the city wanted to spend five years — Five Years! — on a pilot project before bravely venturing onward.
Expensive and convoluted as this may seem, it is more politically viable than trying to ban hot dog vending outright, since that could provoke public sympathy for the vendors and anger at the city government. Just such a reaction occurred in Miami years ago, when that city tried to ban private buses, known as jitneys, on which many of the city’s poor residents relied for transport. To protest, the jitney drivers led a motorized protest in front of city hall. I wish Toronto’s hot dog vendors were to do something similar — picture hundreds of hot dog carts together taunting the politicians! (Thanks to Neil Hrab for the National Post link.)
Some people seem to think that having a mind for business and profit means you must be some kind of money-grubbing miser. Far from it, according to new research featured at the Insider Online. It seems that entrepreneurs give more generously to charitable causes, at every level of income, than non-entrepreneurs. Go figure.
Read the whole paper
here.
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