Global elites—many of the 2,500 of them billionaires—are spending a few days in Davos, Switzerland, attending the World Economic Forum (WEF), a group founded in 1971 “committed to improving the state of the world.”

The state of the world doesn’t appear too rosy. The recent downgrades of major economies, the clamor over perceived income inequality, the crisis in the Eurozone, and other concerns are weighing heavily on the participants. Vikas Oberoi, chairman of India’s second-largest real estate developer, observed, “Many who will be in Davos are the people being blamed for economic inequalities. I hope it’s not just about glamour and people having a big party.” Azim Premji, chairman of India’s third-largest software company, was equally somber: “We have seen in 2011 what ignoring this aspect can result in. If we don’t take cognizance of it and try to solve this problem, it can create a chaotic upheaval globally.”

Not just the movers and shakers were expressing concern, either. Mainstream economists were of one mind about the world economy, agreeing with the downbeat report from the International Monetary Fund on January 24 which reduced its economic growth outlook for 2012 significantly, predicting at least a “mild recession” in Europe and the rest of the world to slow further from its current tepid pace.

Carmen Reinhart of the Peterson Institute for International Economics agreed that there will be a “serious economic crunch [with] another sub-par year of stubbornly high unemployment, weak growth and delayed recovery in general in all the advanced economies.” Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, also on the roster of attendees, said that the IMF might be underestimating the projected difficulties and that the crisis will be “all the worse because of the weakness of appropriate government response.”

Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres admitted, “Twelve months ago we were all looking forward to a pretty good 2011. Twelve months later, here we are in a completely different world.” That was the tone set by the founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, in his opening remarks. The problem is that capitalism, according to Schwab, is failing and that

Continue reading World Economic Forum in Switzerland: Global Elites Celebrating Hypocrisy

A farmer in the communist collective of Xiaogang, a small village in eastern China, was starving, along with his family and his neighbors. At one of the political indoctrination classes he was forced to attend, Yan Junchang had a revolutionary idea: why not try privatizing the farms and letting the farmers keep what they grow?

He huddled together in his hut with a number of other farmers and, in 1978, signed a secret agreement to establish the beginnings of a private property society. It had to be kept secret because if they were found out, they would be considered “capitalist roaders,” a pejorative term first used by Mao to describe anyone who dared introduce any principles of private capitalism into his collectivist society.

Prior to the agreement, starvation was the rule. There was never enough food. Children went hungry, and wives were forced to make soup from tree leaves and bark. They went to other villages to beg only to discover that they were suffering as well. In 1958 the village population was 120. After Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” 67 of them had died of starvation.

Yan’s agreement divided the collectivist farm into individual pieces with the understanding that any excess food crop beyond what was required by the collective they could keep for themselves. As Yan explained:

Continue reading The Beauty of Private Property—from China?

The latest revelations from WikiLeaks confirm Monsanto’s continuing efforts to influence governments worldwide to rule in its favor and punish those who won’t.

A cable written in 2007 and released recently by WikiLeaks confirmed the company’s important influence at the very highest levels of the U.S. government. Authored by Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of then-president George Bush, the cable outlined a response to resistance from various members of the European Union to adopting GM (genetically modified) crops. At issue specifically was France’s move to ban Monsanto’s GM corn variety:

Country team Paris [Stapleton’s code name] recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this [resistance] is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. [Emphasis added.]

The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path [of resistance to the adoption of GM crops] has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech [pro-GM] voices.

Other leaked cables documented attempts to influence the Pope himself, who was resistant to

Continue reading WikiLeaks: More Evidence of Monsanto’s Bullying and Influence-Buying

With the announcement by Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, that Trustmark Life Insurance Company’s recent increases in premiums for their health insurance were “excessive” comes the certain result: A few may be helped, but many will be harmed.

She declared, “It’s time for Trustmark to immediately rescind these rate [increases], issue refunds to consumers or publicly explain their refusal to do so.” Under ObamaCare’s usurpations of prior state law, any premium increases of more than 10 percent are to be reviewed and if determined to be unreasonable, made subject to public exposure and pressure to abide by the agency’s dictates as to what is reasonable.

A spokeswoman for Trustmark, Cindy Gallaher, responded to Sebelius: “We respectfully disagree with the assumptions and conclusions drawn today by the Department of Health and Human Services. Our premiums are driven by the rising cost and increased utilization of medical services.”

Those premium increases affect about 10,000 policyholders in five states, including Alabama where Trustmark has raised its premiums by 27 percent over the last year, Arizona with raises of 18 percent, and Pennsylvania with increases of 15 percent.

At present, Sebelius can only complain publicly about Trustmark’s premium increases, as ObamaCare does not yet contain the power to block those increases. The Obama administration sought such powers but

Continue reading Obamacare, Price Controls, and Theft

When Barnes & Noble announced its awful earnings per share losses on Thursday, it didn’t help any that its losses were so much worse than the company had projected just a month earlier. In October, Barnes & Noble estimated losses for its fiscal year at between 30 and 70 cents per share.

Its latest numbers, revised downward to between $1.10 and $1.40, shook investors who pushed shares to $11, down from $17 in early November. The one critical number which investors look at primarily, called EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization—fell from $281 million last year to $163 million this year, a decline of more than 40 percent.

It’s easy to say that technological change and market preferences are pushing Barnes & Noble to the edge of bankruptcy, but its position is vastly different from that of its former competitor, Borders, which disappeared in September. What’s more accurate is to say that Barnes & Noble saw the change coming but waited before responding to it. Succeeding brilliantly in the 1990s by providing a vast array of discounted books, games, and accessories, it innovated by opening Starbucks cafes in its stores and providing its customers with comfortable chairs and couches in informal reading areas. In 1998, it anticipated the change from print to digital and purchased NuvoMedia, the maker of the Rocket eBook reader. But in 2003 it exited the digital business, concluding that there was no profit in it.

Barnes & Noble realized its mistake, and in 2009, introduced its Nook e-reader. But it had allowed Amazon to gain a two-year advantage with its own Kindle e-reader, and then Amazon increased its advantage over Barnes & Noble by

Continue reading First, Borders; Then, Kodak; Now, Barnes & Noble?

After 131 years, it appears that Eastman Kodak will be declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy before the end of the month, according to the Wall Street Journal. It is currently seeking to sell off some of its 10,000 patents in order to stave off the inevitable, but the company is burning through its remaining cash reserves and credit lines rapidly. The last time Kodak was profitable was 2007 when its stock traded at $30 a share. On Friday, its last trade was at $0.37 a share. It’s in the process of being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange, and Moody’s has downgraded the company’s credit to junk status.

By the mid-1990s the company had a virtual monopoly on photographic film that was enormously profitable and may be have been part of the cause of its failure to adapt to changes in the marketplace and in consumers’ tastes. Ironically, its success in developing the first digital camera in 1975 was heralded by its developer, Steve Sasson, as an invention that could “substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.” There was no way he could have known then just how close to the mark he was, or the negative impact such an invention would have on his own company. He called it “film-less photography” which took a “year of piecing together a bunch of new technology that ran off 16 nickel-cadmium batteries, an unstable imaging array, and some parts stolen from a digital voltmeter.” It took 23 seconds to record an image to a cassette tape which was then placed in a reader that displayed it on a black-and-white TV set.

But the company’s highly profitable dependency upon its film business kept it from seeing the coming change, and it

Continue reading The Free Market is Brutal: Kodak Loses; Consumers Win

Inside the Lucky Dragon van sitting by the curb at the Chinese consulate in New York is a couch, a folding chair, two Mac laptop computers and a printer running off the cigarette lighter/DC connector. On the side of the van is the name: Lucky Dragon Mobile Visa Consultants. They are serving 25 to 50 people every working day of the week.

When Adam Humphreys, a free-lance artist and member of a local band, tried to obtain the required visa for his trip to China, he found that the form he had downloaded from the embassy’s website was the wrong one. After standing in line only to find that his efforts to complete the form were in vain, Humphreys walked three-and-a-half blocks to a Burger King which had a wireless connection to download and complete the proper form, and then return to stand in line once again.

At the Burger King’s Internet café, Humphreys had a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious): every one of the computers at the café was logged onto the embassy’s website to access the proper form. Smelling an opportunity, Humphreys called his band buddy Steven Nelson and together they rented the van and started a business.

Continue reading Free Market Thinking Inside the Van

One of the ways that Whirlpool Corporation celebrated its 100th anniversary last year was to file petitions against two of its main South Korean competitors for “dumping” washing machines onto the market on Black Friday. Whirlpool claimed that Samsung was selling their 3.7 cubic-foot top-loading washing machines at a wholesale price of $363.18, way below the $751.46 Whirlpool says it would cost them to make the same product. Consequently, Samsung and LG Electronics sold thousands of their washers over the Black Friday weekend, taking substantial market share away from Whirlpool.

In its complaint, Whirlpool demanded an investigation into their rivals’ practice of “dumping” washers at prices that Whirlpool couldn’t match, and then demanded sanctions—tariffs—against the offending competitors and their products.

It’s worked before. Last March Whirlpool filed a similar petition about their competitors dumping high-end refrigerators and the Commerce Department agreed, applying a 37-percent duty on

Continue reading Whirlpool Asks for Mercantilism, Forces Consumers to Pay More

By adjusting for inflation at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, the purchasing power of $750 in 1964 is equivalent to $5,473 today. With that as his budget, today’s Christmas shopper could buy:

• A washer and dryer ($450 + $378)
• An electric range ($350)
• A freezer ($315)
• A refrigerator ($400)
• A microwave oven ($76)
• A dishwasher ($297), and
• A blender ($60)

for a total of $2,326, with $3,147 left over.

With that he could then purchase:

Continue reading Christmas Redux: Americans Live Better for Less Thanks to Market Innovation

There have been some doozies, which would be an understatement.

Nominees include the two most obvious stories, redistricting and reapportionment. The decennial battle to redraw district lines in Colorado had its fair share of partisan acrimony and alleged political subterfuge. The battle over so-called “Amycare” and SB 200? Check. The momentous Lobato decision? Yep. Green jobs failures? Certainly. Rep. Sal Pace’s, um, “leaks”? Heh. Those too.

We did a bit of crowdsourcing on Facebook to establish a consensus on nominees, but unlike the climate change-mongers, the rankings aren’t “settled.”

We’ve compiled 27 different stories, or storylines, for your perusal. Some, like Occupy Denver, have a long narrative track, extending over many months, with several facets and players and interpretations. Others stories are more one-dimensional, but were also quite notable. Whether the stories could have been anticipated to develop in 2011 (redistricting and reapportionment occur every 10 years), or were spontaneous outgrowths that could not have been foreseen even by those with “conventional wisdom” in the political arena, these stories are what made the past year in politics in Colorado so damned interesting.

Some thought 2011 would be a quiet year in contrast to 2010′s clusterf**k or 2012′s media circus. Looking back on the past several years, this political observer can only say that he agrees with our state’s border welcome signs–welcome to colorful Colorado!

There is, however, no intent to judge the merits of the particular stories themselves; i.e., to re-litigate, debate, critique or reassess the stories. We’re just concerned with what the readers found most memorable or most newsworthy compared to the other stories that emerged in 2011. Some might base their ranking on the sensationalism of the story, or perhaps their personal involvement in the narrative (like defeating Prop 103). Others may eschew the flashier but not all that impactful stories in favor of the more wonky stories that will have a meaningful influence on Colorado politics for years to come. Any method you, our readers, use is ok by us.

Just let us know what you think! The voting will close Thursday, December 29 at 5pm MST. We’ll post the rankings on New Years’ Eve eve, with links to relevant news outlets and blogs who played key roles in uncovering, reporting, and detailing the stories that come out on top. No comprehensive recaps, just a quick flashback to PPC’s favorite political moments in 2011.

Thank you.

**A special thanks to Ben DeGrow and Mary Ila MacFarlane for beta testing the survey. Any faults are solely that of the author, and formatting, well, blame SurveyMonkey. Cheers.