Yeah, I screwed up the URL (I posted at 5:30 this morning before heading to the airport). Hard to fix from my phone, so later. Thanks for the right link.
Congratulations on your rebuttal pieces but does the Forbes audience read them? Somehow we have to limit the damage caused by pieces like this. Would Forbes be up to publishing your rebuttals? If not, why not?
I have several additional points:
1. Is the Lexington Institute, (LI) an “Institute” or a “lobbying house”? Maybe there’s no difference!
2. I think I would have expected a much more frontal attack than this given what ATK got up to when Constellation got the chop.
3. Where, and/or what is the political support for LI and Lockmart?
4. Why is it that Lockmart has no foot in the commercial space world – or are they just working a delaying tactic to slow others while a secret IRAD program matures?
It’s ironic that old space companies would be oh so concerned about relying on only one company for launch services. How many companies provided shuttle launch services?
Remember when liberals kept big business in check- or at least watched intensely? Since Multinational corporations have become bedmates with the progressives in corporatist nirvana, it looks like it’s going to be up to the libertarians to watch both sides of the road for oncoming vested interests.
…it’s going to be up to the libertarians to watch both sides of the road for oncoming vested interests.
We could have seen it coming that the big-government left would end up in flagrante delicto with big business.
Contrary to the left’s longtime bashing, corporations are most comfortable with whatever happens to be the status quo at any given time, and will risk all manner of STDs with whoever promises to maintain it for them. If status quo means taxes and regulations are onerous but predictable and waivers can be had for a check with enough zeroes on it, the corpos are more than willing to play along.
…it’s going to be up to the libertarians to watch both sides of the road for oncoming vested interests.
Given the choice between “big business” and “big government” the choice should be “neither”. That is, co-opt the Republicans into doing things that help small businesses while keeping the megacorps in check.
(I don’t see any useful way to pry the Democrats back from their adulation of government – every single solution is “Well, add a layer of oversight!”)
From the “How on earth do you keep the megacorps in check?” perspective: I think the whole area of antitrust needs drastic help. I’d personally change corporate taxation to focus on “How monopolistic are you?” instead of “How much profit did you make?”
If there are twenty competitors in the field, no one should give a damn how much profit you made. But once you get under ten competitors, and certainly when you get under five, we start having issues.
Wow, that was unusually blunt for one of your published pieces, but well-deserved. It might be a good thing to point that not all legacy space companies are misbehaving in the same way. ULA and Boeing aren’t. And pointing out that ULA and Boeing are very experienced entities while SpaceX has a short record of success, unlike MSFC and to a lesser degree KSC which have a long record of failure would be good too.
“So it wouldn’t be surprising if they aren’t secretly cheering on Mr. Thompson”
I can personally attest to hearing an unnamed high company official of Lockheed Martin speak very condescendingly about SpaceX. Suggesting that any success they’ve had is marginal while Elon Musk uses fast talk and liberal accounting practices to distract from failures and claim false cost savings. The plan to deal with SpaceX was to wait for them to fail but under no circumstances would there be any consideration of changing the extremely wasteful way Lockheed Martin does business. In short, they’re not just cheering Mr. Thompson, they’re praying for SpaceX to fail. BTW, doesn’t LM make THAAD? I’m just saying…
I’d personally change corporate taxation to focus on “How monopolistic are you?”
The trouble is that “how much money did you make?” is less subject to political influence. Microsoft went from a trivial DC presence (“Jack and his Jeep”) to a massive political campaign, and they went from nearly being broken up to having to promise to avoid future bad behavior under threat of wrist slap. Decide for yourself to what extent they were the victims of extortion vs the beneficiaries of bribery, but either way it’s not how we want the system to work.
Any anti-monopoly taxation has to be more automatic than that – a progressive scale based on total revenue, for instance. But the very act of changing the tax system is an enabler for corruption – any change massive enough to counteract barriers to entry for smaller companies is a change which will change present expected value of companies across the board. The negotiations aimed at making such a change “fair” would be a feeding frenzy.
Monopolies are only possible through government interference in the marketplace. Every new regulation is an increase in the barriers to market entry.
Dr. D
Never underestimate the power of sticking your head in the sand, in big organisations. The Dark Side of the Force pales into insignificance…..
An interesting idea I’ve seen for limiting the size and power of monopolies is to make companies, in one respect at least, more like real people.
The idea is simple in concept, but with many ramifications. Simply to make companies mortal. Companies are legal persons to a large degree (there are some exceptions, such as no voting rights) but a company can be immortal. And that means that the size of a company can grow without limit, unlike a family business solely owned by an individual. One reason for this is that a company never has to pay inheritance tax. (Does this type of tax apply in the USA?)
It is also impossible for a company to suffer the penalty that an individual might, if convicted of a sufficiently serious crime. For example I believe that there is such a crime as corporate murder. An individual convicted of murder, in some places, can suffer the death penalty.
So the idea is that after a specified interval (maybe 75 years?) a company be broken up and pay any appropriate death taxes as an individual (or his heirs) would. And a company that commits a crime for which an individual would be executed is broken up and its pieces sold to the highest bidder, forthwith.
Ed – Sorry, but that is just plain nonsense. The idea of a small startup offering significant competition to Intel, for example, is laughable.
One more thing, just for a laugh: Why does the UK only have one Monopolies Commission? 🙂
Ed – Sorry, but that is just plain nonsense. The idea of a small startup offering significant competition to Intel, for example, is laughable.
Only because of intellectual property laws…
Why does the UK only have one Monopolies Commission?
Heh, good one!
Intel’s newest fabs cost several billion dollars each. We may have differing definitions of “small”: it might be theoretically possible for a new startup to compete with Intel if they’re as well-funded and technically proficient as a new-SpaceX, but a mere new-Apple or new-Google would never have a chance.
If anything, IP laws made the idea of chipmaker startups *less* ridiculous; imagine how much faster Transmeta would have folded if Intel and Sony hadn’t had to pay them patent royalties.
Worthless comment moderation policy on the Examiner page, BTW. Calling someone “hysterical” and pleading for balance are allowed, but hyperlinks explaining the “style over substance” and “argument to moderation” logical fallacies apparently are not.
Intel’s newest fabs cost several billion dollars each.
A competitor wouldn’t need their own fabs. As a consequence they wouldn’t be able to compete in the fabrication business, but without IP laws they wouldn’t need to do as much R&D. Could Intel then still charges the same prices for its high end products?
It is interesting to note that ARM is giving Intel a big headache. And they are are 1,700 employee company that don’t own a fab. Instead they license their designs…..
Ed
[[[[Monopolies are only possible through government interference in the marketplace. Every new regulation is an increase in the barriers to market entry.]]]]
Sorry, but you need to read your business history. Standard Oil had no problem being a monopoly in the era before Anti-Trust regulation. And old Mr. Vanderbilt did a good job with his monopolies in the pre-regulation days, not to mention J.J. Astor. Unregulated markets tend towards to the formation of monopolies as large firms use their economic power to take out the small.
However Regulations do increase barriers to entry which is why most large firms tend to support them in private while complaining about them in public. Read the history of the CAB sometime. Or how the electric utilities and AT&T advocated for them in order to have an ‘orderly and efficient” market.
Nor any presidential candidate in the past decade to the present.
in one word: islam. year 550 of the illegal occupation of Constantinople.
Nothing to worry about. Obama said the Muslim Brotherhood is a peaceful and secular organization with no aspirations for the presidency.
Return Byzantium to its AD550 borders!
Boy, that would rock a lot of boats…
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/LocationByzantineEmpire_550.png
This is strange. The comments above belonged to a thread on how Obama doesn’t understand the Middle East. The thread topic changed (and a better link would be directly to the Examiner article at http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/opinion-zone/2011/06/desperation-continues-legacy-space-companies) but the comments remained.
Yeah, I screwed up the URL (I posted at 5:30 this morning before heading to the airport). Hard to fix from my phone, so later. Thanks for the right link.
Congratulations on your rebuttal pieces but does the Forbes audience read them? Somehow we have to limit the damage caused by pieces like this. Would Forbes be up to publishing your rebuttals? If not, why not?
I have several additional points:
1. Is the Lexington Institute, (LI) an “Institute” or a “lobbying house”? Maybe there’s no difference!
2. I think I would have expected a much more frontal attack than this given what ATK got up to when Constellation got the chop.
3. Where, and/or what is the political support for LI and Lockmart?
4. Why is it that Lockmart has no foot in the commercial space world – or are they just working a delaying tactic to slow others while a secret IRAD program matures?
It’s ironic that old space companies would be oh so concerned about relying on only one company for launch services. How many companies provided shuttle launch services?
Remember when liberals kept big business in check- or at least watched intensely? Since Multinational corporations have become bedmates with the progressives in corporatist nirvana, it looks like it’s going to be up to the libertarians to watch both sides of the road for oncoming vested interests.
We could have seen it coming that the big-government left would end up in flagrante delicto with big business.
Contrary to the left’s longtime bashing, corporations are most comfortable with whatever happens to be the status quo at any given time, and will risk all manner of STDs with whoever promises to maintain it for them. If status quo means taxes and regulations are onerous but predictable and waivers can be had for a check with enough zeroes on it, the corpos are more than willing to play along.
…it’s going to be up to the libertarians to watch both sides of the road for oncoming vested interests.
Given the choice between “big business” and “big government” the choice should be “neither”. That is, co-opt the Republicans into doing things that help small businesses while keeping the megacorps in check.
(I don’t see any useful way to pry the Democrats back from their adulation of government – every single solution is “Well, add a layer of oversight!”)
From the “How on earth do you keep the megacorps in check?” perspective: I think the whole area of antitrust needs drastic help. I’d personally change corporate taxation to focus on “How monopolistic are you?” instead of “How much profit did you make?”
If there are twenty competitors in the field, no one should give a damn how much profit you made. But once you get under ten competitors, and certainly when you get under five, we start having issues.
Wow, that was unusually blunt for one of your published pieces, but well-deserved. It might be a good thing to point that not all legacy space companies are misbehaving in the same way. ULA and Boeing aren’t. And pointing out that ULA and Boeing are very experienced entities while SpaceX has a short record of success, unlike MSFC and to a lesser degree KSC which have a long record of failure would be good too.
“So it wouldn’t be surprising if they aren’t secretly cheering on Mr. Thompson”
I can personally attest to hearing an unnamed high company official of Lockheed Martin speak very condescendingly about SpaceX. Suggesting that any success they’ve had is marginal while Elon Musk uses fast talk and liberal accounting practices to distract from failures and claim false cost savings. The plan to deal with SpaceX was to wait for them to fail but under no circumstances would there be any consideration of changing the extremely wasteful way Lockheed Martin does business. In short, they’re not just cheering Mr. Thompson, they’re praying for SpaceX to fail. BTW, doesn’t LM make THAAD? I’m just saying…
The trouble is that “how much money did you make?” is less subject to political influence. Microsoft went from a trivial DC presence (“Jack and his Jeep”) to a massive political campaign, and they went from nearly being broken up to having to promise to avoid future bad behavior under threat of wrist slap. Decide for yourself to what extent they were the victims of extortion vs the beneficiaries of bribery, but either way it’s not how we want the system to work.
Any anti-monopoly taxation has to be more automatic than that – a progressive scale based on total revenue, for instance. But the very act of changing the tax system is an enabler for corruption – any change massive enough to counteract barriers to entry for smaller companies is a change which will change present expected value of companies across the board. The negotiations aimed at making such a change “fair” would be a feeding frenzy.
Monopolies are only possible through government interference in the marketplace. Every new regulation is an increase in the barriers to market entry.
Dr. D
Never underestimate the power of sticking your head in the sand, in big organisations. The Dark Side of the Force pales into insignificance…..
An interesting idea I’ve seen for limiting the size and power of monopolies is to make companies, in one respect at least, more like real people.
The idea is simple in concept, but with many ramifications. Simply to make companies mortal. Companies are legal persons to a large degree (there are some exceptions, such as no voting rights) but a company can be immortal. And that means that the size of a company can grow without limit, unlike a family business solely owned by an individual. One reason for this is that a company never has to pay inheritance tax. (Does this type of tax apply in the USA?)
It is also impossible for a company to suffer the penalty that an individual might, if convicted of a sufficiently serious crime. For example I believe that there is such a crime as corporate murder. An individual convicted of murder, in some places, can suffer the death penalty.
So the idea is that after a specified interval (maybe 75 years?) a company be broken up and pay any appropriate death taxes as an individual (or his heirs) would. And a company that commits a crime for which an individual would be executed is broken up and its pieces sold to the highest bidder, forthwith.
Ed – Sorry, but that is just plain nonsense. The idea of a small startup offering significant competition to Intel, for example, is laughable.
One more thing, just for a laugh: Why does the UK only have one Monopolies Commission? 🙂
Ed – Sorry, but that is just plain nonsense. The idea of a small startup offering significant competition to Intel, for example, is laughable.
Only because of intellectual property laws…
Why does the UK only have one Monopolies Commission?
Heh, good one!
Intel’s newest fabs cost several billion dollars each. We may have differing definitions of “small”: it might be theoretically possible for a new startup to compete with Intel if they’re as well-funded and technically proficient as a new-SpaceX, but a mere new-Apple or new-Google would never have a chance.
If anything, IP laws made the idea of chipmaker startups *less* ridiculous; imagine how much faster Transmeta would have folded if Intel and Sony hadn’t had to pay them patent royalties.
Worthless comment moderation policy on the Examiner page, BTW. Calling someone “hysterical” and pleading for balance are allowed, but hyperlinks explaining the “style over substance” and “argument to moderation” logical fallacies apparently are not.
Intel’s newest fabs cost several billion dollars each.
A competitor wouldn’t need their own fabs. As a consequence they wouldn’t be able to compete in the fabrication business, but without IP laws they wouldn’t need to do as much R&D. Could Intel then still charges the same prices for its high end products?
It is interesting to note that ARM is giving Intel a big headache. And they are are 1,700 employee company that don’t own a fab. Instead they license their designs…..
Ed
[[[[Monopolies are only possible through government interference in the marketplace. Every new regulation is an increase in the barriers to market entry.]]]]
Sorry, but you need to read your business history. Standard Oil had no problem being a monopoly in the era before Anti-Trust regulation. And old Mr. Vanderbilt did a good job with his monopolies in the pre-regulation days, not to mention J.J. Astor. Unregulated markets tend towards to the formation of monopolies as large firms use their economic power to take out the small.
However Regulations do increase barriers to entry which is why most large firms tend to support them in private while complaining about them in public. Read the history of the CAB sometime. Or how the electric utilities and AT&T advocated for them in order to have an ‘orderly and efficient” market.