Category Archives: Business

Crowdfunding

Where does it go from here?

Traditional capital flows from nonprofits to investment banking are being disintermediated. People, causes and businesses that need capital have access through the internet, social media and crowdfunding platforms to capital that they simply could not access before. As this trend grows, crowds will demonstrate a different sort of wisdom, sometimes funding causes that foundations wouldn’t or entrepreneurs that VCs wouldn’t.

The JOBS bill was one of the few bi-partisan things that Congress had done recently that will actually help the economy and provide more opportunities for true wealth and job creation.

MSNBC And The Bigotry Of The Left

“They’re totalitarians, not hypocrites.”

[Update a while later]

Matt Welch has more thoughts:

There is nothing tolerant about assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic tribalism. MSNBC, on whose shows I have happily participated, engages daily in the othering business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age.

I think you have to have your sense of irony excised at an early age to be a leftist.

The Death Of The Humanities

Thoughts on the depths to which they’ve plunged, by classics professor Victor Davis Hanson:

…classical liberal education—despite the fashionable critique that it had never been disinterested—for a century was largely apolitical. Odysseus was critiqued as everyman, not an American CEO, a proto-Christian saint, or the caricature of white patriarchal privilege. Instead Homer made students of all races and classes and both genders think twice about the contradictions of the human experience: which is the greatest danger to civilization, the Lala land of the comfortable Lotus Eaters, or the brutal pre-polis savagery of the tribal Cyclopes? Telemachus was incidentally white, rich, and male, but essentially a youthful everyman coming of age, with all the angst and insecurities that will either overwhelm the inexperienced and lead to perpetual adolescence, or must be conquered on the path to adulthood. Odysseus towers among his lesser conniving and squabbling crewmen—but why then does his curiosity and audacity ensure that all his crewmen who hitch their star to the great man end up dead?

In the zero-sum game of the college curricula, what was crowded out over the last half-century was often the very sort of instruction that had once made employers take a risk in hiring a liberal arts major. Humanities students were more likely to craft good prose. They were trained to be inductive rather than deductive in their reasoning, possessed an appreciation of language and art, and knew the referents of the past well enough to put contemporary events into some sort of larger abstract context. In short, they were often considered ideal prospects as future captains of business, law, medicine, or engineering.

Not now. The world beyond the campus has learned that college students know how and why to take a political position but not how to defend it through logic and example. If employers are turned off by a lack of real knowledge, they are even more so when it is accompanied by zealousness. Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal combination.

Ignorance and arrogance is a deadly combo, as demonstrated by the current occupant of the Oval Office.