Never apologise, never change your mind

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Alan Greenspan served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. During his tenure at the Fed, he presided over an orgy of bank takeovers.  There were approximately 14,000 banks in the United States when he started, most of them community banks that served small, local companies.  When he left his job there were 7000 banks left, and the big banks had taken the local savings and gambled them on derivatives and other irresponsible financial techniques.    Greenspan, the chief author of the financial crash, has never adequately apologised for his policies. By now his libertarianism should have been utterly discredited.  Regrettably, people never do learn, nor do the more ideological change their minds.

What has this to do with Epicureanism? Followers of Epicurus make mistakes like everyone else. But they not only try to learn from them and do better next time, but they have the self-confidence and self-knowledge to admit them, hopefully charmingly, and with a smile.

Put accountants where they belong – in a back room!

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A poll earlier this year showed that 32% of those polled believe it’s acceptable to legally avoid paying tax. Most of these are probably accountants.  (YouGov/The Sunday Times)

The UK Treasury and The Inland Revenue have been failing to prevent some of the 398 different tax reliefs being exploited by people making false claims. The cost of relief for entrepreneurs, for instance, rocketed from £500m in 2008-09 to £2.9bn in 2013-14, three times more than forecast. It has been used by well-established private equity companies to reduce tax liability.

Tax is the preoccupation of accountants, who “in cricket terms keep the score but do little or nothing to score the runs”. (forgive me the Anglicism). Tax is a cost of doing business. Without tax, companies would not have available to them the whole of the nation’s infrastructure and institutions, created over many years by individual and corporate taxpayers for the mutual good. Britain is unique in the world for its accountants. America has too many lawyers, Britain too many accountants. In Britain they tend to get to the top and run business and industry, instead of sitting in back rooms, counting. The result has been the huge decline in entrepreneurialism. Accountants are not generally by nature and temperament good at new ideas or being entrepreneurial.

Were Epicurus alive I believe he would urge everyone to pursue new ideas and technologies in the quest for profit and survival. He would think tax avoidance and fiddling with the status quo simply pathetic, and would advocate making accountants the servants of industry, not the masters.

Too many accountants?

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To The Guardian
While working in the consultancy arms of a couple of major accountancy firms, I was continually struck by the fact that one English regional office seemed to have as many accountants as were present in the whole of other European countries with which I had contact. Indeed, Professor Prem Sikka pointed out in 2009 that the UK had as many accountants as the whole of the rest of the EU.

Maybe they are to blame for the tidal waves of performance measures which consume far too much of the energies of organisations, private and public, and for the dominance of short-term thinking over strategic outlook. It is hard to think what they might directly contribute to productivity performance. In an earlier phase of concern about UK industry’s failings, Akio Morita was invited to talk about his company, Sony’s, success. He expressed amazement that so many UK corporations were headed by accountants, whose “central concern is for statistics and figures of past performance” which made it hard for them to “reach out and grab the future”.
If “grabbing the future” rather than delight in “efficiency savings” is the way forward in improving productivity, then that way seems to be blocked by an infestation of accountants.
Trevor Hart, Shipley, West Yorkshire

More on this subject tomorrow.

Mining giveaway

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Some while ago two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, pushed Congress and the president into giving away what could amount to over $130 billion worth of copper under the ground in Tonto National Forest – public land in Arizona. The giveaway was sneaked into the massive Defense Authorization Bill. There are approximately 23.5 million tons of copper sitting under this four square miles of public property in Tonto National Forest.

Rio Tinto Zinc (British) and BHP Billiton (Australian), two of the largest mining companies in the world, (capitalizaton of $200 billion), formed a joint company called Resolution Copper Mining LLC to mine the copper. Instead of a public auction (if you believe at all in getting rid of a hunk of National Park), the land is being handing over to Resolution Copper in return for other, worthless land they own.

The Defense Authorization bill is a “must-pass” bill, like appropriation bills and debt ceiling bills. It has passed Congress, and been signed into law by the president, fifty-three years in a row. 

The good news: The land happens to be an old Native American burial ground!
There are more steps Resolution Copper has to navigate before it gets its bonanza, including an environmental impact study. But the point is: “Why is national parkland being given away and despoiled, and how can congressmen get away with it?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to follow the money that will (?) flow for election expenses to the Republican party from these giant mining companies? Unfortunately, we can’t – all such donations are secret. Epicurus would probably comment that that was why he found politics and politicians distasteful.

Weird logic

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26% of people think that if victims of sexual violence are drunk, they are at least partly responsible for what happens to them. And if the victims have flirted heavily with their attacker before being attacked, that proportion rises to 36%. (Office for National Statistics/Daily Mail).

No, no, no! Nothing justifies sexual violence! It’s true that men are sometimes confused by the signals they are getting from a companion, and can be excused for making a gentle and tentative approach (note my careful euphemism). But “no” is “no”. End of subject. Gentlemen absolutely do not use force on other people. If you are not trying your best to be a gentleman, then you are no Epicurean.