Category Archives: Private Interests

Can an Innovator Fix Downtown Las Vegas?

Leave a reply
Image representing Tony Hsieh as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas
Timothy Pratt
NYTimes.com

We have a great deal of faith in entrepreneurs here at the Bull Moose. At the same time, we’ve made no secret of our belief that business acumen does not necessarily translate into the skills required to run a government.

That said, Timothy Pratt’s feature in today’s New York Times Magazine about Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh‘s vision to transform downtown Las Vegas through his Downtown Project offers an interesting approach. Will Hsieh’s efforts work? Perhaps: he’s leading with human capital rather than infrastructure, a unique approach that Harvard economist Edward Glaeser suggests is the proper approach.

What seems a little light is the longer-term vision. Hsieh is putting into place something that is likely to work for 5-10 years, but what does it do for the city over the long term? How does Hsieh’s vision turn Las Vegas into something more than a desert railroad junction surrounded by casinos? The grand difference between a transaction-driven businessman and a vison-driven statesman is the distance to the horizon.

Hsieh’s Downtown Project is worth watching, not just to see if his approach bears fruit, but to see if his vision evolves with his success.

Related articles

On the Huawei/ZTE Issue

2 Replies
English: The western front of the United State...

The western front of the United States Capitol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A brief comment on the Huawei issue, if I may, since I published a book about the history of the Chinese telecom industry earlier this year.

A Congressional committee has issued a report stating that allowing Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE to do business in America constitutes a national security risk. Since the specific evidence to support this accusation – given by anonymous tipsters – is veiled under a security classification, neither we nor the companies involved will ever be able to judge for ourselves. Leave that aside for a moment.

After a year of ongoing research, I have found no evidence of government or military control of either Huawei or ZTE. On the contrary, the government has all but ignored Huawei, and Huawei has been forced to rely on global markets rather than government attention for its success. This has made the company not only unbeholden to its government, it has made it the first of China’s truly international companies.

Classifications notwithstanding, the security issue appears to be a canard. The evidence of issues with Chinese-made equipment is apparently unsubstantiated hearsay that the committee has decided to take at face value. It seems that no hard evidence of a single security breach tied to Chinese equipment from either manufacturer even exists. The recommendation by the committee to exclude these companies from any business in the United States is based on the circumstantial existence of “means, motive, and opportunity.” On that basis every gun owner should be convicted of murder, and every parent should be jailed for child abuse.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is an identifiable risk to the US government or American citizens because of Chinese-made telecommunications equipment. Maybe it is even because the U.S. government has asked its own companies to abet its own espionage by the same means. By making the issue about these two companies, Congress is making America even more vulnerable by positing a solution that doesn’t fix the problem. Most other major equipment makers – Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Nokia-Siemens Networks – make their gear in China, too, and do it increasingly under the supervision of Chinese nationals. Wouldn’t this also be a national security risk? Are we not also vulnerable to equipment made in any foreign company? If this is a problem, this is an industry-wide problem, and not one limited to two companies. A solution would need to involve ALL companies.

If Congress really wanted to solve this problem, they would not simply redline these two companies. What they would do is mandate and fund a “distrust but verify” approach to the problem: assume all equipment is faulty or compromised, and test the equipment rigorously for such problems. As an American, I want everything in our networks checked, whether it is made by the French, the Israelis, the Finns, the Germans, OR the Chinese. And, at the same time, I don’t want us to marry ourselves only to US firms for such procurement. That is both foolish and dangerous, as our Department of Defense is discovering.

The two Chinese companies are not without blame – both need to learn that they need to be at least as transparent as an American, French, or German company in the same business, if not more transparent, in order to deprive Congress of the opportunity to deliver such censure. Whatever its intentions, though, the committee in question has wasted taxpayer dollars on what appears to be a politically-motivated witch hunt. The witch has been found, and the country is no safer than it was a week ago.

Plutocrats: Our New Secessionists

1 Reply

“Revolt of the Rich”
Mike Lofgren
The American Conservative
August 27, 2012

A brilliant piece by Lofgren, the kind that underscores how being “pro-business” does not mean being a supporter of the new American Plutocracy. A sample quote:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

The question facing the nation, then, is why have we allowed an elite to build a disproportionate influence on our society, in contravention to everything for which our Constitution stands?

What we need to do now is draw a line from this disturbing, anti-democratic trend to the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United and the wider issue of campaign finance. Because the problem is not patricians-as-candidates: some of our best presidents have been men of independent means. The problem is the influence of money at every level of our political system on both sides of the aisle, and how it gives the extremely wealthy the opportunity to undermine our one-man-one-vote system.

The Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and their ilk will not be amused. Me, I’m delighted to see this in AmCon.

Related articles

The Reconstruction Myth

1 Reply

“Imperial Reconstruction”
Peter Van Buren
The American Conservative
August 16, 2012

Twenty-four year State Department veteran Peter Van Buren issues a damning screed against the neocon conceit that reconstruction is about remaking countries in our own image.

I’m going to pick up Van Buren’s book. The idea that post-war reconstruction should be about remaking countries to look like mini-USAs is not a new one, but it finds its roots in the idealism of the Kennedy administration, and it has become a meme of the Neoconservatives. The approach stands in marked contrast to the way we undertook reconstruction in conquered and/or devastated nations after World War II. Say what you want about MacArthur in Japan and the occupation of West Germany, the polities that emerged in those countries in the 1950s were born of a democratic self-image that we enabled rather than foisted upon them.

We were as horribly prepared, both in terms of worldview, doctrine, and assets, to engage in national reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we were in South Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. Something is broken. Whether it is in the conceit that we can rebuild nations in our image or whether we can rebuild them at all is the question.

I remain a subscriber to Thomas P.M. Barnett‘s approach to multi-agency efforts to improving the lot of failed states, but I think we need to recognize that our failure to un-fail those states needs to be thoroughly examined before we engage in any further missionary activity.

The largest problem, and the one that seems to set our post-WWII efforts apart from our post-1960 efforts, is that we have allowed our ideologies to get in the way. We have made it our goal to export democracy rather than to put into place a government that can start feeding, clothing, housing, and employing its people first.

What is more, we have to get private enterprise off of the battlefield and out of the reconstruction business. I am no fan of big government, but shifting some burdens to private enterprise makes the more costly and less accountable, and that undermines our own democracy, not to mention or well-intentioned efforts on the ground.

Read Van Buren’s article and see what you think.

Related articles

Adelson and Macau

Leave a reply
Sheldon Adelson - Caricature

Sheldon Adelson – Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

“New Questions about Sheldon Adelson’s Casino Operations in Macau”
Matt Isaacs, Lowell Bergman, Stephen Engelberg
FRONTLINE | PBS.

I trust PBS to be fair, balanced, and unbiased in its (often superb) reportage about as much as I trust Fox News to be the same, which is to say I don’t. PBS’s editorial bias is more implicit than explicit, but it is there nonetheless.

That said, they’re onto something here.

What is concerning about Adelson’s behavior is the appearance that he owes greater obedience to a foreign power (China, via its Macau-based officials) than to the United States government. No American citizen or corporation should ever leave that issue in doubt when operating abroad. To do so is to put at risk the very premise that foreign operations of U.S. companies redound to the overall interest of the U.S. and its citizens.

Mr. Adelson may wish to consider that while he considers the value of his U.S. operations. Macau is going great guns, no doubt. But the political and economic risk exposure of those properties is immense. If, ten years from now, Shel is back in Vegas with his tail twixt his legs, will he have burned his bridges?

More important to the rest of us, will he have damaged political support to U.S. companies establishing operations overseas?

Related articles

In the Zone

Leave a reply
Unsightly wires were among the targets of late...

Unsightly wires were among the targets of late 19th century agitation for zoning (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Birth of Zoning Codes, a History – Politics – The Atlantic Cities.

You need not experience too many cities in America to come to the conclusion that the cities of California, while sharing some similarities with their Eastern sisters, are unique on the continent. When I was in my early teens, one of the differences I noted was in the structure of our low-income neighborhoods. Most of Los Angeles‘ workers lived not in tenements but in bungalows, and even our federal housing projects, like Nickerson Gardens, were low-density low-rise.

As Amanda Erickson at The Atlantic Cities hints in her condensed history of zoning linked above, one of the reasons that California cities look different from those of the East is that the west coast metropolises were ahead of the rest of the country in implementing and testing the limits of zoning laws as a means of ensuring quality of life. While in many parts of the state this approach denied us the kinds of homey neighborhoods you find in New York and Boston, it also set the tone for a city more in harmony with its surroundings and denizens than at war with them.

Zoning laws rankle with me, both ideologically and as a property owner. Having spent the past two decades living in a city (Beijing) where zoning laws were largely nonexistent, however, they are an essential part of a liveable city. We can debate about where the line should be drawn, but they need to be there.

California pioneered the practice and continues to do so. The question is whether we the assumptions upon which those laws were built still apply, or will in the future. California now needs to forge a new zoning system appropriate for a world where the automobile plays a declining role in our lives. The challenge will be doing so in a manner that does not disenfranchise property owners in a rush toward an enlightened, utopian future.

via The Birth of Zoning Codes, a History – Politics – The Atlantic Cities.

Related articles

Do Entitlements Kill the American Dream?

Leave a reply
Entitlements

Entitlements (Photo credit: wstera2)

Right Fears Entitlements Are Killing American Dream : NPR.

National Public Radio (NPR) is running a series on the status of the American Dream as we move into the general election. The series is balanced to a great degree, something that I am certain requires some effort on the part of the Morning Edition team.

The program frames the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats as a difference between “opportunity” and “entitlement.” That may be the case, but if it is, it misses the point.

I haven’t taken any polls recently, but anecdote and experience suggest that the only liberals who disagree that the path toward prosperity is paved with opportunity are on the far left of the American political spectrum. In the same way, those who oppose any form of government assistance to Americans in dire straits sit on the furthest right extreme of that same political spectrum. What we need to do is to agree upon principles that will guide government’s approach to both opportunity and entitlements.

Ours are these:

1. Equal opportunity, not corporate welfare. Government should work to ensure equality of opportunity for all, without favor. Government should not be in the business of bestowing opportunity or of denying it, but of ensuring that neither government nor private entities can either bestow or deny it.

2. Entitlements should be a safety net, not a hammock. Government should provide entitlements only to the extent that they are necessary to ensure against the impoverishment or destitution of the citizen. Government should not be in the business of providing a comfortable life to its citizens, and the focus should be on ensuring that citizens are can provide for themselves.

The question, then, is how do we ensure equal opportunity and a social safety net, and stop both parties from spending tax dollars bestowing opportunity on politically connected corporations or politically powerful defenders of entitlements.

Related articles

The Business of America

2 Replies

The business of America is business.

Let me qualify that. The business of America is business, but that truism ends when collusion between commercial interests and legislators creates a plutocracy that undermines democracy.

America is and must ever be a nation of yeomen, not of oligarchs.

To support an ethos that can be exploited to justify oligarchy is to be anti-democratic, and a closet fascist. As conservatives, it is time we recognized the thin line between “pro-business” and “pro-plutocracy,” and how the latter is death to the very values we hold dear.

Rethinking Amtrak

Leave a reply

Review & Outlook: Amtrak’s Banner Year – WSJ.com.

If this editorial was not such a naked appeal on behalf of petroleum-dependent passenger transportation industries, we would have enjoyed it a lot more.

Amtrak P40DC #832 pulling the now-discontinued...

Amtrak P40DC #832 pulling the now-discontinued Desert Wind. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The editors are right: there is something wrong with a passenger rail system that loses a half billion dollars after enjoying a banner year.

Where the editors are wrong is in condemning passenger rail altogether. Buses and airplanes are fine substitutes for passenger rail when Brent crude is selling at $88.34 a barrel. Once that price begins to rise – and it will – rail is going to become an essential mode of travel for a growing number of people.

The way I look at Amtrak – right or wrong – is as the seed corn for a new passenger rail industry that we will need at some point in the foreseeable future. That said, it is time we started digging into how to make Amtrak more efficient – even if it means dropping some money-losing routes.

Related articles

The Market vs. Agenda 21: Who is Right?

1 Reply

 

City planners' vision of Shanghai in 2020 at t...

City planners' vision of Shanghai in 2020 at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why Planners Need to Take Agenda 21 Criticism More Seriously – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities.

One of the indelible lessons learned in my nearly two decades living in China is that deferring to pure market forces and eschewing urban master planning is as much a pathway to unlivable cities as is overplanned municipal development. Surprisingly for a country built around central planning, the concept of “zoning,” much less sustainability, seems alien to Chinese city planners.

(We also joke bitterly about the design of highways here, suggesting that perhaps the roadways were designed by planners who had never actually driven a car. But I digress.)

Resistance to planning per se is thus wrongheaded, but the belief that there is a single set of rules to govern the development of urban and suburban areas seems equally out of touch with reality. It was thus with interest that I read The Atlantic‘s take on Agenda 21.

The failures to understand how planning may better utilize market frameworks in seeking sustainability, or how planning endeavors may be expressed in language appealing to conservatives, represent an egregious error.

Amen.

The takeaway here is simple: we need to find a healthy middle ground between prescriptive planning and market forces. Taking an ideological stance either way is going to lead us to trouble.

The UN’s Agenda 21 bureaucrats and many professors of urban planning will be no happier with this than major developers. Tough. Development that serves the city, the state, and the country comes not out of boardrooms nor bureaucracies, but from a balanced interplay between the two that is ultimately moderated by common sense.

Related articles