The ultimate answer to libertarians who think the invisible hand of the market will magically yield stellar results http://t.co/xALg2u80oY
— Salon.com (@Salon) December 12, 2013
The stock of Sears Holdings is far off its highs. Salon is blaming this on the management style of its CEO, Eddie Lampert, and this may be true. However, Salon is also attempting to link the drop in the stock price to Lampert's infatuation with the philosophy of Ayn Rand. TAn article, written by Lynn Parramore, begins :Once upon a time, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert was living a Wall Street fairy tale. His fairy godmother was Ayn Rand, the dashing diva of free-market ideology whose quirky economic notions would transform him into a glamorous business hero.The article then attempts to link the Lampert management style to Rand:
Lampert is now known as one of the worst CEOs in America — the man who flushed Sears down the toilet with his demented management style and harebrained approach to retail. Sears stock is tanking. His hedge fun is down 40 percent, and the business press has turned from praising Lampert’s genius towatching gleefully as his ship sinks. Investors are running from “Crazy Eddie” like the plague.
That’s what happens when Ayn Rand is the basis for your business plan.But last I looked, Rand never discussed management style, especially any of the techniques implemented by Lampert. She was an advocate of free markets and believer that markets should determine winners and losers. She would have seen the failure of Lampert's style as the market signalling that Lampert's management style was ineffective and that Lampert's investors got the losses they deserved. The market was, and is, treating Lampert very harshly for his poor management philosophy. It is signalling to investors: Stay away from Eddie Lampert. Rand would have agreed.
The Left is totally lacking in its understanding of Rand, but obviously she still bothers them, as they try to link her together with something she never advocated.
Lambert's style is to issue debt to buy back stock and suck assets dry....so what do you expect?
ReplyDeleteGreat thing about the "free" market is that the last I checked, I don't have to go into Sears, nor do I have to own Sears stock. Also, when Sears goes out of business, I can get some pretty good tools at a great price. It's a feature, not a bug.
ReplyDeleteIf the government owned Sears, they'd probably come up with an individual mandate requiring me to frequent the store.
They would also penalize you for not shopping at Sears. Bail them out if they lost money. Put in regulations to put competitors out of business.
Deleteand fine you for not shopping at Sears and put onerous regulations of competitors.
DeleteThe funny thing is, if salon hates and disagrees with Rand so much, then they should be saying; "I guess the 'invisible hand' of the market works sometimes." Isn't this the outcome they would want for someone "infatuated" with Rand?
ReplyDeleteThe left will never confront the actual arguments Mises or Rothbard (or Rand, for that matter), because its straw man make easier targets, and the moronic readership of a publication like Salon won't know the difference, nor does it want to know.
ReplyDelete"The left will never confront the actual arguments Mises or Rothbard (or Rand, for that matter)...."
DeleteThat's because these little cowards can't.
1. If Sears has a product I want, I can usually get in and out quickly because it has no customers. They usually have good supplies at good prices of auto/boat batteries, blue jeans and Dockers khakis, for example.
ReplyDelete2. No "progressive" or non-Austrian or non-libertarian seems to understand (or wants to understand) basic Austrian concepts or the NAP. Strange but true. Very strange but very true. I constantly repeat it because I'm constantly astounded by it.
They also can never (or just will not) understand the difference between laissez faire and crony capitalism.
Finally, they do not (or will not) understand that Rothbardian libertarianism is nothing more than the NAP and the prohibition on fraud and does not concern the subject of how people ought to behave otherwise. On the other hand, Rand had the additional component of instructing you how to behave beyond observing the NAP.
These concepts are simply not that complicated to understand (whether you agree with them or not) so the widespread ignorance regarding them appears to be purposeful.
Of course it's purposeful. Like any simpleton socialist (or do I repeat myself?) all that matters is feeeeeeelings. They think like a woman during a a bad PMS trip. Facts, logic, and reason are impenetrable to these people.
DeleteRemember, these pathetic cowards are motivated by ENVY. They think that because they're not as wealthy as Bill Gates that he shouldn't be either. They're like children who scream, "It's not fair!!" I guess their parents never told them that life isn't fair. If they want to make millions or billions then they can take the chances wealthy entrepreneurs take and work their asses off in order to get it.
So, if Lampert read, or visited Salon, they are responsible for Sears' downfall. Lampert just needs to go public with that knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThe only "stLynn Parramore
ReplyDeleteThe only "stellar" result that a Salon economist would recognize involves stolen tax-payer wealth and the state.
At least Libertarians expect results AND acknowledge them, be they good or bad.
Salon/Prog-Tard/keynesian economic policies ignore them.
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See FED.
Sears is being transformed from a struggling retailer to a reinsurance business- similar to what Warren Buffet did with Berkshire Hathaway. All the valuable real estate, trademarks (DIehard, Crastman, Kenmore) and IP rights are being shifted to a SPE that is protected in a bankruptcy from other creditors. This is why Eddie Lambert has been aggressively buying back shares. You can read more here: http://www.searsholdings.com/invest/docs/Sears_Re_February_2012.pdf
ReplyDeleteThe media is linking it to Ayn Rand because Lampert specifically said his management style was influenced by Ayn Rand. Lampert made the divisions compete with each other rather than cooperate with each other. In other words, he told them to put their self-interest above shareholder's interest. He believed competing self-interests would achieve a better result than collectivism and cooperation. He was wrong.
ReplyDeleteNice try, Jerry. Ayn Rand argued for making justice a priority. In the context of Sears, this implies honoring the fiduciary duty to shareholders (i.e. owners) in a firm, which in any case is not an example of "collectivism", as your straw man attack would have us believe. So, if your shady analysis illuminates any part of the truth, it shows that Lampert abandoned the principle of justice advocated by Rand, assuming (1) that he understood her in the first place, which is by no means certain and that (2) he assented not only with the head but the heart, which, again, is not certain.
DeleteNow let's assess another aspect of your selective thinking, and that of the media. Did any of you notice Lampert's sympathy for a backwards and primitive superstition? If yes, then how did you conclude that it was merely a secondary or trivial influence on his thinking? Well, of course, this aspect of Lampert's personality fails to corroborate a narrative used to demonize a perennial hobgoblin of the American left, much of which imagines itself to be the only model for an atheistic future with the people as a god. Your own expertise in statistics, however, would have deterred a reasonable person from drawing sweeping generalizations from a tiny sample size.
Good grief, you are naive, too. Never seems to have dawned upon you that he's merely using Rand as a smoke screen.
Jerry, you are proof of why America is doomed to fail. Like its politicians, you take a simpleton's A or B view of the world, as if those are the only choices the world offers. Even children understand that cooperation is a great way to further your self-interests. I will give you that it's clear Lambert didn't have a full grasp of Ayn Rand either.
DeleteYou prove your ignorance of being able to distinguish between macro and micro economic issues on this post. Cooperation is necessary for most business to provide a product in a world such as ours (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour). Several of the posts above do a good job of pointing out the downfalls of having collectivism be the goal, at the macro level. Thankfully we haven't heard Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi calling for a Sears bailout (yet).
So what is the right level of self-interest vs collectivsm? Who knows exactly, but the fiscal situations of California, Illinois and especially the US Federal Government should say we are too far on the collectivist side of things at this point in time.
Would you please just stick to cheer leading on sites like Foxnews.com and MSNBC.com? If you continue to read all the posts here at EPJ your brain might actually make some connections and you will realize how misinformed you are. If you keep your head out of the sand much longer, it just might explode.
-Gitz
1) Parramore claims in her article that free-market economics has been "discredited". Absolutely no support for the claim. She just puts it out there and apparently hopes readers will take it at face value. This sort of Progressive disinformation tactic should be challenged and called out into the open whenever its encountered if libertarians are ever going to hope to undo generations of educational malpractice foisted on the public by government schools.
ReplyDelete2) At Jerry W: It's a little early to say that Lampert was "wrong", without actually knowing what his objectives are. There is no reason to assume his sole purpose is to run a successful retail operation. There is also no reason to assume Lampert is losing money just because the company is.
If we grant this one possible example, can we counter with the countless examples of failures of statist policies? Oops, I forgot - those failures are just examples of not enough time and/or (other people's) money.
ReplyDelete