Thursday, August 11, 2011

Mark Cuban Decides to Run Against Matt Damon for the Position of Central Planner of the United States

It isn't bad enough that Matt Damon wants to set wages for the entire country, Mark Cuban wants to give taxpayer money to corporations to create jobs using the nuttiest plan since the United States invaded Vietnam.

Cuban writes:
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield. In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can....The problem for the Democrats is that the government hasn’t shown that they can earn a positive or even a break even return on their spending.
Earth to Mark. Does Cuban expect returns on money spent on drones, food stamps, medicare? Does Cuban expect to cut these programs and replace them with his crazed scheme? I think he does. Here's his plan:

So IMHO, creating  jobs isn’t about the government spending money on jobs /projects, nor is it about cutting taxes. It’s about taking a page from the technology and common sense world.
How is this for a revolutionary thought: Companies that would create jobs if they had more cash know who they are. Right ? If you own a company and are thinking to yourself “Self, if I could borrow or get an investment into my company I could hire X more people to grow the company/meet demand/release a new product/whatever”  So rather than guessing and hoping what might happen, why don’t we let companies self identify themselves ?
Uh, Mark, companies self identifying themselves is the free market.

Oh I see, it's self identifying but only from the pool of businesses designated by Cuban and decided on by committees designed by Cuban:

Seriously. Call me crazy (and Im sure many of you will), but there is no reason why we can’t quickly create a federal website that allows existing companies to say to the Federal Government how much money they need and how many jobs they can create for that money and for what duration are they committing to maintain those jobs for the money.

Of course you will have to set some minimum parameters in order to prevent the dreamers, crazies and who knows whats from clogging up the system. I would set those minimums including: The company must be in business for at least 10 years. They must be have at least 100 full time employees. They must do 100mm in revenues. And of course they must be up to date on their taxes and Im sure there are other things to think of as well...

I would set up multiple 5 person regional committees across the country. I’m not quite sure who would pick the members, or what their exact qualifications should be, but I can tell you what I would set as a requirement. People would only be eligible to be on the committee if they had not made a political contribution of any kind directly to a politician or to a PAC of any sort in the last 5 years. This can not be a politically dominated decision process.

The committees would then look at the submissions, starting with the ones that promised the most jobs at the least cost. Then they would do their due diligence about the company and request and make a decision...
What Cuban fails to realize is that when you set up a power center, and this would be super power center, people will try and find out how to get to those controlling  the power centers. Second, if there is one thing that we should all understand from the teachings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises is that the world is complex and no single person, or regional committees of five, will have the all the information  to plan across the economy. Decisions must be made at a much less decentralized level.

How's this for a plan, Mark?

Cut the government spending and cut a comparable amount in government borrowing so that the money finds its way into the private sector so that individual bankers and investors make decisions as to where they want to invest. That's America and free markets, not some 5 member committees designed by Mark Cuban.

8 comments:

  1. I didn't think this guy was that stupid.

    I will create 1 billion jobs if the taxpayers give me 10 billion dollars...I promise! Get those guns out, government! Steal me some start-up capital!

    Statist are so infantile, it is embarrassing.

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  2. Cuban wants to pick winners and losers. Sounds like Obama 2.0. Really Cuban just wants to be the dictator Obama sees in the mirror every morning. He thinks that because he would do the same exact thing we're doing now but with different intentions, the outcome would be different. He's just as much of a moron as Obama and his sycophants.

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  3. I don't think Cuban reads Hayek or Mises, not even on the beach...Sports Illustrated maybe but they don't focus on economics as much as asset bubbles.

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  4. Let me offer my perspective having been an insider twice in my life. The first time I sold my company and was given over a million shares in the parent company's stock. The company that bought my company had also bought 8 other companies at the time, so there were others in similar situation as me. I was made an exec and given a seat on the board. When the stock shot up through the roof in 1999, every insider except the CFO, CEO and outside board members wanted to sell as much as they could to diversify if nothing else.

    When the stock crashed in 2000, we were requested to stop selling and buy some shares to show confidence in the stock. I can tell you that when you hold so much of your wealth in your company's stock and the price is going down, you do not want to buy more. IMO, insider buying in a down market means that management is scared of further price declines. When insiders are buying in an up market, that's a positive sign.

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  5. So isn't this what a board or directors, a bank, or investors do. Review a plan, decide yea nor nay and invest or loan or approve?

    What I am missing and what is Mark missing?

    Shouldn't his point really be why do we need taxes going to these function.

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  6. Wow, I guess this proves that you don't have to know anything about economics to become a billionaire! I've been wasting my time studying Austrian Economics! Instead of wasting my time reading Mises (in my room, not at the beach), Hayek, and Rothbard, I will immediately draft a letter to one of these "regional committees" and inform them I can create four jobs (for me, my wife, and two children) and I will only need $5 million, no better make that $6 million ...um, in gold ...yeah, in gold, because...I want to prove Robert Murphy's definition of savings in his classic debate with Robert Wenzel! What committee would turn that down?

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  7. Cuban is just a bubble billionaire and not a true value producer so he really doesn't understand. He is just a mental child with a trust fund type.

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  8. This guy is almost Matt Damon stupid...Maybe Marc Andreessen stupid.

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