Saturday, December 23, 2023

Centralized Repurposing


It was [in the late 1930s] a little-known oddity of American life that the United States, unlike other nations, actually had no “national” holidays established by law. Under the federal system the legalizing of holidays had been left to the states.

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In fact, however, a reasonable consensus of experts on NPOs [non-profit organizations] agrees that their governance is generally abysmal, worse than that of for-profit corporations. NPO directors are mostly ill-informed, quarrelsome, clueless about their proper role, and dominated by the CEO — as proponents of shareholder primacy would predict.--a paper

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Inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women. This paper implies the rise of women's influence has paralleled anti-collectivism, which they champion.

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Centralized Repurposing

The Biden administration last month began laying the groundwork for a misguided plan that threatens to misallocate vast amounts of capital, encumber natural resources, and destroy rural economies by removing land from productive use in the name of solving climate change.

On Sept. 27, the New York Stock Exchange quietly submitted a substantial and financially material proposed change to its rules. The proposal would allow the formation of a new type of company. Natural Asset Companies, or NACs, would purchase the rights to control public and private lands, such as parks, forests and farms. But a NAC wouldn’t be able to put the land to economic use. Instead, it would preserve its acquisitions to maximize the value of the land’s “ecological services.”

NACs would register to go public on the NYSE. The money raised would purchase land and effectively lock it away from human impact. Grazing, energy extraction and other economically critical activities would disappear on NAC-protected land. Farmland used to feed the nation and world would go back to natural landscape, erasing human activity. The resulting conversion of investor money into unusable wildlands has the potential to be one of the most significant misallocations of capital in history.

Normally, corporations are formed for investors to make money. But since NACs are clearly noneconomic, a rule is required to allow their formation. The land placed in a NAC, a private entity, must support only “replenishable” activities. Since no economic activity can occur, the property is assigned an arbitrary value and traded on that basis. In any other situation, this proposal would be identified as sanctioning fraud.--oaks

And so the unelected Left's war against productivity inches along in always innovative ways toward its grim, hungry, and cold utopia.

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