Words by Woods

Seth Godin has an interesting post, which identifies irrational ways in which consumer choices are made based upon a name recognition that does not really relate to the value of the product offer.  He uses college selection examples to concretize his point.

I want to supplement his point by identifying a contrasting situation, which actually works with Godin’s ideas about permission and relationship building.

In prepping myself to go back to school for an MBA, I have been investing time in listening to podcasts offered for free by various schools.  Consuming these speeches, lectures, interviews, and discussion panels have significantly shaped my evaluations of these school based upon my own firsthand experience from concrete aspects of their offers.  Mostly schools have enhanced my esteem for them and differentiated themselves from their competitors (Stanford, Darden, Wharton, and Chicago), while some have damaged their brand in my eyes (Harvard).

These podcasted events previously reached throughout the room in which the event occurred, and essentially constituted the schools talking to themselves.  Now, they reach across the world and into the future by increasing the persistence of that event’s message.  Offering such free samples for tasting, not only enhances the schools efforts to achieve its educational mission in the dissemination of ideas and well-reasoned thinking, but also defines for the listener the school’s substantial offer.

Will I choose to attend one of these programs?  I have given it much more consideration than I had previously.  However, I have also become a champion and advocate for these schools.  Valuable tidbits from these offers with the name of the school lace my business and personal conversations.  I refer others to their products, targeted to that person’s specific interests.  As my industry has been education finance, I have even considered differentiated products that would specifically target that niche as education capital dries up.

I have noted that many schools have ventured into iTunesU to offer substantial educational products.  These enable the best students an opportunity to know a potential school as more than a name or a reputation.  However, I am uncertain of how effective schools have been in publishing the availability of these offers.

After the second crest of the Echo Boom generation passes into college age, competition for students will become a significant challenge for schools that will require fresh thinking on recruitment: What relationship does the school have with potential students?  How can the school establish or enrich that relationship based upon real and concrete values?  As educational institutions, what offers can they make besides a well known sports team?

In the ‘60s, public urban renewal programs were proclaimed as replacing blight with viable redevelopment; but now, as the New York Times reports, in Flint, there is a public proposal to replace neighborhoods with non-development.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

Such retrenchment is shocking, especially in the context of the cresting Echo Boom generation who will soon create increased demand for inexpensive housing. Further, the parallel to the collectivist looting of the 20^th Century Motor Company and the decline of Starnesville in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is chilling.

Michigan, formerly a center of industry, is regressing toward the primeval as a consequence of collectivism.

According to the news reports, we are all Keynesian now as we follow the lead not only of President Obama, but President Nixon before him.

However, Wikirank says NOT.   Over the past 90 days, interest in Ayn Rand has been more than 100 times higher on Wikipedia than in the Obama-Nixon guru, John Maynard Keynes.

Further, while interest in Keynes is stagnant like his ideas, popular interest on Wikipedia for Ayn Rand has been expanding like the potential of Reason to enrich our lives.

Check out the link for a pretty picture:

Update 3/27/2009:  Interesting, on Wikipedia views Ayn Rand is about 4% off of Rush Limbaugh, during the same period; this during a period of  White House, Democratic, and media attacks on Limbaugh for being the head of the Republican party.

Selfishly contemplating issues related to raising investment capital for a potential venture, I considered some of the obstacles and sent the following to my Senators:

Dear Senator,

I ask that you and your fellow Virginian in the Senate reach out to form a bipartisan group to publicly guarantee that the President’s campaign promise to raise the capital gains tax will not be voted upon in the Senate and will be filibustered if necessary.

This is an important signal that you can send to the market that America is a safe place to invest, because the Congress will not undermine investors’ long term planning by arbitrarily creating draconian rules and changing the economics of private business decisions.

While your past votes for excessive spending, which will indenture our children and grandchildren, have been ineffective, with this at no cost to taxpayers, you could begin the process of freeing businessmen from the specter of arbitrary legislative interference.

Anticipating the negative impact of the candidate Obama’s positions, I cashed out before the crash.  I have heard others with larger stakes publicly state that they did the same thing.

Given the large equity stakes that the federal government has taken in private business, taxpayers depend upon rising valuation to recoup public funds inadvisably spent.  Outstanding presidential threats to confiscate capital gains prevent recovery with anticipation of punitive taxation on investment.

While there are numerous legislative mistakes that need to be undone (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) to return our economy to growth, responsible Senators need to stand up and publicly guarantee that the legislature will not impose new stupidities upon our citizens.

You may have noticed that Words by Woods is undergoing a spring sprucing.

Taking advantage of new themes created by PRODOS, we are now brought to you in the very sharp looking “Gather Your Thoughts 05” and feature 10 widgets along the right of the page.

Further, I have activated some plug-ins to:

• enrich your commenting experience with better editing options,
• add the capacity for you to respond to other commentators within the comments, and
• enable you to subscribe to track comments on a particular post.

On the side bar, I have added:

• a text box for quotes that I fancy at that time,
• a search box to content on the blog,
• a feed of recent comments made by you all,
• a feed of Top Stories that I flagged from my Google Reader subscriptions (see #2 below),
• a feed of recent posts from the Objectivist Blogger group (see #2 below), and
• lots of new links that I track through my Google Reader subscriptions.

As the spruce continues there are a couple of issues that I am aware of, which will be fixed as soon as possible:

1. I have not yet moved six links in the general Links group to either the Activism or Objectivist Bloggers group as appropriate, and
2. The RSS widget is not correctly parsing the link location for the “Top Stories” and “Obloggers” feeds, as a temp work around removing the trailing URL for the website that was appended to the item location.

For example, instead of:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22869http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?lcmd=pub.date.desc&cmd=search

edit the URL to become

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22869

After reading the confession of a Fatah leader that the Palestinian Authorities recognition of Israel is a non-binding fraud to get international aid, I sent the following to my congressman (HT:  Jihad Watch):

Congressman Wolf,

Thank you for your recent efforts related to CAIR and the FBI, the textbooks of the local Saudi school which graduated an aspiring presidential assassin, and the nomination of Charles Freeman.

Continuing in this vein, I would like to draw your attention to an interview in which Muhammad Dahlan (a senior Fatah leader) stated that Fatah does not recognize Israel and that the official position of the Palestinian Authority is a non-binding charade to get international aid.

It is time to end this fraud and end American assistance to the Palestinian Authority.  The Oslo Accords are a failed experiment that should no longer waste American taxpayer money.

If you judge that it is in American interests to continue aid to the residents under the Palestinian Authority, I think that we could agree that such funds should only be disbursed to NGOs not integrated with terrorist organizations, which would exclude funding to Hamas, Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority.

X71 on YouTube has a humorous series of videos teaching the ‘art’ of subscriber whoring to the masses.  The most recent promo vid is below.

Consistent with the spirit of X71’s vid, I invite you to comment, subscribe to my RSS feed, and link to my posts.  Further, I am challenging myself to see how many of today’s published Hot AOL Searches terms I can incorporate into my posts in an interesting way before the end of the month; I excluded the vacation terms from the list.

Below are the terms, where quoted terms refer to movies or TV shows:

‘24′, AIG, Al Jazeera, Alice Waters, ‘American Idol’, ‘Australia’, Beyonce, Blackberry Storm, ‘Biggest Loser’ , Britney Spears, Charlize Theron, Chevrolet, Chris Brown, ‘Coraline’, Credit Cards, ‘Dancing With the Stars’, Dodge, Elton John, Ford, Free Credit Report, ‘Friday the 13th’, Garmin Nuvi , ‘Hannah Montana’, ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ , Honda, Hyundai, iPhone, iPod Touch, Jeep, Jessica Simpson, Joel Osteen, Jonas Brothers, Kate Moss, Kindle, Lance Armstrong, Lindsay Lohan, Lexus, ‘Lost’, Kim Kardashian, MapQuest, Mandy Moore, Martha Stewart, ‘Madea Goes to Jail’, Miley Cyrus, Mortgage Calculator, NASA, NCAA brackets, Nissan, NIT, Oprah, Paula Abdul, Personal Loans, PSP, Rahm Emanuel, Rihanna, Ron Silver, Roth IRA, Samsung Instinct, Saturn, Shah Rukh Khan, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, Stock Market, Stock Quotes, Stocks, Student Loans, ‘Survivor’, ‘Taken’, Taylor Swift, ‘The Bachelor’, ‘The Reader’, ‘The View’, ‘The Wrestler’, ‘Top Chef’, Toyota, Turbo Tax, ‘Watchmen’, Wii, Xbox 360, Zune

I will give myself credit for AIG as I used it earlier today, but not for student loans because my recent related post dropped the last s.  To track, I’ll probably update this post to color the terms used.

Ready, set, go!

Sen. Chuck Grassley said he would feel better if business executives killed themselves (via AP):

I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed. But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.

And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.

He made these comments during a radio interview in the context the AIG bailout and their executives receiving bonuses.  He has made similar remarks in the past about desiring executives of failed companies to follow Japanese norms.

Unlike the Senator, I do not think that AIG execs should kill themselves.  Further, if the executives received bonus compensation based upon the performance of vibrant divisions of the company, federal officials attacking such compensation is akin to killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

To put the Senator’s statements in context, he is the ranking member on the Senate Finance committee with jurisdiction over insolvent programs such as Social Security and Medicare, plus irresponsibility for our bizarre federal tax code.

Perhaps the U.S. Chamber of Commerce should hold public hearings (a.k.a. show trials) investigating the failure of our legislators to reform tax policy and entitlement costs.  After all, it is the taxpayers, especially the most productive, that provide the money for the federal programs mismanaged by our legislators.

Would Senator Grassley like to personally follow the Japanese norm based upon his legislative failures, which have cost Americans more than AIG ever could?  Probably not, given that he responded to questions about his comments by hiding behind a spokesperson to clarify his statement about executive suicides instead of apologizing.

Update 3/17/2009:  “A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.”  - Francisco D’Anconia in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged [HT: nine9s]

In Grassley’s call for others to commit self-immolation so that the Senator can feel a little better, he is fully consistent with the crux of Senator McCain’s campaign that individuals should sacrifice themselves to the collective by their own choice, before government attempts to force them to do so.

On The Hill’s blog, Rep. John Campbell discusses the newly popular term “going Galt.”  I responded in comments:

“Let’s hope I am wrong, and let’s hope President Obama has a change of heart.”

This vain hope reminds me of the begging that had been done to George III to defend Americans from Parliament’s intolerable acts.  Eventually, the colonial American legislators recognized the futility of appealing to paternalism and commenced to legislate in defense of individual rights.  How the quality of our legislators has degenerated!

Regarding the references to Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s strike was not political but moral.  Consider his oath, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”  The productive joined Galt’s strike after they understood and rejected the morality of altruism; in striking, the producer denied that other men held a claim upon their life based upon the needs of others.

Our past election continued the rhetorical Orgy of Sacrifice, which characterized the Bush Administration.  Fundamentally, that election was a choice between a candidate that said that individuals should be immediately forced to sacrifice to others (Obama), and another that said that such force should only be used after individuals failed to volunteer themselves for sacrifice (McCain).  As elections have consequences, it should be no surprise that our new President and Congress have accelerated the rate of compelled sacrifice as chosen by the electorate.

During the election, then-Senator Obama made the moral choice clear when he ridiculed the virtue of selfishness, the title of Ayn Rand’s text on ethics.  Now, individuals are choosing to act morally, to act in their own rational self-interest, and rejecting the moral code that claims that they should be sacrificed to the needs of others.

What is a modern legislator to do, when individual citizens refuse to be sacrificed to their fellows as mandated by law?  To paraphrase Ellis Wyatt, another character from Atlas Shrugged, get the hell out of our way!  To put it less colorfully, in order to save our lives and our republic, the Congress must begin by undoing what it has previously done in violation of our individual rights.

Given so many past legislative sins, where to begin?  Instead of focusing on targeted tax cuts to empower governmental manipulation of individual’s choices, Congress should systematically repeal previous regulations, such as the dangerously ineffective Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Community Reinvestment Act.  Further, Congress should extend legal protections against executive power overreach by replacing the overly deferential Chevon standard (arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to statute) with a statutory right to substantive due process in the judicial review of agency actions.

Hat Tip to The Little Things