Otellini, INTEL's CEO, said: "I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States". Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose. (Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but antibusiness laws: "The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn't want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.").
It's like Israel. No, we are like the USA.
12 comments:
That's too bad. It seems like this is way more of a threat in Israel since Israel is, let's say, existentially troubled.
The obvious lesson is that we need world government so the dirty capitalists can't escape to a place where they can evade proper taxation and regulation.
K
So then perhaps Israel's socialist origins make it vulnerable to this kind of thing.
How to explain the US propensity for the same thing, despite the lack of (elected) socialist history? Of course we have plenty of unelected socialists (even though they don't call themselves that - in America all but the most dyed in the wool reds call themselves "progressives" thought they never say what they are progressing toward) in the intelligentsia.
K
Apparently "progressive" used to mean government investment in infrastructure and support of businesses. Then the environmentalists and the unions got control, of California atleast. Here's a well-written article: http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_california-economy.html
As raskov's link shows it is not government per se that is to blame for industrial decline, but its capture by the leftists and their hanger-ons. The Americans are doubly disadvantaged because the mid-level bureaucracy is staffed largely by box-tickers lacking common sense. There are of course excellent public services run by the FCC, FDA and the FAA, but by and large I get the impression that significant parts of the US government is run by incompetents. The French have an even more intrusive bureaucracy but they are knowledgeable, and know how to tailor policies to prevent flagship operations like Cypress from leaving their shores.
Yes, if you're not a Yank, you probably don't know of the Progressive Movement, a specific movement around 1900 which is hard to call strongly left or strongly right. Even here it is not something most educated people recall anything about from their schooling, though it is not obscure.
Maybe the French know that enemies can come in your yard and rock you hard. My countrymen have less of a hard-core collective concept of the fallibility of man or of life and hope. Thus, they can't get much animus up against Man or his retard ideas about how firms or peoples should (be made to) behave ideally in Utopia. Peoples such as 1.Iraqis, 2.ourselves.
If Israel is equally bad as America, re anti-Zionism, immigration, regulation, than this invalidates my theory. But I don't think it is equally bad quantitatively.
Intel once built a factory near where I lived. They got massive tax breaks and then staffed the facility mostly with Mexicans.
The losses imposed by regulation and inefficient tax systems are quite serious though. I recall Dr. Milton Friedman once claimed that if there were no taxes, income per person would grow at five percent per year. We have taken a lot of potential wealth from future generations to get the government services we enjoy.
And I heard Dr Friedman claim that if the progress in the automobile industry had matched that of the semiconductor industry, we'll all be driving cars costing a few dollars and averaging a million miles a gallon.
If there were no taxes, Dr Friedman would have no income.
Dr. Friedman was the asshole who came up the the idea of Withholding Tax. Government gets first crack at your labor. You are just property of the State.
May he rot in hell!
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