Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.
The story Sam Walton tells of how he started Walmart is one of my favorite autobiographies and business books. My old, scribbled paperback is long lost but I can now safely share the book with you digitally through the 3rd-party magic of Scribd:
read it online.
It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!
It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns.
But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, we amazed ourselves. And before too long, we amazed everybody else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore.
...dynamic geography may finally strengthen anarchy’s weakest link. It is difficult to seize hold of water—it tends to fragment into tiny pieces and swirl away. Counterintuitive though it may be, this apparently shifty foundation will provide a stable base for anarchy.
The landlubbers and groundhogs can keep their monopoly-inducing dirt – we’ll take everything else.
I dismissed the idea of seasteading, of colonizing the seas to establish new nations in them. But a quick skim today through the
Seasteading Institute proved a several hours affair, and I’m thoroughly intrigued. As Patri remarks at several places, they turned to the oceans because it was the least claimed space but they found that its intrinsic dynamics were uniquely suited to freedom. When it becomes inherently possible to move not only yourself but all your belongings, your house, your building, or even your neighborhood, a whole new freedom of association can become the effective base of societies.
The sea is bigger than capitalism, communism, or anarchism. It’s a whole new meta-system, with different dynamics that give hope of different results.
Perhaps the Pacific ocean, the world’s biggest expanse, will one day become the new West, the new frontier, will one day hold the most diverse, innovative, prosperous civilization on Earth. History hasn’t stopped, changes of this scale and strangeness will happen.
Free trade is when a trade doesn’t need the consent of anyone but the traders.
A trader is an owner of property to be traded.
The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.
It’s claimed that government is a legitimate party in sex trade
(say, prostitution) because it has to defend public morals, clients and prostitutes, but what is it that gov’t
owns? Clients’ and prostitutes’ bodies and money? Public morals? Gov’t is also claimed a legitimate party to international trade
(say, immigration) in the name of protecting domestic industry, but what is it that gov’t
owns? Domestic industry? Employers’ or employees’ time and money?
For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).
“How many think spreads will widen?” she asked.
The hands of about half the smartest people on Wall Street shot up.
“And how many think they’ll narrow?”
The other half—equally smart—raised their hands.
“Well,” she said. “That’s what makes a market.”
If they didn’t know, nobody could.
Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:
..it is hard to overstate the effect that securitisation has had on financial markets. Until the early 1980s, finance hewed to an “originate and holdâ€? model. Banks generally held loans on their balance sheets to maturity; some debts were sold on loan-by-loan, but this market was small and lumpy. This began to give way to an “originate and distributeâ€? model after America’s government-sponsored mortgage giants issued the first bonds with payments tied to the cash flows from large pools of loans.
Wall Street built on this innovation, and securitisation took off soon after, then paused before exploding in the 1990s.. It was given a lift by America’s savings-and-loan crisis, which encouraged mortgage lenders to jettison their riskier loans, and by new technologies, such as credit-scoring, that facilitated loan-pooling. Around 56% of America’s outstanding residential mortgages were packaged in this way, including more than two-thirds of the subprime loans issued in 2006. Thanks largely to securitisation, global private-debt securities are now far bigger than stockmarkets.
Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.
What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.
Mexico’s 2006 GDP Structure
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as
ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean
”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ?
How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
Hace ya casi un anho de la FIL y yo apenas subo este cuentito que tan simpatico se me hizo. Libertarianismo para ninhos.
«En el pais de la colmena,
el guardia para a la abeja:
“¡Su carné!
¡El permiso de zumbar,
el permiso de volar,
el permiso de libar
y el permiso de melar!
¡Pronto y deprisa!”
Y a Abeja le da la risa:
“¡A ver!
¡Su permiso de silbar!
¡El permiso de multar!
¡El de parar a la gente
y el de ser tan repelente!”
En el pais de Colmena
¿quién se rÃe?
El guardia, la abeja y yo.
Y este cuento se acabo.»
Darabuc, La vieja Iguazú
...Is how Peter DruckerWP drives it home. “It” here was not originally the free market, though what a great defense for it it makes, no? Drucker was illustrating, rather, his brave belief that strong people always have strong weaknesses, that it is foolish to concern oneself with what a man cannot do instead of what he can, that the man who “leaves least to be desired” is invariably the mediocrity, that one builds on strengths, not on weakness. Moreover, that making strength productive and weaknesses irrelevant is “the unique purpose of organization.” A great short book, The Effective ExecutiveAM.
And enjoy it you should. If you’re not a thief or a politician you earned it, which, being clear about it, is just a handy way of saying that you did stuff that Other People voluntarily value enough that Apple is willing to exchange an iPhone for your stuff (confident that it can then exchange it with Other People for what it itself really wants). The iPhone is yours and yours alone to enjoy. You earned it. You owe nothing to anyone—not, particularly, guilt.
What is more, both you and Apple, by freely exchanging only for how much each could get from each other, are subtly but importantly cementing the worldwide enterprise that has made it possible for the output of 4 Hindu villagers to seem tiny by comparison.
