Andy Kessler

WSJ: A Biden Economy Means ‘Litter Jobs’

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-biden-economy-means-litter-jobs-11603658932

I hate admitting youthful indiscretions. Way too long ago, I was with friends in a desolate Colorado parking lot drinking rare-outside-the-state Coors beers. One guy would occasionally open his window and toss empty cans out. I shyly mentioned that he probably shouldn’t litter. After all, I grew up watching “The Three Stooges” on channel 11 WPIX with constant public service announcements featuring an American Indian standing next to a highway crying as litter is thrown at his feet.

The can-tosser launched into a long diatribe ending with, “Listen, someone will have to be paid to clean up all these beer cans. Who am I to deny someone a well-paying job to feed his family and pay rent?” I stupidly laughed. I think that guy is now a politician, but obviously dead wrong.

During the first debate, I had a Coors flashback when moderator Chris Wallace asked Joe Biden about his $2 trillion climate change spend-fest: “I actually have studied your plan, and it includes upgrading four million buildings, weatherizing two million homes over four years.”

Mr. Biden responded: “The fact is, it’s going to create millions of good-paying jobs, and these tax incentives for people to weatherize” are “going to make the economy much safer.” Maybe he cribbed this from Al Gore in Wired magazine last year. “Now, think about the Green New Deal,” Mr. Gore wrote. “What it encompasses are two things we have to solve: the climate crisis and the opportunity to create tens of millions of new jobs.” That includes “retrofitting residential, commercial, and industrial buildings.”

This is what passes for progressive policy these days? It sounds impressive but it’s dead wrong. These are litter jobs—unproductive work that subtracts from societal wealth rather than adding to it. A waste of resources.

We saw similar thinking this summer.

WSJ: No Quick Fix for Social Media Bias

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-quick-fix-for-social-media-bias-11603048637

After Twitter’s ban of the New York Post’s scoop on Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian payoffs last Wednesday, CEO Jack Dorsey called his staff’s actions “unacceptable.” Ya think? The timing was especially dumb, as he’s set to appear next week, along with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, before the Senate Commerce Committee. The topic is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social-media platforms from liability as publishers. Mr. Dorsey just gave his adversaries the fuel to burn his tweet house down.

Except Twitter didn’t do anything illegal. Section 230 protects online forums against being sued for user-posted content on their platforms. But these platforms can also apply “community standards” to remove anything they deem objectionable. You and I have First Amendment rights to say whatever we please (without inciting violence), but these platforms are private companies. They can remove or allow what they want.

That doesn’t mean they should. All rise: The court of public opinion is in session. Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out the hypocrisy of banning the Biden revelations—however questionable or ill-gotten they may be—but allowing the New York Times’s story on Donald Trump’s leaked tax returns or Buzzfeed’s Steele dossier.

So now Twitter—along with Facebook, which didn’t ban the Biden story but said it was “reducing its distribution”—have drawn a murder hornet’s nest of rebuke, mostly calls for rewriting or repealing Section 230. In a dogpile sandwich, it now seems everybody hates the statute that built the latest version of the internet.

Republicans, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, rightly worry about bias against conservative posts. Mr. Hawley has introduced several bills to rewrite Section 230, and he’s probably not done. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested in April that Section 230’s privileges “could be removed.” And forget Chuck Schumer—even comedian Amy Schumer wants to “Amend CDA 230.”

President Trump tweeted “REPEAL SECTION 230.” This may have been a trick to get Kamala Harris, who said of a vaccine, “if Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it,” to be for Section 230.

WSJ: To Serve the Public, Seek Profits

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-serve-the-public-seek-profits-11602435735

“It’s way past time we put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,” Joe Biden declared in Dunmore, Pa., in July. Companies “have responsibility to their workers, their community, to their country.” This echoes last year’s virtue semaphoring by 181 CEOs, when the Business Roundtable redefined corporate purpose away from shareholders and toward “stakeholder capitalism”: a collectivist creed of workers, customers, communities, climate and country. Why does it feel like we’re about to get our pockets picked? The message is clear: Profits are greedy, so spread the wealth around.

It’s been 50 years since the New York Times published Milton Friedman’s article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Most people only read the title, so they miss Friedman’s statement that businesses are obliged to avoid deception and fraud. A company must “engage in activities designed to increase its profits,” he writes, “so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Almost as penance for publishing the original, the Times recently printed an eight-page supplement nitpicking Friedman’s article. It’s as if in 1826 the Times of London had ripped to shreds Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and said, “No one has actually seen the invisible hand. Hidden incentives? Balderdash! Let’s go back to stakeholder mercantilism.” The sun would have set on the Industrial Revolution.

Capitalism and competition create wealth; other systems slop existing wealth around. Stakeholder capitalism is a passing fad with a blatantly obvious end result. Ding ding!—there were four redundant phrases in that sentence. “Stakeholder capitalism” is redundant because companies already benefit stakeholders or die quickly. “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied,” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos told Congress in July. “A constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf.” And any company that wants to be around beyond next quarter already takes care of its community within the Friedmanesque rules of the game. Underpaying employees means competitors eventually lure them away.

No, profits aren’t greedy. They are a critical price signal—a measure of how well a company is deploying capital and creating value for society. The stock market sums all expected future profits, funding companies with great profit prospects and starving unworthy ones. But besides owning shares in those companies, what’s in it for us?

A lot. In a 2005 paper, Yale economist William Nordhaus concludes, “Only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers.”

WSJ: TikTok Meets the Meddling Feds

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-meets-the-meddling-feds-11601843585

TikTok shock: Last week a federal judge enjoined an executive order blocking new downloads of the Chinese video-sharing social network, which has 100 million users in the U.S. Wow—that’s a lot of people wasting time. Now a Nov. 12 deadline looms to shut off TikTok’s U.S. operation or outsource its management to U.S. partners. The Trump administration is concerned that the app’s user data could be funneled back to the Chinese government, which owner ByteDance denies.

In July, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced TikTok was under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius. There’s no question TikTok has quickly turned into a major social-media platform, but is it really a security threat?

No one can say why the Chinese government might want to spy on 16- to 24-year-olds who watch twerking routines. TikTok may censor information critical of Beijing, but it’s primarily an app for entertainment, not news. Maybe someday the platform could feature videos that influence elections. But that’s a big “maybe.” And please don’t make me think of Joe Biden twerking.

As for its potential as a spy tool, there are simpler remedies, like having Apple and Google set limits on the data TikTok can collect. Or restricting data transfers. I suggest making TikTok put up a bond, say $50 billion, that gets forfeited if it is caught providing data to Beijing.

The real problem is that the current remedy, a forced ownership transfer of TikTok’s U.S. operations to American investors, violates all forms of business decency. The Trump administration is basically stripping away equity from Chinese investors. Originally, Microsoft and Walmart were to invest and run the U.S. TikTok. When they dropped out, Oracle (with Walmart as a marketing partner) negotiated to be the “trusted technology provider” to TikTok. The data would stay in the U.S., and Oracle would buy an equity stake—basically buying a customer. And somehow, still unclear, Chinese investors would own less than 50%. This taking doesn’t smell right.

There’s a history of presidents manhandling corporate assets. Franklin Roosevelt threatened to nationalize the banks in 1933 forcing Congress to pass the Emergency Banking Act to strengthen balance sheets.