Digger’s Friday Triple Play

Posted by Doug Eberhardt on Aug 7, 2009 in Investing | Comments Off

Invest in paths that are less trodden, says Jim Rogers

The idea that you can solve a period of excessive borrowing and consumption with more borrowing and more consumption and destroying more balance sheets, to me, is ludicrous on its face,” Rogers said.

Inclined to Liberty; The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit by Louis E. Carabini

Labor unions use the “take away jobs” fallacy when jobs are so
narrowly defined that one is allowed to do only one’s job designation.
A plumber isn’t allowed to remove a wall to repair a pipe,
because doing so would eliminate the carpenter’s job. History is
replete with such nonsensical restrictions.

With unionized job restrictions, inefficiency raises the cost of
products and services, which, in turn, reduces consumer preference
for those products and services. This “take away jobs” fallacy
also caused riots, killings, and the destruction of property when
labor-intensive factories installed labor-saving machines. Yet,
when factories installed those machines, the demand for their
now lower priced products, in most cases, resulted in an increase
in the need for workers in those very same industries. Many get
upset when companies take advantage of cheaper labor in poorer
countries to produce goods or provide services. But what’s the difference
if a company in Detroit decides to send its car parts to
Arkansas or somewhere out of the country for assembly? There
may be a relocation of people performing a given type of job, or a
change in the type of job for those who live in Detroit, but it does
not reduce the number of total jobs.

When a company produces a good at a lower cost, it can, in
turn, attract more buyers by reducing the price of that good to the
public. The lower price of such a good frees the purchaser to use the
savings to buy something additional that the purchaser could not
have previously afforded. That “something additional” now has to
be produced by someone who landed a previously nonexistent job.

U.S. Food Stamp List Tops 34 Million for Frist Time

It was the sixth month in a row that enrollment set a record. Every state recorded a gain, and Florida had the largest increase at 4.2 percent.