IMG is nothing?

Michael Dannenberg and Phillip Longman - A Bid for Better Student Loans - washingtonpost.com

Just got done reading Ben Stein’s piece for the New York Times,”The Hard Rain Falling on Capitalism“. Based on the description of his home in California, he is obviously living well, but he sees a real problem with our economy and government–the rich continue to get richer, while the wages and opportunity for the rest are stagnating.

The thing we have to remember is that this isn’t a necessity of capitalism. Yes, the wealthy can invest to expand their wealth, and some people will get paid more for their work. Yet, traditionally, American capitalism meant that anyone with a great idea could seek capital to make that idea reality; it meant your contributions and compensation would be correlated (you’d get what you’re worth or close to it).

For Stein, the issue is trust. How can we continue to believe in a system [capitalism] that doesn’t compensate based on value, but rather allows the top percentiles to decree what the rest of us will get (while demanding their own ever-increasing pay). He’s really focusing on the ridiculous salaries of CEOs, but this also applies to the connection between corporations and the public. We trust government to tax corporations that use public resources and use that money to better society. But oil companies reap billions in profit, then are able to squirrel away these funds in tax havens AND further enrich themselves with subsidies. Government allows this because those who govern receive their share while the rest of us watch our opportunities evaporate.

Stein writes that capitalism is,

“built on man’s notion that he can trust his neighbor with his money, and that if the neighbor misbehaves, the law will chase him and catch him, and that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom, that even the nobles get properly handled (Bob Dylan again) once they have been caught.”

I don’t expect CEOs or governments to forget profit or their own interests, but I expect them to pursue those interests in a way that leaves the middle-class and lower-incomes with mobility. Their greed and cronyism, coupled with our apathy or skepticism means we will eventually lose the trust in capitalism that lets janitors become millionaires and crooked executives become inmates.

Just got done reading a blurb about Web 2.0 from the BBC Davos blog. If you don’t know, Davos is the the site of the World Economic Forum : the place where the bigshots of Finance and Business come together and discuss whats going on in the world and what is going to happen.

The blog post is about how user input (read: your input) is changing the web and business. The panel that discussed this topic at Davos was pretty impressive:

YouTube’s Chad Hurley;
Microsoft founder Bill Gates;
Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr;
Nike chief executive Mark Parker;
and EU commissioner Viviane Reding

but I’d say only 2 out of 5 speakers have really been on the ball (YouTube, Flickr). Nike is letting people design their own shoes online, but the choices are limited (its really a redesign of a few overpriced styles) and Microsoft only listens to corporate customers, so I can’t get too excited when Gates talks about the potential.

Still, 2.0 is Now. This it the idea thats driving the new sites to come on the scene. Hopefully, the big boys will embrace it a little faster —Before 3.0 comes around