Macro – What job is the MA (Hons) BSc Dip Sc doing? Given that it only pays $13 an hour, is it a case of a highly skilled person doing a low-skilled job?

I’m sure the low-waged do spend all their income, but making it more expensive for businesses to employ people isn’t going to create jobs. By that logic we should just increase the minimum wage to $50 and let the good times roll.

And Sean the low waged SPEND all their income! There are a large number of them and each extra small amount amounts up to a large sum which feeds back into the economy.
Giving lots to wealthy individuals as in tax cuts to the top tax bracket, on the other hand nearly always goes to savings or payments off the mortgage – which is the same thing really. None of this money ends up feeding directly back into the productive economy as in the former case. Blingish’s “stimulus” package is no such thing!

How does making it more expensive to employ low-skilled people create jobs?

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For what it’s worth I think her writing is much-maligned. It’s wonderfully polemic.

Yes, she could certainly write … although she badly needed a decent editor. To call her “long-winded” or “using a rhetorical steam-hammer to crack a walnut and then grind it to an exceptionally fine powder” is to understate the problem by a couple of orders of magnitude.

And it’s always interesting to talk about Rand with younger ACT supporters – largely they haven’t actually read the books due to the length and the excess verbiage. Mostly they’ve read about the books rather than worked their way through the full length of the sacred texts.

Can’t see much move downward movement on the OCR front, though … and it’s not clear what impact it would have anyway, as commercial borrowing rates seem to have a pretty low correlation with the OCR at the moment.

For what it’s worth I think her writing is much-maligned. It’s wonderfully polemic. But, indeed, it’s no more the basis for running a society than the Celestine Prophecy.

L

Ayn Rand’s book Fountainhead centered on Roark’s jury summation, which represents her ideals of an entrepreneur …

Not to point out the obvious here, but Rand had no academic or practical qualifications in the subject of entrepreneurship, and The Fountainhead is a novel.

If you’re suggesting that the fictional rantings of a dead author with interesting sexual predilections should be used as the basis of sound economic decision making, then perhaps we should also research our foreign policy by reading back-issues of Spiderman comics.

Entrepreneurs do create jobs. So does making babies, breeding sheep, making rubbish, and probably arse scratching (wears out the pants – thereby creating demand for pants).

What you’re struggling to say (in an inarticulate and highly coded way) is that entrepreneurs create new types of jobs by generating new types of demand.

They do this by finding and founding new industries. On the way through the vast majority of them either fail financially or manage to merely survive but nothing more. They are “think out of the bubble and live out of the box” because most of them are kind of nuts. Frequently they are borderline maniac-depressives. Much of the time failed ventures will drag the savings of other people down with them.

The people you’re lauding are typically the winnowed survivors of that process. The majority of them survived and prospered by sheer luck, typically by finding someone that actually made their nutty ideas workable. A small minority did actually did do it largely themselves.

Entrepreneurs are worthwhile supporting, but not for the inane reasons that you’re suggesting. They are just nuts enough to try something truly desperate in the market that no sane person would consider. Some of those wild gambles pay off. This is how new industries form.

But typically the majority of successful entrepreneurs will fail on subsequent speculative ventures. They didn’t understand why they succeeded in the first venture and tend to over-commit on subsequent ones. That is why the new industries that they create usually wind up in the hands of others.

This picture is a little different to the mythic picture that you and the nutty Rand paint. But then you’re not really into reality are you?

Society needs to support them, but also needs to restrict the damage they also cause. You only need to look at causes of the current recession to see both sides of the issue.

Pity the poor entrepreneur, for they know not what they do or why they do it.

20yrs old, I’ve put them on a modest amount. Also given him a car and a phone.

Just cause I vote national doesn’t mean I treat employees like shit.
[no it doesn't. but it means you defend the right of other employers to do so. The problem with National's labour policy - low minimum wage, 90 days etc - isn't that all bosses will abuse their position but that some will. These policies are a kind of bandits' charter, not much use to good employers, trouble in the hands of bad ones, who often have the most vulnerable employees]

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