Daily Archives: December 11, 2003

Tax Collectors in Action

This entry was posted in Economics Federal Government Taxation on by

Jim Henley takes up the cause of a neighborhood comic store owner who is getting screwed by the IRS

The familiar regulatory coupling of arrogance and ignorance has forced her to take attention from her proper concerns – her business and her life – and focus them on trying to straighten out interlopers as clueless as they are powerful.

Stories like this make me wonder once again why we have not risen up and smashed the IRS and its ilk. Yes, I am angry about this at the moment.
There is an update on this story at Tegan’s place. This sounds really broken and I am still angry.
Oh, and if any of you know anything about a federal inventory tax would you, if possible, point to references. I couldn’t find anything at irs.gov and don’t believe that there is such a thing at the federal level.
Update (12/12): Jim Henley, Hit&Run, and a number of other folks in the comic community (linked by Dirk Deppy) have more. Dirk wants action and has a sample letter to send to your congress critters.
The comment thread at Hit & Run has some info on the tax law but I have yet to see a clear discussion of the specific law and why and how it applies here. And, yes, I’m still angry. Let’s get rid of the IRS.

Why did so many buy into the 90s stock bubble?

This entry was posted in Economics on by

Jane Galt looks at the stock market bubble of the late ’90s and why so many supposedly bright folks lost their nest eggs. She proposes, in essence, that some nifty (in some applications) evolutionary programming overpowered our supposed rationality:

Seriously, think about the way evolution has programmed us to learn.
We are, by nature, fearful beings. But fear will only get you so far in this imperfect world, and so nature has also equipped many of us with a modicum of courage and a taste for novelty. Those people try new things. If disaster doesn’t ensue, they try them again. If that works out, they do it a third time. Each time they lose a little more fear . . . and a few more, slightly less courageous people are encouraged to try it, having seen it work for the “thought leaders”. After the eighth or twentieth repetition, the entire tribe is eating pterodactyl steak or riding railroads or investing in the stockmarket.
We are programmed to lose a little more fear every time we are successful — to worry less about the risks. It’s a heuristic that allows pre-rational animals to function pretty well in a universe of many unknowns.
But it has its costs. And I’d argue that speculative bubbles are one of them.

There is a lot more so head on over and check it out.
Rip Rowan thinks this article is interesting but not quite on the mark:

The problem with Galt’s analysis is this: stock market bubbles are not irrational. They are perfectly rational responses to perfectly rational conditions.
The rational condition is easy to understand: new, discontinuous technologies (for example, the advent of the Internet and new biotechnology possibilities opened up by the unraveling of the human genome) created an environment in which the market was forced to react to possibly revolutionary changes in the business environment with extremely poor information on the short- and long-term impacts of those technologies.

Hmmmm, pretty hard to make rational decisions with ‘extremely poor information.’ While the bubble itself may have been a rational response I think Jane’s argument that “investors in the late 1990’s had completely slipped their cams” is pretty solid.
There are some additional comments on the article here, here and here.