The SWEETEST Charity...

You know, like most Americans, I give a fair amount of money to charity, and I don’t write much of it off, because I really don’t really care if my charity goes to an “official 5093B charitable organization”.  In fact, I really prefer NOT to give to charitable orgs., because the slick offices and the "Directors of Giving" that pull in a hundred grand a year (those 'non-profits" need to go somewhere, don' t they?) seem venal, somehow.

If you doubt that dollars are more precious than God to an American, try this little exercise sometime.  Pay for the groceries of someone behind you in line.  Pick up dinner for the old couple in the corner at a restaurant.  A few bucks... but, the recipients will be blown away.  Why is THAT bit of grace, cheap on its face, so... rare?

In any case, you will get lauded for charity as a huge humanitarian for parting with sums that are less than what you might piss away at a craps table or stuff into a g-string (if you are into that sort of thing...). It seems out of whack to me.

You know what I am really proud of?  The companies I have founded or co-founded today employ hundreds of people and have combined payrolls in the  $10's of millions a year.  This money pays for over hundreds of homes, hundreds of cars (and some harleys), countless meals, primary through college education for lots of kids, and worthwhile, productive lives for hundreds of families, and dozens or hundreds of, yes, charitable contributions of time or money on the part of the individual.  What he or she feels is a good use of their money.  Not me dictating it.  

Best of all, the beneficiaries of this “largesse” are hugely capable folks that don’t have the stigma of feeling that they are charity cases at all.  They find or create or sell things that other people want to buy.  No one is forced to buy… they WANT to buy.  To be honest, the charitable giving we do corporately is marketing.  Why do I think I can make better charitable decisions than my shareholders?  Should I be using their money to support my charities?  I decided I could not.  They bought into a business plan, not a charitable giving plan.  I am not against corporate charitable giving, per se, as long as it is up front in the prospectus and defined in a way that, as a shareholder, I would want to give on my own.  Having some CEO use my money to gain accolades for his charitable contributions for causes I could care less about is a problem, however.

I was pretty much broke when I first started these endeavors.  A good idea, hard work, a huge amount of luck, some great people, and being fiscally conservative, ie not betting the livelihoods of those hundreds of people on risky deals, made it all possible.  Even better, this isn't a one-off story. There are millions of people in this great country that are trying to do the same thing at all different scales, and lots succeed.  

What do these millions of humanitarians do?  They make things or doing services that you might want to buy.  THAT is free-market capitalism.  A beautiful thing.  People thinking about what I miogth want and providing me a chance to choose to buy it.  It is amazing how few Americans even understand that.  Admit it.  When you think "capitalism", you think Enron, Madoff, and failing banks caused by mind-bending things called derivatives that you don't really understand.  That is no more capitalism than bak robbery is banking.  Fraud is fraud.  

You know what else?  I don't feel sorry for people that lost money on Enron stock, or lost all they had with Bernie Maddoff, or are threatened with bankruptcy fromwalking away from their homes that they have no equity anymore, or that will have to sell their oil and gas assets because they got too highly leveraged when commodity prices were at the highest they had ever been in real dollars.

Why in the world would you invest your hard-earned money in something you didn't understand? Cons depend upon your greed.  Madoff and Skilling used to deflect questions about their business using esoteric language or saying what they did was "proprietary".  You wouldn't think about investing in a secret scheme that your neighbor Larry came up with and won't let you in on the details.  But God forbid that Larry gets your other neighbor Delbert in and Delbert makes some money.  Damn the details!  I want in!

This is the formula for fraud.  Learn to recognize it.  The victims of this have a less than pure soul, that is why they got victimized.  I learned these lessons the hard way a long time ago.  I learned that it was my own larcenous nature that caused me these problems, and I altered my way of thinking.  Hd someone made me whole because I was a victim, I would still have this spot on my soul.  

So, people making things that other people want, and can choose to buy, or to buy from someone else that is selling it cheaper.  That is free markets.  When I drill a well in the US, I contract with, on average, 50 or 60 companies or entities to do all the work necessary to drill and produce that well. Because we don't have onerous regulations on starting businesses, I have a lot of choices of who to use.  Overseas, where the hurdle rate is ten or more times higher than here, and there are only a handful of service companies to choose from, my costs are 4 to 10 times higher.  That is the cost of bad law, bad policy, and too much needless regulation (as opposed to desireable regulation, of which there is some).  Big business knows this.  It knows it is not nimble.  That's why it uses the power of government to write those precious regulations that keep small players out that are so beloved by lawmakers and "anti-business" advocates.  Ironic, isn't it?

For a quick reference of how powerful small business is, lets compare the returns from a T-Bill and companies like mine.  This is also a great proxy for classic charity.  A perfectly run charity with no overhead can invest the returns of its endowment at the prevailing rates of return.  Let's pretend it isn't -40% as it is today, but the T-Bill rate. To pay my payrolls, and thus support the hundreds of people I do today in exactly the same scale as they are today, I would need to have invested over $1 billion dollars.  For the guy with the corner bakery, who pulls in a net of $50k a year?  Close to $4 million just for the profit!  To pay for the salaries of the two people he has working for him?  Add another $4 million.  That little place that cost $50k to start provides the same amount of social good as a $10 million endowment that is operated with no overhead.  THAT is the magic of what we have here.  Best of all, if the guy with the corner bakery is selling more and more every year, he will probably spend his money expanding his facilities and hiring more people... investing in himself. I think, objectively, that the effective social goodness of my baker friend hugely overshadows the social goodness of my wealthy friend who chooses to charitably give away his inheritence.

Creating, growing, and supporting small (and large) businesses, or at least businesses that provide stuff you want, and that don't look to the government to keep competition down via needless regulations or to subsidize the crap they make that we consumers are unwilling to buy ourselves.  When they do so, they acknowledge their failure as a contributing member of society and now demand that we collectively pay for their failure... so F*** GM and Chrysler, as far as I am concerned.  Maybe a company that cares about what buyers think can take their place.  Maybe they can spin out VOLT and Cadillac as independent companies.  I bet someone would buy those stand alone!

 Thomas Jefferson had a great quote.  “A government that is big enough to give you anything you want is big enough to take away everything you have”.

Comments

[Royal Enfield]

"You know what else? I don't feel sorry for people that lost money on Enron stock...." Open Choke, March 12, 2009

Choke, perhaps you should reconsider this statement. Many people who lost money on Enron stock were hard working school teachers. They did not invest directly, but indirectly through their pension funds. Projecting blame on them is "curious" to me. Most oil companies depend on some type of public funding. The oil/energy business is complex, and almost impossible for the layman to understand in detail. The school teachers are not the villains. They are the good guys. To feel no empathy for them is something I do not understand. Perhaps you should reconsider this position.

[Open Choke]

Not that I care whether they are school teachers or rocket scientists, but, unless they did not have any investment choice for their pensions, then I really don't have much sympathy. If it was a big black bag that was the prescribed pension and you had no idea what was in it and it was your only choice... great. My sympathies.

Why do people want to invest in stuff they know nothing about? Is an investor who invests unwisely in stuff that they know nothing about worthy of pity when they lose their investment?

I do business with other oilmen. Others I know do business with the general public. I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole because you will get sued for taking advantage of a poor unknowing accredited investor if you drill a dry hole. No thank you.

I don't understand everything about major oil, but I know enough to invest. Investment advisors are supposed to know enough not to be fleeced. However, the promise of big returns trumps all common sense. Thenwe cry when it turned out to be a charade.

There is no such thing as no-risk investment, period. When you do business with crooks, your risk just gets much worse.

Social Security and Medicare/medicaide are Ponzi schemes as well. The only difference between them and Madoff is that they provide only a 1.5% return on my investment before they collapse and the Federal Government makes me buy it.

What are the innocent school teachers do about that? Oh, I forgot. They don't generally participate in that scam. They have their government pensions in lieu of.

So I have reconsidered it a bit. Hope that is enough, but I am frankly tired of whiners and victims. The scam artists are bad guys. The people who invest with them are NOT without culpability. Isn't that where "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"?

[Open Choke]

Of course, as a freind of mine said to me at lunch today, "I got no problem with Ponzi Schemes, I just want to be one of the first ones in"...

[Royal Enfield]

Choke, you seem do be advocating a "buyer beware" securities market? So in the wake of the 60 to 1 leverage schemes you want less regulation?
Enron screwed some of the best with false disclosures. They lied and deceived in very sophisticated ways, sometimes. Capitalists have again denomstrated there is no honor before $. They must be regulated, and they are about to be roped, tied and ***** by Obama etal. Oh happy day!!!

[Open Choke]

The best regulation, Scott, is to not buy crap you don't understand. I guess it was the way I was brought up. When I came home trying to play the victim with my dad over some bit of trouble I found myself in, he would respond that I needed to look at what MY actions were that led to me being there when that bad thing happened, because THAT is what I could reasonably expect to control. It doesn't feel as good as being the poor exploited victim, all us humans love that feeling, but it is a lot more productive for us to figure out the bead decisions on our part that led us there, even if they are "I trusted that guy or that pension fund to make me a huge amount of money".

I will grant that good rules and penalties governing transparency will make a market more valuable, ie you don't have to risk discount it as much.

I think politicians have demonstrated that THEIR constituencies obscure what the rules are meant to be and how they are carried out much more than the failures of capitalists. Capitalism largely works, dependable politically controlled entities largely don't.

[fred mrozek]

http://www.robertbryce.com/node/223

an excerpt:

In 2002, the world's smartest investor (and my pick for president this year), Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett, issued his annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. In it, he called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."

Few people heeded Buffett's warning. In fact, some of America's most important financial players dismissed him out of hand. In September 2002, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, and James Newsome, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, sent a letter to a pair of U.S. senators in which they declared that financial derivatives were not a danger. Instead, they said that derivatives "have been a major contributor to our economy's ability to respond to the stresses and challenges of the last two years." Further, they declared that a then pending Senate proposal to regulate derivatives could increase "the vulnerability of our economy to potential future stresses."

In June 2003, Greenspan again defended derivatives. In another letter to members of the Senate, Greenspan—this time bolstered by Treasury Secretary John Snow and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson as well as Newsome—declared:

Businesses, financial institutions, a nd investors throughout the economy rely upon derivatives to protect themselves from market volatility triggered by unexpected economic events. This ability to manage risks makes the economy more resilient, and its importance cannot be underestimated. In our judgment, the ability of private counterparty surveillance to effectively regulate these markets can be undermined by inappropriate extensions of government regulation.

Back in 2002, in Pipe Dreams, my book on the Enron disaster, I wrote that reforms were needed to deal with derivatives. I quoted one financial analyst who called derivatives "Wall Street's dirty secret." I recommended that "derivatives dealers should be required to post agreed-upon amounts of capital to collateralize their trading positions" and that "the derivatives marketplace must be made more uniform, with policing by regulators who can establish price limits, listing requirements, and other trading parameters."

I don't repeat that to brag about any foresight on my part. Many other people were arguing for the same types of reforms. The point is that the warning signs left by the Enron mess could not have been more clear. The derivatives mess created by Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the others occurred because of a regulatory vacuum where none of the players were required to post collateral to back up their positions or to disclose to investors the size of their huge derivatives positions. That lack of oversight has spawned a financial crisis that will reverberate through the global economy for years to come.

Thousands of people are losing their homes. Thousands more are losing their jobs. Taxpayer money is being used to bail out private companies that were headed by corporate bosses who routinely helped themselves to multimillion-dollar pay packages. And all of it is happening because the Bush administration and Congress refused to heed the lessons of Enron.