Business in “modern” Russia – back to primitive violence

This is, sadly, the main reason why even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t do business in today’s  “modern” Russia…

“He was a very successful businessman,” Yelena Denisova, a member of the company’s board of directors, told The Moscow Times in a telephone interview Monday. “The company has produced the best wine in Russia. I don’t think he had any enemies. It could be only a robbery.”

I hope, I am not the only one who cannot believe that this was a case of a simple robbery, but rather a case of “normal” way to “compete” on the Russian market, as in if your business becomes attractive, and there is no way you would give up the gains earned through honest hard work, you will eventually be “stepped aside”, forever…

McKenzie on High Income Tax

“The Soak-the-Rich tax proposal reduces to the argument that those Americans who made good, and conservative economic decisions in the past should now be forced to pad the pockets of the CEOs who have made unbridled risky business decisions, and of other profitable Americans who over the past decade tried to live far beyond their means.

Any proposal to Soak-the-Reach is all too often grounded in the presumption that the rich got their gains through bribes, corruption, and thievery. Some, no doubt did. But now rich retired CEOs who absconded with tens of millions of ill-gotten bonuses and stock options when they were misrepresenting the risks that they had their companies take should be jailed [...]

However, many of today’s rich  people have got their incomes in the good, old-fashioned way through hard work, frugality, and judicious and concervative investment policies.

Indeed, many rich people today have actually earned over the course of their lives the lower average wage rate than people making far less. How can that be?

Many rich people of today have put in mountains of unpaid hours in developing a product or a business over the last decade, with their efforts finally paying off today.

Their current incomes may look excessively high, but only because no account is made for all the unpaid hours worked long ago, or for the substantial risks that they took [...]“

(Professor Richard McKenzie,  Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine)

Transnistria – a cultural hazard

I know this is an old documentary, but just to show you that it’s true – the Russian tsarist and soviet culture is alive and demanding its rights, in Transnistria.

Are these people better off? I would say not, but certainly a small fraction got super rich at the expense of all the rest. And although it is culturally attractive for the majority of locals who after 1990 just craved for some old-style soviet social stability – for their previous lives “good or bad as they were” – without ever knowing an alternative  option, for the Transnistrian’s government, this is a convenient recipe to secure an easy target population to steal from.

Yes, not fair, but with all their political and civil rights restrained by the monster that they’ve encouraged grow itself, would these people ever choose to be free and live a better life?

Hard to believe. It’s almost as asking a deaf person to walk toward the most beautiful sound…