OT: But Worth The Time to Read

GROVER · 2010-04-14T17:38:59+00:00

Jean Baptiste Colbert, the 17th century French minister of finance,once remarked that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking thegoose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the smallestpossible amount of hissing."Joe G

Apr 14, 2010 21 Replies

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Correct.

Whether a private enterprise makes a "profit" is often more of a bookkeeping tactic than a reflection of the real world. I'm reminded of the old REA (Railway Express Agency) that was in business for over a hundred years, starting with the Pony Express. They never made a "profit."

Even so, profits for most businesses are in the range of 2-5% of revenue. Here's a sample of usual industry profits:

Networks - 29%
Mining, crude oil - 24%
Pharma - 16%

But

Specialty retailers - 4%
Energy - 4%
Airlines - 4%
Hospitals - 3%
Pipelines - 3%
Car parts - 1%
Homebuilding - -9%

It doesn't take much inefficiency to crash the bottom line and governments are unrivaled at inefficiency.

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:07:37 -0400, the infamous "J. Clarke" scrawled the following:

...or what burned to the ground waiting for said dept. 2 competing agencies had a dispute on a fire in Merlin last year and the result was that two truck companies sat and watched a house burn to the ground while the first responder's water truck lumbered there. The second responder (the company who serves me) responded with a real water truck and was prevented from stopping the blaze by the new guys on the block. It was truly criminal.

That said, there are three types of protection:

The govt's tax-base-supplied fire dept, the fire protection we pay to the fire dept ($277/year for me), and the fire insurance.