It took 10 months, a fat bundle of paperwork, countless certificates, long hours of haggling with bureaucrats and overcoming myriad other inconceivable obstacles for one group of young entrepreneurs to open an online store…

Antonopoulos and his partners spent hours collecting papers from tax offices, the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the municipal service where the company is based, the health inspector’s office, the fire department and banks. At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples.

Which both fails to surprise me from what I’ve read of the processes for starting new businesses in Europe generally, and does surprise me given my impression during my visit there in 1995 that everyone seemed to be running one or more small businesses.

But this is both surprising and funny:

Antonopoulos describes the massive difference between the treatment he and his partners received from the Greek authorities and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose approval Oliveshop.com needed in order to export its products to the USA.

“I contacted the FDA and they sent us an e-mail with directions immediately. I filled in an online form and was done in five minutes. We received the approval 24 hours after making our application.”

Of all bureaucracies, our FDA is shown to be a model of efficiency. Who woulda thought it?

And this part fits my own experiences with setting up an online business (People’s Press Collective). It took me all of an hour to fill out the state and federal LLC forms online, and part of that was waiting for the federal tax ID to be emailed to me automatically. No begging for permission. No X-rays or stool samples (?!). No funny business. Once we had the tax ID, we could open a business bank account as easily as a personal one.

Speaking of banks…Bruce seems to think that “international bankers” (and you know who they are…) are at the root of Greece’s problems, rather than a bloated, overly-bureaucratic state apparatus which promised everything to everyone believing the bill would never come due as it now has. I guess you have to have someone to blame when a state reflecting a lot of your own utopian ideals (minimal work hours, cradle-to-grave social welfare schemes, etc.) goes belly-up.

A free society will not function or maintain itself unless its members regard it as right that each individual occupy the position that results from his action and accept it as due to his own action. Though it can offer to the individual only chances and though the outcome of his efforts will depend on innumerable accidents, it forcefully directs his attention to those circumstances that he can control as if they were the only ones that mattered.

– Friedrich Hayek

Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because the importation of soil is restricted by the Antarctic Treaty , dirt is not used to grow the plants. In fact, the closest local dirt is nearly two miles beneath the ice on which the station sits. The plants are grown in a hydroponic nutrient solution instead — no dirt needed.

For that matter, no sunlight is needed either. The growth chamber, which was built in the winter of 2004, makes its own light via 13 water-cooled, high-pressure sodium lamps. In this bright environment, it is not uncommon to find people, like the plants, dwelling happily under the intense light produced in the chamber during the dark polar winter.

Carl and I put a lot of thought into extraterrestrial agriculture while writing In the Shadow of Ares, not least because the primary setting for the book is a very large agricultural settlement. Interestingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), we came to some of the same conclusions as these researchers. Of particular note, the morale benefit to settlers in an inescapably indoor environment of having an open green space (or Greenspace, if you’ve read the book).

For those who don’t know, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature two weeks ago passed what have come to be called the “Dirty Dozen” tax increases – blatantly ignoring the Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment to the state constitution by raising taxes without a vote of the citizens. Among the items subjected to new or increased taxes, including soda and (some, weirdly-defined) candy, doggie bags, software downloads, and bull semen (!), are all online sales.

In the case of the latter, the tax increase mandated onerous and privacy-invading reporting requirements onto online retailers. Amazon announced early on that they would suspend all affiliate accounts for Colorado residents if the measure passed, and over the weekend made good on that promise, sending cancellation letters to all of its Amazon Affiliates in the state.

In other words, a company had the guts to stand up in a small, symbolic way to the anti-constitutional taxation policy and invasive reporting requirements of the state of Colorado – and Senator Morse won’t stand for it. How dare Amazon not meekly accept the dictates of Senator Morse and his pals in the Colorado legislature? Who does Amazon think it is?

Me? I say “Hooray for Amazon!”

What amuses me is that he is now going to ditch his Kindle, boycott Amazon, and take his custom to more statism-friendly Apple. While I applaud Amazon’s actions, I firmly believe that they will lose far more business from people like me, who will no longer purchase anything online, from any retailer, so long as this taxation and reporting law is in effect. Indeed, even though I am a shareholder and the move would cost the company money, I would have preferred to see Amazon go all the way, and refuse to accept any orders for delivery to or with a billing address in Colorado (or at the very least the addresses of the governor and every legislator who voted for the bill).

What’s not funny about Senator Morse’s dramatic soliloquy, though, is the unquestioned assumptions that lie behind it. The notion that Amazon being a $900 million “corporate customer [sic]” is something shameful, a sin that requires the redistribution of their profits to assuage. Or the assumption that the targets of an objectionable piece of legislation ought to know their place, and accept the imposition humbly without uttering a word of protest. Or the apallingly ignorant assumption that he and his equally-economically-ignorant colleagues can blithely pass tax increases without altering economic behavior in the private sector whatsoever.

What’s even worse is Morse’s astonishing and hypocritical attack on Amazon as being a “bully” and engaging in “egregiousness” and ”tyranny”. Senator John Morse, Democrat of Colorado Springs, may want to look in the mirror – after all, it isn’t Amazon who is pitching an over-the-top emotional fit, it isn’t Amazon who is throwing its weight around to take something it shouldn’t have or forcing people to do business with it, and it isn’t Amazon who is acting in blatant violation of the state constitution and against the loudly expressed wishes of the citizens of Colorado.

[via WhoSaidYouSaid]

ADDED: Senator Morse is getting called out on his BS in the comments at YouTube, and is (not at all surprisingly) responding with snippy and condescending remarks. How dare we proles question him! He’s a senator!

While it veers into the de rigeur hip-deep patriotic cheese near the end (around 9:50, when Gramps Robinson stands up), the rest of the film is surprisingly good and refreshingly accurate. As I’m in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged, I was struck by how the town in question is the mirror image of Starnesville: a place where the “motive power” of local industry was recognized, respected, and celebrated.

Another interesting element of this film is how toned-down the utilitarian justifications for capitalism are. Sure enough, capitalism is defended to some degree on the basis of its public benefits, but the public benefits are more overtly presented as the natural, emergent effects of the spontaneous organization sparked by Mr. Manson’s initial investment. Gramps Robinson even gets in a dig at the now all-too-familiar “Progressive” mindset which evades the real sources of prosperity, thinking it can tear down industry and still have the prosperity of which productive enterprise is the root.

Pretty sophisticated for an educational film aimed at young teenagers.

[cross-posted at People's Press Collective]

More here: “We needed Mr. Brown’s weenies! That’s the incentive that makes capitalism work!”

Besides, who wants to go to McDonald’s Restaurant on Mars?

I do.

Not because I find the food appealing, but because of what the fact of a McDonald’s on Mars would say about the planet’s level of development. Shipping in from a distribution center on Earth all the mystery meat, synthetic cheese, pickles, onions, buns, soft-drink syrup, shoestring potatoes, condiments, service items, and other consumable products a franchised fast-food restaurant would require would be prohibitively expensive, at least by the modes of transportation available in the near term, so the existence of a simple McDonald’s on Mars would imply a whole range of other complex economic activities:

• the ranching (or decanting) of various types of meat;
• agriculture capable of supplying oil seeds, wheat, cucumbers, onions, sugarcane/corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and assorted spices;
• silviculture providing pulp stock for paper goods;
• processing facilities for the meat and other raw agricultural goods;
• secondary processing facilities, such as bakeries for the buns, plants for conversion of sugar or corn syrup into soft-drink concentrate, other plants producing ketchup, mustard, pickles, etc.;
• transportation for moving the raw materials and processed items (not to mention the consumers);
• a local construction industry capable of building a structure to house the restaurant, and a supply of building materials;
• a local manufacturing industry with the ability to produce the various pieces of specialized machinery and fittings required to turn the aforementioned consumables into final product and deliver them to customers — freezers, refrigerators, fry vats, grills, microwave ovens, soft-drink dispensers, cash registers, communications systems, preparation tables, sinks, water heaters, icemakers, customer furnishings, etc.;
• the constituent items (gears, motors, electromechanical elements, control devices, refrigerants, sheet metal, advanced plastics) that go into the production of such equipment;
• the miscellaneous secondary items involved in the running of the primary business, such as cleaning equipment and supplies;
• items taken for granted in a terrestrial McDonald’s: a supply of breathable air, potable water, and reliable electricity;
• a reliable supply chain making all of the above available on short notice;
• enough unskilled and surly teenagers to staff the restaurant;
• all of the above available at a cost which still allows the restaurant to make a profit;
• a trustworthy means of exchange (i.e.: money), and the financial infrastructure that goes with it;
• applicable legal structures (contract law, property law, etc.) and appropriate enforcement institutions; and
• enough customers to keep the restaurant profitable.

Not to mention the fact that a McDonald’s would be a pleasant alternative to a communal cafeteria that would be a more practical and efficient if drab means of providing meals. That is, the restaurant would indicate a level of development at which options for enjoyment are available, and people can concern themselves with quality of life (in this case the enjoyment of a simple pleasure) versus mere subsistence.

Who would go to a McDonald’s on Mars? I would — to celebrate the accomplishment that the existence of such a thing would symbolize.