@globeandmail doing the meme and highlighting why their country sucks. Never mind that Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is one of the biggest winners from
$SPCX but the sentiment was covered by Howard Marks in a 2010 Memo titled "Tell Me I'm Wrong."
Lastly, I worry about the rising tide of populism and anti-business sentiment. I’ve never seen negative attitudes like those toward financial institutions today. Administration members with Wall Street backgrounds are regarded with suspicion; high incomes are considered wrongful; and banks and investment banks are seen as victimizing America, not rendering it prosperous. Schadenfreude is in the ascendancy, with people wishing ill for successful bankers. Politicians pander by throwing gasoline on the fire. With an election coming up, I expect candidates to compete to see who can be tougher on Wall Street.
I mentioned in “What Worries Me” that decades ago, when a socialist-leaning labor movement was ascendant in the U.K., I came across a good explanation for the success of U.S. business:
When the worker in England sees the boss drive out of the factory in his Rolls Royce, he says, “I’d like to put a bomb under that car.” When the American worker sees the boss drive out in his Cadillac, he says “I’d like to own a car like that someday.”
More recently, in 2005, Thomas Friedman compared old and new economies as follows:
French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck. . . . Voters in “old Europe” – France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy – seem to be saying to their leaders: stop the world, we want to get off; while voters in India have been telling their leaders: stop the world and build us a stepstool, we want to get on. . . . A few weeks ago Franz Müntefering, [then] chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, compared private equity firms – which buy up failing businesses, downsize them and then sell them – to a “swarm of locusts.” The fact that a top German politician has resorted to attacking capitalism to win votes tells you just how explosive the next decade in Western Europe could be, as some of these aging, inflexible economies – which have grown used to six-week vacations and unemployment insurance that is almost as good as having a job – become more intimately integrated with Eastern Europe, India and China in a flattening world. (“A Race to the Top,” The New York Times, June 3, 2005 – emphasis added)
Capitalism, free enterprise, pro-business policies, adaptability, work ethic and profit – these are the concepts that have generated most of the material progress in this world.
oaktreecapital.com/docs/defa…