Daily Archives: 18 April 2012

Why does the government insist on hindering entrepreneurs and rewarding sloth

Fantastic read. Please forward this to anyone involved in government labor offices.

open quote The secret of professional happiness is to have no staff. It has taken me forty years to discover that.

I used to have 120 staff. Now I have none whatever. I don’t need any and I don’t want any. I’m happy as I am, on my own.

I was very fond of my staff. I selected them and trained them. I respected them for their skills and rewarded them for their creativity, imagination and enthusiasm. I paid them well.

They moved on when they got married or moved away. In my entire professional life I employed only six secretaries. I delegated to them and, in effect, they ran me. I saved a fortune in recruitment and training costs by having a stable staff.

I employed twice as many women as men, at all levels. That was not a deliberate policy. It just happened. I employed, paid and promoted on one criterion alone: talent.

I had no concept whatever of teamwork. It doesn’t work. I prefer to be a benevolent dictator. Teams reward incompetence and self-opinionation. I saw myself in a comparable position to that of a constitutional monarch. The crucial factor was not so much the power that I had but the power that I denied to anyone else.

I had a wonderful professional life and I am delighted to be in touch with most of my former employees.

Many have said that they would like to work with me again. But I don’t want that. I shall not employ staff ever again in the present political climate. Not one.

This entrepreneur is on strike. The interference by government has gone too far. I have every intention of working for another twenty years but I have no intention whatever of allowing myself to be controlled ever again by state-funded jobsworths.

With no employees, I am below their radar. I do not have to formulate policies and procedures and monitoring systems for them to inspect. I do not have to listen to the lectures and pontifications of people who have never created or run anything in their entire lives. I do not have to go on courses that have no value whatever to me but simply enable bureaucrats to tick their boxes. I’m free of all that.

Most of all, I value being free from the sense that I was contributing to political ideas that I do not support. Even in the fully private sector, my work supported the State. It was my taxes, and those of staff in jobs that I created, that kept the State in funds so that it could waste them on projects that I do not believe in. close quote (Read more)

Report says Israel to use Azeri airbases

open quote WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) — Israel has access to airbases in Azerbaijan near Iran’s northern border to use in a military strike against Iran’s nuclear sites, sources told a U.S. magazine.

Unnamed senior diplomats and military intelligence officials were interviewed in the Foreign Policy magazine report, “Israel’s Secret Staging Ground,” published Wednesday.

“The Israelis have bought an airfield … and the airfield is called Azerbaijan,” a senior administration official was quoted as saying.

The Azeri military has four abandoned Soviet-era airfields that would potentially be available to Israel and four air bases for their own aircraft, the report says, quoting details from Military Balance 2011 from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly concerned Israeli military expansion in Azerbaijan will hamper efforts to dampen tensions with Iran, an official told Foreign Policy. close quote (Read more)

Child witnesses to Afghan massacre say Robert Bales was not alone

open quote Here are two versions of what happened the night of March 11, when 17 Afghan villagers were shot to death.

First, the Army version: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, troubled by marriage woes, drunkenly left Camp Belambai, 12 miles from Kandahar, with a pistol and an automatic rifle and killed six people as they slept. Bales then returned to the base and left again for another village, this time killing 11. He acted alone and he admitted to the killings, according to the Army.

Then there is the account that child witnesses provided Yalda Hakim, a journalist for SBS Dateline in Australia. Hakim, who was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to Australia as a child, is the first international journalist to interview the surviving witnesses. She said American investigators tried to prevent her from interviewing the children, saying her questions could traumatize them. She said she appealed to village leaders, who arranged for her to interview the witnesses.

In the video, the children told Hakim that other Americans were present during the rampage, holding flashlights in the yard.

Noorbinak, 8, told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg. close quote (Read more)