What Is the Deal With LeaderShift?

It's some kind of business parable that suddenly sold lots of copies last week -- and the Amazon comments on the one low-ranking review imply that there's an astroturf campaign in place to give it lots of good reviews quickly. (Not that that's anything new or notable.)

There's a weird stew of "take our country back" and multi-level marketing here, and the book itself clearly has some political slant, but it's hiding that slant behind code words. (Or perhaps the word I mean is dog-whistles.)

One author, Orrin Woodward, is head of a current major multi-level marketing scheme called LIFE, and seems to have been a bigwig in another one called MonaVie. His co-author, Oliver DeMille, has a long Wikipedia page that doesn't say much, and which claims his politics are "independent" while listing a bunch of Republican codewords.

Best of all, the book is a "parable" -- which is what business books call themselves when they're fictional. (Business readers are serious, serious folks, with no time to waste on stories, so you need to pretend that you're Aesop if you want to sell fiction to them.)

Anyone seen this book in real life yet? It looks like something very, very special.

Stating the Obvious

This story is a week old, but I neglected to mention it when it hit: Amazon declares that Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy is the highest-selling series ever for them in the US.

This does not mean that Collins's books have sold more copies overall than, for example, J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, which was the prior record-holder. And it doesn't mean any of the things implied in Sara Nelson's self-lauding statement at the link.

What it means -- and what everyone who works in publishing already knows, but doesn't usually like to say in public -- is that Amazon is capturing an ever-larger share of the book business, which means that they sell a larger percent of books now than they did ten years ago -- so of course the big sellers now are bigger for Amazon than the big sellers were ten years ago. (Look for a similar statement about those "Fifty Shades of Grey" books in another year, especially if a movie does get made.)

This is good if you think that a single retailer should dominate the entire retail landscape for a particular kind of product. If you don't think that's such a good thing, your mileage may vary.

But what the statement really is saying is "we own the book market now, suckers." So you might as well learn to love Big Brother.

Gaining, and Losing, Capital

Anyone plugged into US politics has heard the debate about capital-gains tax rates -- currently pegged at 15%, lower than most rates for earned income (particularly for the people actually earning capital gains). Supply-siders claim that capital gains are "double taxation" (as if all monies in markets are not taxed, repeatedly, as they move around and are involved in various transactions) and that lower rates stimulate investments by increasing the potential rewards for such investments.

Those things may well be true. But those same supply-siders are usually also the people who note that taxation tends to depress interest in the things taxed -- if something costs more, people tend to do less of it. This is one of the rationales behind "sin taxes" -- cigarettes have a punitive tax on them in part to discourage smoking.

I haven't seen anyone connect those two things, though.

If we have a tax regime in which capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than earned income, we are systematically providing a disincentive to work and an incentive to passively gain from already having already accumulated wealth.

In a healthy, well-functioning society, though, working would be privileged -- taxes would be organized so as to provide incentives to work rather than to let your money do the working. We are clearly not a healthy, well-functioning society.