Dead Markets

It's even worse when you have the government actively taking part in the collusion. ELDs are an example in our industry.

 

Absolutely. The mega's had to install ELD's because the liability they were exposed to every time a driver drove illegal was astronomical. The reality is that right now the optimal size for a trucking company is definitely not >100 power units. This is because the bigger you get the more of your real liability you are taking on (what a jury will award if one of your drivers ####s up and hits a school bus).

In an attempt to make smaller operators easier to compete with they've gone and gotten ELD's made mandatory for 'safety'. ########. Trucking is pretty safe now given how many miles get run. ELD's are mandatory for safety like Voter ID laws are for stopping voter fraud. Both are policies designed to help one group over another and nothing else.

EDIT: I did have an interesting conversation about ELD's with my actuary brother yesterday though. He said that the attorneys who defend trucking lawsuits seemed to think that ELD's were a bad thing for judgement size as it becomes much easier to prove when the driver is noncompliant. My brother and I had a pretty good laugh at that. These lawyers are so out of touch with the industry they defend that they don't even realize that the whole point of ELD's is to lower the frequency of big judgments by making illegal driving impossible.

 

Welcome to America. Government of big business, for big business, by big business.

Unfortunately a free market is a myth, like a Greek god, it will never actually exist. People who promote the virtues of free markets are really only shilling for large corporations. That's one of Ayn Rand's basic fallacies: she never adequately distinguishes between a corporation and a person. Even in her fiction works like Atlas Shrugged, she glosses right over the fact that corporations are only possible because of government.

There have to be some rules. Imagine a football game with no sideline and no end zone. Or a swap meet where the sellers each draw the boundaries of their own space. The first person to arrive would take the whole place.

So somebody has to draw the lines and make the rules. One person might create a football game, but someone else might create a basketball game or a soccer game. That's how markets really work. They can be set up a whole bunch of different ways and still function. There's a country in South America where the government monopolizes raw materials, like gravel. It might seem communist but the nice thing about it is everybody gets the same low price. Joe the landscaper buying one pickup truck full gets it for the same price as the company with a fleet of dump trucks buying it to build the highways. And it works, and it also helps keep the little guys in business.

The notion that a perfectly free market is possible is a fallacy, which leads to a secondary fallacy, which is the notion that a freer market is always better - which then leads to a tertiary fallacy, the notion that some control inevitably results in more control and less productivity, in a vicious cycle of red tape and destruction ending in a dystopian 1984 world where everybody is depressed and nothing good ever happens.

So rather than being a conflict between more free vs. less free, it's actually a conflict between government for big business vs. government for proprietorships and individuals. People in the former camp refer to people in the latter camp as socialists and therefore communists. And they love to wrap themselves in the stars and stripes when they do it. But few if any of them really have a clue about the markets the founders set up.

Banks were illegal in most states, and corporations were rare. Corporations could not own other corporations, in whole or in part. Corporations could only have one function, i.e. to build a canal. Corporations could not exist for more than 40 years. The founders firmly believed that a corporation should not be able to exceed the natural lifespan of a human. And corporations could have their charters revoked by simple majority vote of the legislature. Instant liquidation sale.

People might be inclined to call these ideas communist or whatever, but if they do that, then what are they saying about the founders? So they typically prefer to ignore it. They don't want to talk about the fact that it's no accident that the tea that was tossed into the Boston Harbor was actually owned by the largest corporation in the world at the time - the WalMart of it's day. They don't want you to know that the founders chose that particular tea on purpose.

 

Really interesting to read. I've been into economics and economic/political/moral philosophies for years. The older I get the more blurred everything really seems.

Funny how the founders never talked much about economics. Probably because the industrial revolution was just a gleam in the eye of the people in that era. Whole completely different story now. For the past year I've begun to not think of the GOP as capitalists and Democrats as socialists. It really seems like they're both the same. They may SAY different things, on the stage in front of the people, but in practice they both are the same where it really matters. They're beholden to those who pay their paychecks, and to think that the paltry 80,000 or so that a senator gets is their real paycheck, compare that to all the behind the curtain "perks" they end up with, they are beholden to those with a whole lot of money and who want to protect it and make more of it. I'll bet there are both GOP and Dems alike got their hands in this ELog pie, in some form or fashion.

 

Actually Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson both had very strong views on economics and the type of economy we should have. Jefferson favored an agrarian utopia with the economy revolving around 'farmers' like him. Hamilton had grown up at a Carribean trading post and then moved to NYC and was basically the founder of our banking system. A system that Jefferson strongly opposed.

That argument seems pretty silly in retrospect, much as most of our modern arguments will seem silly in 2150.

Senators make 174,000 dollars plus hilarious perks. They also get to go be a lobbyist for roughly 500k per term served per year when they retire. Nice work if you can get it.

I'm not a huge Ayn Rand fan either, and that's mostly because I find her description of the vast majority of humans to be pretty much a cardboard cutout of some scary communists she saw as a child. I just honestly don't think she had any idea what she was talking about. I think her work is very appealing to people who have worked hard AND been a bit lucky because it allows them to throw humility out the window and assume that they, and they alone, are 100% responsible for their success. Pretty easy to feel you have zero obligations to society when you see things that way. Her philosophy would turn the world into some kind of dystopian corporate nightmare if it were actually adopted by society. People who want to know what that looked like should read up on their history from the 1840's-1910's and really drill down on what life was like for normal people then. We do not want to go back to that.

None of this means that I'm going to be in favor of the government being involved in areas where I don't already think they should be involved. Fire/Disaster, Security, Roads/Bridges/Infrastructure, basic science research, schools (although I think there need to be tons and tons of changes to schools), healthcare, and regulations written to deal with abuses that have already happened as simply as possible.

This is the thing about modern political arguments. We're arguing about stuff that we really should have just tried out years ago. Where our system has broken down this last 30 years is that it has become very easy for both parties to simply block anything at all from happening. As a result both sides pander more and more to their bases without having to deal with reality at all. You can promise to turn the sky purple in the election if that's a popular position, because it will never get done. Nothing will. So you can say anything you like without any consequences at all. The perfect example is how the GOP yelled about repealing Obamacare since before it passed, even though the whole structure of Obamacare was dreamed up in a conservative think tank in the late 80's. That's why Romney used it in Massachussets. Because it's a conservative plan designed to stop people from free riding on the healthcare system. It's a private insurance market solution to the coverage problem that does absolutely nothing about cost. They vilified it because the Democrats passed it and it had flaws which made it an easy soft spot to poke at... Not because they had anything resembling a better idea. It was their best idea lol.

EDIT: And yes I agree completely that both parties are functionally the same. Look at how cynically Trump selected the Republican party. He decided to run as a Republican because he felt it gave him and the kind of message he wanted to use the best odds. I 100% guarantee he would have run as a D in 1953. I'm much more of a traditional Republican than he is ironically... And I'm certainly not a modern Republican.

 

They are similar, in that they both represent the rich and big business, and this is where they both get much of their cash from. Two factions of the same business party, similar to how the USSR might have had two competing factions of the communist party. Indeed, if we view the R's and D's as two factions of the same ruling party, then their degree of dominance over our government, in terms of the % of elected seats held by them, actually exceeds the degree of dominance the communists had over the Soviet politburo.

But there is an important difference between R's and D's, in that they have different visions of how to best run the country for the benefit of the rich. One side thinks the rich will be best off when the rich have all the money, whereas the other side thinks the rich are better off when the poor have a few bucks in their pocket.

The latter vision takes into account the fact that economic demand requires money. Most economic models ignore the painfully simple fact that someone who is starving and broke supplies no economic demand to the economy. Yes, there is actual biological demand, but there's no economic demand until he has a few bucks in his pocket. Righties love to tout corporations as the engine of job creation, but the fuel of job creation is economic demand. Without fuel, the engine does nothing.

So someone who is broke provides no economic demand, but when someone is so rich that they stash excess billions in an offshore tax haven, those hidden billions provide no economic demand either. So the D vision of the best way to run the country for the rich is to take a chunk of those billions out of the tax haven and put it where it creates economic demand. The economy is fueled, but the money goes straight back into the pockets of the rich anyway, so the way they see it, they aren't really losing anything.

I think a lot of opposition to elogs will soften over time. They save time for one. Running paper - especially running hot paper - takes a lot of time, while elogs are laughably quick and easy. Lowering total truck hours driven will increase rates, so the drivers losing miles will make at least some of it back in higher rate per mile. And when elogs makers were selling devices only to fellow large corporations, there was no incentive to make elogs devices perform quickly, since nobody buying the devices gave a carp about how long the driver had to sit there waiting for the stupid thing to turn on. But now that end users are also becoming buyers, we're seeing HUGE increases in how quickly the devices perform. Instant, like any other modern device.

And I think there is more flexibility than people realize. DOT focuses on paper logs because that's where they find all the violations. Yes, you can paper over a shipper delay that would have resulted in a log violation, but if you're on elogs, having the violation doesn't matter if they don't even want to bother looking at your logs. And you probably would only have gotten a verbal warning if they did find it anyway. That sticker on your door saying elogs on board is almost as big a deal as having your DOT number displayed, and it'll get you waved thru a lot of places where you might otherwise get inspected.

 

Oops, sorry @d o g, I was already typing when you posted that. The second half is about elogs; I hope that's an ok segue back towards being on topic.

 

Atlanta is a rough market. But i have found it has use. It has a lot of florida freight. So if I've been up working the Midwest for a couple weeks, its one of the markets i can use to get home for a good rate. Its not my first choice, but its on the list of markets i am constantly watching.

 

Hey @Pepper24 do you find it possible to live on LoadBoards? I haven't been able to close a customer yet so I keep heading to LoadBoards to find my freights. But it's hard to find good (or great) paying loads every time. Especially if you try to plan far ahead of your calendar.
Creating good relationships with Brokers has helped me a little but I still depend on Boards.