Still Standing in San Luis Obispo

Dear Still Standing,

Dottie is not a fortuneteller, tarot-card reader or entrail-grubbing omen prognosticator. She does not work part time as an industry analyst, stock picker or trend spotter. But she is an etiquette specialist, and in that regard she is on firm ground when she advises you that it is bad manners to simultaneously quote impudent Elton John lyrics and disrespect venture capitalists. They might not be able to buy your privately held company, but if they get in a snit, they could wipe out your whole market sector before you could finish humming the chorus to "Crocodile Rock."

And that doesn't even begin to address the rudeness of asking Dottie Downturn about the possibility of an upturn. Do you want Dottie to lose this job too? Do you think this country is anywhere near ready for another giddy joy ride of hyperspeculative stock markets and IPO-a-minute madness?

Sniff. Excuse Dottie for a moment as she wipes a tear from her eye and recalls those happy days when a four-month-old start-up burning through $10 million a month could be valued at a billion after just a couple of hours on the stock market. When a degree in English lit could buy you a $90,000 director of corporate marketing position. When just the imposition of the prefix "e-" to an ordinary word would constitute a business plan worth $100 million of Kleiner-Perkins V.C. money.

Those days, Dottie fears, will never return -- no matter how many people decide to do their shopping online.

Dear Dottie Downturn,

Laboring in Livermore

Dear Laboring,

What's that sound I hear? The dull rat-a-tat of cheap shots aimed at skewering dumb dot-com excess? Or the self-revealing wheeze of hot air escaping from a collapsing gasbag? It is clear that you completely misunderstood the economic lessons offered by your early lemonade entrepreneurship. When your father "fronted" you the lemons, as you so quaintly put it, he was instructing you in the basics of what it means to be a modern businessperson. Debt is good. Deficit spending is even better.

Open your eyes, man! We are a nation of debtors. The federal deficit is more than $5 trillion. Consumer credit card debt for the entire United States was $585 billion in 1999. The monthly trade deficit is running around $30 billion. And people are now carping over a few million here and a few million there being spent by dot-com visionaries. The shame, the shame.

An insult to working people?!! Far from it. On the contrary, demanding profits too early from dot-com start-ups is the real injustice -- the real insult to all people who understand how capitalism works. You know the old saw, don't you: "You've got to spend money to make money." The truth is, all you've really got to do is the first part -- spend money. Making money is an afterthought.

If you think about it, you'll see how much sense it makes. The more money you spend, the more money someone else is raking in, and the more vigorous the overall economy is. At least with dot-com expenditures, most of that money is staying within U.S. borders (give or take a few hundred million or so repatriated to foreign countries by programmers squeezing every penny out of their H1B visas). So Dottie begs, please, no more carping about aggrieved dot-commers complaining about having to balance their books. Until the people of this country understand, as they usually do, that making money is not the be-all and end-all of economic activity, we'll never be able to escape the dot-com quagmire we're stuck in and get back to the glory days of yore.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.