Any discussion of what "optimal" would look like is for another time. So, too, is the difference between "initial perception" and "desired/actually achieved result," which rather unites these sausages.
- Sometimes the minutiae of corporate accounting overwhelms everything else about a company. This can most obviously arise from major mergers and acquisitions, either overtly due to mispricing and misvaluation or more subtly from reverse cultural imperialism. The key commonality in both instances is the malign influence not of the particulars of Dodge v. Ford, but the failure to examine what "shareholder wealth maximization" actually means — and over what time period. Year-over-year results (whether used to set securities prices or management compensation) just don't make a lot of sense for projects that by their very nature have decade-long development cycles before their success or failure can be adjudged, and it's even more nonsensical when to the end-user that item is not obtained/used for "profit" (or anything resembling "wealth maximization").
Application of this concept to the ongoing and future Paramount fiasco is left as an exercise for the student — and the shareholder-litigation partners at white-shoe law firms. None of whom will reflect on the difference between "wealth maximization" and "immediate gratification of impulsive greed."
- With all due respect, General Olson, you've gotten the problem almost exactly backward. The difficulty is not with excessive demands for recusal of judges who have picayune, attenuated financial interests in a matter that might appear before them. It is, instead, with the difficulty of removing judges who won't give a fair, on-the-facts hearing to a matter due to extralegal ideological prejudice… and the difficulty of finding a suitable replacement judge who will, given partisan appointment processes (federal and state, appellate and trial, literally appointed and elected). Even the specific mischaracterized example cited by General Olson in his opinion piece reflects the problem: Judge Willett's writings, both judicial and extrajudicial, reflect fundamental animus against the very purpose and existence of the subject agency, such that a reasonable person might question his impartiality. In practice, however, that is not the standard; instead, actually obtaining recusal virtually requires finding an "adverse financial interest."
The irony that a standard — perhaps not a rule, as family members can't be directly subjected to it — that judges shall place all of their investments into either a blind trust or an index fund, together with some relief from forced-sale tax consequences, would pretermit most of these arguments has escaped almost everyone. Then, it would undermine the "I'm smarter than the Average Investor" perception, too… even though both history and math demonstrate otherwise (absent insider knowledge of precisely the kind that would cause a reasonable person to question impartiality).
- It's election season, so I suppose I have to acknowledge various bloviations. Citizenship and immigration (and hence voter eligibility) is an obvious one, especially when cranked far to the right via fact-free racial and ethnic proxies. (Why yes, I am making an accusation here. Go ahead: Sue me.) It could, of course, be worse — as one candidate for the Big Job at present would make it. <SARCASM> Maybe we should just send all of the white people back where they came from, because they're all descendants of immigrants. </SARCASM>
Far more disturbing, though, is the utter failure to consider what "representative democracy" is in continued whingeing over how to declare victory that ultimately assumes that the prejudices expressed by a candidate cannot be changed by persuasion and facts, even as to unanticipated and/or peripheral matters, once in office. That is, that loyalty to a faction (closely resembling theocratic reasoning) necessarily overcomes reality every time. Perhaps that explains the overt factionalism and inability to bloody listen that is even more apparent in parliamentary systems (prevalent in Europe) than divided-executive systems (the US, and only a few other examples). Devices like the so-called Hastert Rule further mask the problem, preventing even debate and persuasion — the very core of representative democracy (at least among those who know how much they don't know, eschewing the theocratic impulse).
- If that's not depressing enough, go bomb hospitals (sadly, elsewhere too) in furtherance of the worst impulses (and routine practices) of Stalin, the Gang of Four, Pinochet, and Big Brother. Or maybe that's Nixon's list of enemies for the 21st century; unfortunately, I'm nowhere near prominent enough to be included, although my non-film-based Bacon number to some who no doubt are is not more than two…