1. Sean Connery
2. Harrison Ford
3. Bill Murray

Yours?

If you want a great business, take Coca-Cola. The product is unchanged, they sell 1.5 billion 8 ounce servings per day 122 years later. They have a moat; if you have a castle, someone’s going to come after you.

Gillette accounts for 70% of razor sales at 80% gross margins and it is the same over time. Men don’t change much. Shaving might be the only creative thing they do, like painting the Sistine Chapel.

Snickers has been the #1 candy bar for the past 40 years. If you gave me $1 billion to knock off Snickers, I can’t do it. That’s the test of a good business. You don’t knock off Coke or Gilette. Richard Branson is a marketing genius. He came in with Virgin Cola, we’re not sure what the name means, perhaps it turns you back into one, but he couldn’t knock off Coke. We look for wide moats around great economic castles. Growth is good too, but we prefer strong economics. In the upcoming annual report I have a section titled “The Great, the Good, and the Gruesome” where I talk about these.

underground value via urban monarch

The cost of the $500 I’ll (tentatively) be receiving in the Spring isn’t being advertised to all of us by Congress or the President, but it’s basically future debt…because, oh wait, our government doesn’t have the money!

Now, since I’m paying MORE than enough taxes, I’ll be happy to contribute that cash to my tax bill or, heck, a new iPhone.

John Stossel sums up the problem of “economic stimulus” in the form of checks from the government:

The federal government is in the red. Bush’s new budget has a $400 billion deficit. There’s no lockbox with $100 billion in it. So to give everyone a tax rebate, the government will have to borrow more money. But that only moves the cash from one part of the economy to another. As Roberts says, “It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.” Unless the government cuts spending, which the theory says would neutralize the stimulus, the only other way to get the money will be to raise taxes or to have the Fed create money — inflation — which would raise the price of everything. How will that stimulate anything but the politicians’ short-term approval ratings?

Read the rest…

The mystery is why anyone would think the foreign-affairs part of Sen. McCain’s brain is not in sync with the part that produced: McCain/Feingold legislation that eviscerates core free-speech rights on which a functioning democratic republic depends; or proposals for massive, unregulated immigration (from someone claiming the mantle of national security paragon, no less); or global-warming legislation, the latest iteration of the senator’s Big Government regulatory penchant (we are talking, after all, about someone who has suggested federal government intervention in everything from professional boxing to major league baseball); or opposition to the Bush tax cuts in class-warfare rhetoric so strident it would make Hillary Clinton blush (including a swipe just last week against “greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished”); or the Gang of 14 deal, which undermined a conservative effort to end Democrat filibusters against the Bush judicial nominees.

The surge can only camouflage so much. Sen. McCain’s readiness to be the commander-in-chief fit for today’s perils is the grand hope his supporters offer to overcome substantial conservative doubts. It’s a mirage.

National Review