Although Facebook’s estimated market value is over $50 billion it still wasn’t a mature company in my eyes. In my opinion a company can’t be considered mature until the politicians start trying to crawl in and thus the company needs to resort to hiring lobbyist to protect itself from these government bureaucrats. Well Facebook is now looking for exactly that:
Until lately, Facebook has spent very little money in Washington, even by Silicon Valley’s frugal standards. The company’s outlays on lobbying totaled $351,000 last year, federal records show. That’s a fraction of the amount spent by other technology giants, including Google Inc.’s $5.2 million and Microsoft Corp.’s $6.9 million.
Facebook’s new Washington office, designed to look like a hacker’s lair, with walls of faux construction rubble, is a work in progress.
This is the price of running a successful business in America, you need to pay the politicians off twice. First you need to pay them taxes and then you must pay them in incentives in order to get favorable legislation passed and unfavorable legislation shot down. On a side note I found this funny:
President Barack Obama will travel to Facebook Inc.’s Silicon Valley headquarters Wednesday to hold a “town hall” meeting on the economy with users of the social-networking site.
Maybe the President should go down the the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI) instead. Facebook knows how to function in our currently regulated economy so the advice they’re likely to give is going to be more of the status quo. The (LvMI) on the other hand could explain to the President how the only way to save our economy is to move to a free market where producers and consumers are able to make transactions without interference from government bureaucrats. Of course that would require the government to surrender some of it’s control and we know they don’t want to do that.