Daily Archives: 5 April 2019

Nice Ideas, But….

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There are some moves afoot in the House Ways and Means Committee to revamp Americans’ retirement savings accounts.  A couple of them include

increasing the flexibility associated with retirement accounts. If approved, individuals would be allowed to stash money into IRA accounts beyond the current age limit of 70½. It would also delay when individuals are required to begin taking required minimum distributions to 72, from 70½.

These are moves in the right direction, but they seem to proceed from a false premise, and some unanswered—unaddressed, even—questions.  One question is why there should be any age limit (or any other limit) on saving money into IRA (or other retirement) accounts.  Another question also is age-related: why there should be any age after which distributions from retirement accounts must be taken.

Those lead to the false premise.  Whose money is it, anyway, both before and after it goes into those retirement accounts? The worthies on the Committee seem to be assuming its Government’s money and not each citizen’s.

As interim steps, these are fine ones to take.  They cannot be any sort of final answer.

Protection

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Facebook’s MFWIC Mark Zuckerberg wants the Federal government to regulate the industry in which Facebook plays such a significant role. As cited by The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg claims that

such intervention is vital to protect both the welfare of users and the fundamental values of an open internet.

He closed his op-ed, originally published in WaPo and the Irish news outlet Independent with this gem:

People shouldn’t have to rely on individual companies addressing these issues by themselves….

People shouldn’t have to rely on Government to dictate to private enterprise, and those enterprises’ leaders and managers need not be told what to do by the men of Government.  It’s entirely appropriate for people to expect “individual companies” to behave honestly and honorably—to address these issues to customers’ satisfaction without Government involvement.  After all, the managers of those companies are grown, adult human beings who clearly understand the difference between right and wrong.  And we customers clearly can withhold our custom from misbehaving businesses; we need no Government instruction for that, or Government protection from those misbehaviors.

Zuckerberg knows full well what regulations are necessary for the purpose.  Which means he knows full well the internal controls he needs to implement—wholly voluntarily and without Government intervention, or even prodding—to achieve those regulatory goals.

Instructively, Zuckerberg is not alone.  Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Google honcho Sundar Pichai agree with him: they also want Government to impose “stricter privacy rules.”

In the end, though Zuckerberg, Cook, and Pichai aren’t interested in protecting consumers, much less their own—as Zuckerberg and Pichai have demonstrated repeatedly with Facebook’s and Google’s cavalier attitude toward customer’s privacy and control over personal data, and Cook’s willingness to work with the People’s Republic of China’s government to invade that nation’s citizen privacy in the name of government censorship.

No, all Zuckerberg (along with his fellow protectee wannbes) want is protection of their companies from competitors—even though their very size and market share afford all of that that they need.