Monopolies

The FCC thinks it has a problem with the pending T-Mobile-Sprint merger, worrying that such a thing would anti-competitive and lead to rising prices for consumers.  The WSJ‘s editorial board demurs from the FCC’s attitude.

But greater economies of scale in industries with high fixed costs can create efficiencies that benefit consumers. DOJ’s position should evolve as markets and technology have.

Indeed, and the FCC’s regulators presently are illustrating another problem with government intervention in the market, whether by Republican or Progressive-Democrat regulators. The FCC’s regulators’ worries are purely speculative, not realized fact.

It’s also true that the converse—a particular merger leading to increased competition and lower prices—is just as speculative.

That’s the problem, though. Our anti-trust laws bar abuse of monopoly power, not the possession of it, and those laws have the mechanisms for enforcing and taking corrective, including punitive, action against companies that do abuse their monopoly power.

The right answer here is for government to get out of the way of a purely business decision made in a free market, even though it should watch carefully to ensure that abuse does not occur or is corrected should it occur.  Let the market do the speculation in the meantime.

Speculative intervention in the present case is solely in the mindsets of regulators.

Computers and Telephones

Call me Luddite.  A short time ago, Samsung decided to delay the rollout of its foldable cell phone for a month.  I won’t miss it.

My beef isn’t the growing pains associated with the device; all of those are just Samsung’s hurried and botched release before the thing was ready for prime time.  My beef is with the price and capability of the thing, stipulating that Samsung will solve those rollout problems.

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold will set you back two grand for a midget tablet’s display that’s part of a pocket calculator of limited calculational capability that also runs an app for making telephone calls.  Huawei is planning a fall rollout of a slightly larger and much more expensive foldable cell—theirs will run $2,600.

Jeez.

For that kind of money, I can get a desktop or a laptop, a real computer that can do actual computing.  That real computer includes a display that’s large enough that I can see actual image details, that makes reading material much easier on the eye, and that can hold a usefully-sized spreadsheet or document that I’m reading or writing.  I had an Osborne II, back in those early days, on which I had to scroll around left-to-right and up-and-down in order to see the rest of the spreadsheet or document.  I don’t need to repeat that today.  PCs and laptops also can do the calculations associated with those sheets and docs, and do them rapidly—neither of which an expensive pocket calculator can do.

After all, my work depends on actual interaction with my computer; I’m not just consuming what passes for entertainment, or games, or…news…these days.

Feel like scrolling your social media accounts or flipping through the day’s doings while sitting on the subway or in your car?  You don’t need to drop a couple of stacks to do that; an “ordinary” cell phone will handle that just fine.  But don’t do any of that if you’re the driver in your car.

Censorship

The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

Economic Performance

…and one Progressive-Democrat’s tax proposal.  Although, the fact is that these effects aren’t unique to Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, NM): the trend of effects are the outcomes of all the Progressive-Democratic Party’s proposals, differing only in detail.

Warren’s particular proposal is to tax business profits above $100 million at 7%.  Here are some outcomes of such a thing, according to the Tax Foundation, with the FoxBusiness cited.  A tax like this would

  • reduce incentives to invest, so GDP would shrink by ~1.9% over the long-term
  • reduce a firm’s capital by 3.3%
  • reduce wages by about 1.5%
  • eliminate as many as 454,000 full-time jobs
  • reduce after-tax income across the entire economy by 0.93%, with the biggest reductions on the top 1% of taxpayers
  • considering that shrinkage of our economy, after-tax income reduction could be an even larger 2.16%

But, hey, it gets after that hated 1%, so it’s all good.

This is of a piece with all Progressive-Democrat tax ideas, based as they so much are on their belief that the money really isn’t the business’ money, anyway.  They didn’t earn that.  They had (Government) help.

The Mueller Investigation

Not just the report itself, but his investigation, too, that was the subject of his report. What were the circumstances of the investigation’s start?  What triggered it?  Who leaked so many parts of it?

Now that Mueller’s report of his investigation has been released, and especially since it largely exonerated President Donald Trump, it’s necessary to see what led to the expenditure of two years of personnel resources and millions of dollars on an investigation of a President of the United States that accomplished so little—and in some cases so redundantly.

The role of senior FBI personnel, the importance of the Steele dossier in the trigger event(s), the lies told the FISA courts to get warrants, the FISA court itself, the behaviors and roles of members of Mueller’s investigation team—these all have severely damaged the reputation of the FBI, and of DoJ generally in te case of the FISA court, and they have damaged more than that—they’ve severely harmed the ability of the FBI to function as a Federal law enforcement agency and of DoJ’s ability to handle actual justice.

Investigations into this, like the one to which AG William Barr has committed, are critical to restoring the FBI and DoJ and producing substantive sanction on those personnel who misbehaved during the run-up to the investigation, its start, and its conduct.

 

Largely exonerated: the putative purpose of the investigation was to look into Russia’s interference into our 2016 election process and attempted interference in that election itself.  On this, the investigation found conclusively that Russia did do those things, and it found that the Trump campaign, personnel involved, and Trump himself did not collude—had nothing at all to do with those attempts.  And that outcome, despite repeated attempts by Russian agencies to get those personnel to collude or to con them into colluding.

The investigation, on turning to claims of one form or another of “obstruction of an investigation/of justice/of…,” did find quite a bit of embarrassing information and a number of embarrassing incidents that will be used to attack Trump—and much of this derogatory information was cynically leaked over the course of the investigation.  Withal, a closer look reveals the overall exoneration here, too.

Much is made, in the report, of Trump’s public “attacks” on the investigation itself and its conduct.  This was, supposedly, pressure, interference, obstructive in nature.  This is, actually, nonsense—and it’s insulting to the personnel conducting the investigation, from Mueller on down.  Suggesting that Trump expressing his anger and distrust of the investigation and the investigators in Trump’s inimitable way is capable of influencing the investigators by the slightest iota is to suggest that those investigators—every single one of them, from Mueller on down—are such timid summer pansies that they would be bothered by those words.  On the contrary, there’s nothing more to these public remarks than those implied insults and textbook projection by those expressing concerns about the impact of Trump’s words.  Even when those expressions come from the investigators themselves via the report.  Perhaps those investigators didn’t belong on Mueller’s team—their weakness, if not their bias, is exposed by their “findings.”

Much is made, also, of Trump’s (at least according to the claims of Mueller’s interrogatees over the course of his investigation) ordering various staff members to fire Mueller, to “influence” witness/interrogatees prior to their interrogations, of Trump’s personal attempts (allegedly) of such tampering.  What’s ignored here, too, in assessing the meaning of these things (stipulating they’re accurately, if narrowly, described) are three things in particular.

One is that Mueller was never fired, nor was his investigation ever actually interfered with.  It proceeded to its full and Mueller-style objective finish.

Another, regarding the behind the scenes interactions, is that had Trump been serious about firing Mueller or interfering with the investigation, Mueller would have been fired, the investigation actually interfered with, witnesses/interrogatees actually interfered with, and so on.  In the realization, though, Trump did none of these things, staffers were not fired and replaced with those who would obey those “instructions,” Trump did not bypass those staffers and act himself, and on and on.  He did none of those things because he wasn’t serious, except in the anger of the moment, as a man falsely accused (not just wrongly so) and faced with a years-long drumbeat of biased publicity and petty partisan attacks (and not just on himself, but on his family and his friends and his advisors) vented his anger in those moments.  The fact is, despite the claims of interference, of outright obstruction, none occurred.  None occurred, not because staffers disobeyed Trump, as so many of the NLMSM would have it, but because there was nothing to disobey.

A third thing is all the information and documentation—millions of pages of it—that Trump willingly and voluntarily released to Mueller and his investigation.  All of this information was free for the asking.  All of this information would have exposed the contradictions of Trump’s…obstruction…and they did not because there was none.

And all of that information freely provided is cooperation, not obstruction, except in the Newspeak dictionary of Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.

This is the backdrop that emphasizes the importance of Barr’s investigation, separate from that of the DoJ’s Inspector General.