Monthly Archives: March 2023

“Dumb Rule”

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Now the Army management corps has struck again, this time doing away with a long- (and I mean long) standing tradition of letting tank crews name their tanks. Unless they perform on the gunnery range (under the range’s necessarily artificial—peacetime safety constraints, and all that—conditions) well enough to suit those in the management corps.

One former Army officer said [brackets in the original],

Sounds like a dumb rule that has [command sergeant major] written all over it[.]

Indeed. The alleged motivation for the change is to allow only those crews performing at the top on the gunnery range to name their tanks as motivation for being allowed to name their tanks. Never mind that there’s already a natural competition among tank crews, and not only on the gunnery range. Never mind that another—better—way to improve tank gunnery is to increase maintenance and training rates, including the frequency of live fire exercises. (‘Course that would take more money than the real dollar cut in defense spending President Joe Biden (D) wants.)

No, this is a rule for the sake of having a rule. As an ex-Air Force officer, the change sounds to me like a new kid on the block, whether CSM or Commanding General, was desperate to find material for his upcoming Performance or Efficiency Report.

New Kid Material is widespread and long-standing enough already, but this is the sort of nonsense that woke-ism in the SecDef’s and JCS’ offices is producing.

“Banking System is Safe”

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That’s what President Joe Biden (D) claims after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe. Your deposits are safe. Let me also assure you that we will not stop at this. We will do whatever is needed.

But that’s true only if regulators do their job and enforce the rules in place—as they chose not to do in the runup to SVB’s failure—and if risks are well-known and left to the responsibility of the risk-takers in a free market rather than laid off to us taxpayers to make those taking the risks whole.

That last just transfers the risks to us and leaves the risk-takers entirely free of risk. That last, also, is what concerns Senator Tim Scott (R, SC), even though Biden claims that taxpayers won’t cover the losses. Yes, we will. SVB doesn’t have enough book value, even were its liquidation not done at fire sale prices, to cover the billions of investor—venture capitalists, startups, bond holdings, and on and on—losses that will occur. Scott’s concerns:

We just heard recently that they’re going to really have the greatest form of corporate cronyism that we’ve seen in a very long time. They’re going to insure all the deposits, even the ones over the $250,000 limit, which means that the most sophisticated investors are now going to have the insulation of the federal government. That is problematic. It sends a very negative statement to the marketplace….

Scott’s concerns are well-founded. Here’s what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said in their Sunday joint statement

Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the US economy…providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.

That bailout is destructive of our banking system and of our economy at large.

I’ll have more on that last tomorrow.

Ending Subsidies

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President Joe Biden wants to end fossil fuel subsidies, per his budget offering.

I actually partly agree with him on this. But only partly, because he’s only partly ending subsidies—those for fossil fuels. He needs to end—or propose ending; it’s Congress that has to do the deed—all subsidies for any purpose in any industry.

Still he could make a major step forward were he to produce a favorable answer to my question:

Will Biden also end the “green” energy subsidies, or will the Progressive-Democrat continue to insist on picking industrial winners and attacking those industries of which he personally disapproves?

Guess.

Insufficient

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There is a move to relocate the FBI headquarters out of DC. Assuming the FBI should be kept as an institution, which is not at all established given the institution’s corruption, naked political bias, and anti-Catholic (anti-religion generally?) bigotry in its ranks from middle management on up, its relocation out of the Beltway would be good.

However, the two new locations on offer—Fairfax County, VA, and Prince George’s County, MD—are not sufficiently far away. Those areas are just down the street a piece, in the Beltway suburbs.

If the FBI is to be kept on at all, its headquarters needs to be moved out into Middle America, to a small town in, say, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska. Or perhaps in Oklahoma, where the bureau also can deal at close hand with the reservation problems from long-term Congressional negligence that are newly exposed by a recent Supreme Court decision forced by that negligence.

Forfeiture

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Robert Frommer had a Wall Street Journal article centered on a case in which the FBI confiscated the life savings of his client as they raided a bank’s safe deposit box vault and snatched up the contents of deposit boxes rented by hundreds of customers, including his client’s. The FBI never charged his client with any wrong-doing, and in denying her request to get her stuff back, the FBI simply said “No,” with no explanation.

What drew my attention even more strongly, though, was Frommer’s penultimate sentence:

Courts must demand justice by preventing agencies from forfeiting property without informing owners of what they did wrong.

That’s not enough. Seizing and forfeiting are two different things. If existing statutes don’t permit courts to bar forfeiture altogether prior to actual conviction, than Congress must correct the statutes’ shortfall.

Further, rather than seizing property prior to conviction—the FBI and too many local police departments repeatedly show how difficult it is even to get back seized property—law enforcement agencies should be limited to getting courts to freeze property pending conviction, leaving the frozen property at least nominally, and formally, in the possession of the owner.