Category Archives: regulation

Government Investment Nanny

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The Federal government regulates who it will permit to invest in private investments—startups, pre-IPO opportunities, loans to private companies, and the like. These are highly risky investments, and they have high payoff possibilities, even if those possibilities are low. The Feds limit those who it permits into these private opportunities to folks with $1 million in net assets, not including their primary home residence, or at least $200,000 in yearly income, or $300,000 for a joint household.

Now there’s a move afoot to add a government-regulated glorified intelligence test as an alternative path for investors to make these investments.

A group of lawmakers has proposed legislation that would allow any investor capable of passing an exam to buy private securities—an array of investments like shares in pre-IPO startups or loans to private companies that are considered riskier because they have looser disclosure rules than public securities and can be harder, and sometimes impossible, to sell in a pinch.

Passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to invest in a class of securities—passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to vote in an election. That Jim Crow era requirement has long since been done away with. Except now Congressmen want to revive the practice for investing.

Private securities—meaning outside the scope of government regulation. This is something far too many politicians can’t stand; it limits their power to dictate to us; it limits their power, period.

The idea is that the ability to make these high-risk, high-reward bets should be open to all sophisticated investors, not just those with the biggest bank accounts.

Of course the definition of who’s sufficiently sophisticated, the definition of “sophisticated” itself is carefully left to government personages.

Patrick Woodall, Americans for Financial Reform‘s Managing Director for Policy (AFR is vehemently pushing for even more government regulation of our financial decisions):

Knowledge cannot protect people from the potential losses if they invest in risky, opaque, and illiquid, private offerings[.]

Neither can government. Nor should government try. The decision to run those risks are ours alone.

This is nanny-state-ism intruding into us private citizens’ own affairs far beyond regulation of public company-related investments. Companies are private rather than publicly owned explicitly to get out from under the government’s thumb, and citizens invest here—or would if we could—explicitly to stay out from under the government’s thumb—especially when that thumb operates, according to government, for our own good.

No.

We average Americans do not need government protections from ourselves. We are fully capable of making our own decisions, and we are fully capable of handling, and fully and responsible for, the outcomes of our decisions. We are not wards of the state, much as one of our major political parties is bent on reducing us to that condition.

Who’s in Charge in Arizona?

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Arizona citizens will be voting this fall on a ballot measure that would

require legislative approval for any regulation that the state Office of Economic Opportunity projects would impose costs of $500,000 or more over a five-year period. Lawmakers or anyone subject to the proposed rule could request a cost estimate. If lawmakers failed to ratify the rule before the end of the legislative session, the promulgating state agency would have to issue a notice of termination.

That seems entirely reasonable, restricting as it does unelected bureaucrats in unelected “independent” State agencies from acting on their own recognizance to limit citizen activities.

However.

Republicans hold a majority in the Arizona House and Senate and this year passed a bill to require legislative approval for costly regulations. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it, claiming such a check “would create an unnecessary burden on state agencies that would inhibit their ability to carry out duties in a timely manner.”

And

Two Arizona Sierra Club chapters betray what opponents fear when they claim Prop. 315 “undermines the autonomy of state agencies.”

The Sierra Club chapters’ managers have said the quiet part out loud.

This is the Progressive-Democrat and her Leftist…supporters…insisting that the citizenry exist to give government agencies something to do; those agencies aren’t at all beholden to the State’s citizens or their elected representatives.

As the WSJ editors put it in the link above, The issue is who decides—elected officials, or unelected regulators? Or perhaps those regulators favored by Progressive-Democrat politicians?
The Know Betters in Arizona’s governor’s office have answered that plainly. The citizens of Arizona need to apply their answer in a couple of weeks, loudly and clearly.

Destruction

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has committed herself to eliminating the Senate’s filibuster.

I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom[.]

Never mind that the filibuster is the only tool the minority party—whichever it is—has with which to be heard in the Senate and to get at least part of its priorities included in legislation that winds up enacted into law.

Aside from her pushing a national mandate for abortions, instead of letting the citizens of each of our 50 States decide that question for themselves (with many of which States deciding in favor of abortion), the elimination won’t stop there. The Progressive-Democratic Party Senators will eliminate the filibuster altogether.

That elimination will lead to a number of nationally destructive outcomes. One will be the prompt passage of new laws accelerating Federal spending and increasing taxes on us average Americans and our businesses.

Another will be the loosening of our election laws, allowing anyone to vote, including illegal aliens. Recall all those Party politicians who oppose requiring voting eligibility to be limited to those who prove their American citizenship. Recall, too, those Progressive-Democratic Party-run local jurisdictions that already allow non-citizens to vote in those local elections.

Damaging as that would be, those moves at least could be reversed at the next election—assuming the other party can overcome the loosened election laws. Far worse will be the destruction of the Supreme Court as Party moves to expand it and to get confirmed activist, progressive Justices. That destruction will last for generations; it won’t be correctable by short-term election cycles.

Tax Data Theft

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A tax data thief stole Donald Trump’s tax data and transmitted them to various press outlets, many of which, in turn, promptly published the data. The thief was caught and has been sentenced to five years in jail. Congress is working on a bill that would make the penalty for such action much more serious.

That’s nice, but that legislation only addresses one side of the crime, and it only addresses one area in which such a crime might occur.

A more complete solution would include all instances of stolen information and the recipients of those stolen goods. If a journalist receives stolen material from any source on any subject and moves to profit from that—moves to publish the material—instead of returning the material to its owner or turning it over to relevant law authorities, that journalist must be held criminally liable for his crime. He is, after all, receiving stolen goods.

In most other cases, recipients of stolen goods who then move to profit from the receipt are criminally liable. There’s no reason to excuse the press from that liability. If no one is above the law, that must include journalists and the organizations for which they work or to which they contribute.

Free Speech German Style

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A Gab user stands criminally accused of…free speech…in Germany. Gab, so far, is standing tall and refusing Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office demand that the social media outlet dox the user so s/he can be hauled before a German court to answer for his “crime.” The user, it seems, called the Leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, Ricarda Lang, fat.

This is from German Criminal Code, Section 186:

disseminat[ing] a fact about another person which is suited to degrading that person or negatively affecting public opinion about that person, unless this fact can be proved to be true [is a crime]….

Here is Lang, in all her bountifully curvaceous glory:

That’s fatter than fat, it seems to me, and her image provides ample proof of the Gab user’s characterization. But telling the truth, even when the truth is proved, seems to be illegal in Germany.

While we’re on the subject of free speech, here’s Section 188:

If…insult (section 185) is committed publicly, in a meeting or by disseminating content (section 11 (3)) against a person involved in the political life of the nation on account of the position that person holds in public life and if the offence is suited to making that person’s public activities substantially more difficult

Never mind that that’s the whole point of public insults against a political personage—especially if the insult turns out to be accurate and not merely contemptuous (which would be legal in any nation whose politicos are not terrified of their own constituents).

But wait—Section 192 the German attitude toward proof that Section 185 otherwise says would exonerate the person.

Proof of the truth of the asserted or disseminated fact does not preclude punishment in accordance with section 185 if the insult results from the form of the assertion or dissemination or the circumstances under which it was made.

Here’s my “form of the assertion or dissemination:” my echo of the Gab user’s characterization of Lang’s physique, repeated from above:

How far Germany has fallen.