Category Archives: regulation

Big Progressive-Democrat Government

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A Rasmussen poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the socialism in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s encouraging, but I have some concerns about the policies anyway, given that they’re being jammed through without regard for the views of the government’s employers.

The socialism aspect of the Biden-Harris and Progressive-Democratic Party policies is less a matter of the raw spending and usurious taxes in them much more a matter of the strings attached to the spending and of who gets (punitively) taxed.

The strings attached would give the Federal government more control over the States and over what businesses are allowed to produce and the prices they charge. The proposed tax structure would give the Federal government more indirect control by “encouraging” businesses to comport themselves IAW Government wishes.

That control is the essence of socialism, whether the control is through outright ownership or through controlling production permissions.

The spendthriftiness should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

The tax distortions should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

The increased Government control should be enough by itself to keep the bill from being passed.

Unfortunately, dangerously, each of the three individually (as well as together) are tightly aligned with Progressive-Democratic Party goals of spending to buy votes, taxing the Evil Rich to virtue-signal for votes, and to outright accrete power to Party.

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Court Deference

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The Supreme Court has before it American Hospital Association v Becerra, which The Wall Street Journal suggests makes a sufficient vehicle for revisiting judicial deference to an Executive Branch agency’s claims about the legitimacy of this or that regulation promulgated by the agency. The specific item is HHS’ Medicare reimbursement rates for outpatient drugs.

The question is far broader than that, however.

Chevron deference and its still extant forebear, Skidmore, need to be overruled, rescinded, and done away with altogether, along with all other moves, even predispositions, to defer. A regulation (or a mandated drug reimbursement rate) is valid or it is not on its merit, not because a government expert says it is.

It’s wholly unacceptable for a coequal branch of our government to subordinate itself to another coequal branch, much less to an unaccountable subordinate formation of that other branch.

Eliminating deference—subordination—and striking rules that exceed the governing statute’s scope, especially on the grounds that the statute was so vague (as Congress has taken to doing) that an Executive Branch agency must, or has the “flexibility” to, write regulations so originating as to be the agency doing its own legislating, would go a long way toward forcing Congress to do its own job rather than wishing it off onto others.

Our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, should be dispositive here.

Government Control of the Means of Production

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And it begins with Government control of the means of financing the means of production (among other things to be financed).

The acting head of the US’s top banking regulator called for banks to be screened for climate risk as part of their periodic stress tests and said the agency’s own regulatory approach was focused on maintaining the safety and soundness of the financial system.
“Banks face all sorts of risks everyday—credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk,” said Michael Hsu, acting comptroller of the currency. “What’s emerging now is that climate change is going to be impacting a number of those risks in different ways, and we need banks to prepare for that.”

This is nonsense. The risk that banks must be able to manage, in this venue, is the risk involved in Government reaction to the “climate change,” whether global warming is real or not.

Hsu’s attempt has nothing to do with the safety and soundness of our nation’s financial system; it has everything to do with an attempt to increase Government control of our nation’s financial system.

Be Like Austria

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That’s what Biden-Harris want for us with zir continued penchant for isolation and demands for vaccination—”[t]his is not about freedom or personal choice“—demands for masking, even of small children, and threats of lockdown, whether explicitly or by outcome.

Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, by fiat, is locking up all Austrians in the nation—even his vaccinated (but apparently still “unprotected”) subjects in order to “protect” all from the Wuhan Virus.

Schallenberg said the lockdown will start Monday and initially last for 10 days. Most stores will close, and cultural events will be canceled.
He initially said all students would have to go back into homeschooling.

After those 10 days, if the subjects don’t satisfy their Chancellor, Schallenberg may well extend his locking up for another 10 days.

At least now the Progressive-Democrats are getting specific, and not just pushing their more amorphous “be like Europe” mantra.