Category Archives: rights

Why Lend?

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How can a financial entity lend? Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is moving to hide individuals’ medical debt from potential lenders.

[P]roposed regulations would prohibit consumer reporting companies from including medical debts and collecting information on consumer reports that creditors use to make underwriting decisions. Creditors would also be barred from using medical collections information when evaluating borrowers’ credit applications.

This on the heels of his constant attempts to render student debt holders unaccountable for their debt.

Since lenders are increasingly being denied recourse, and now they’re to be denied useful information about a potential “borrower’s” ability to repay a debt a priori, why—how—could any lender make a decision to lend, other than to raise its interest rate very high, commensurate with the very high risk being inflicted on that lender by Government?

Look for the Biden administration to start trying to cap lending interest rates, next.

Progressive-Democrats’ Assault on American Energy and Americans’ Health

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In addition to Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden’s and his Cabinet cronies’ direct assault on our ability to produce our own energy (among the latest attacks is this), Biden and his syndicate are attacking our energy use through attacking us ordinary Americans in our homes.

Here’s a partial list of devices we use to make our lives comfortable, even merely livable, in what used to be our castles—our homes:

  • Gas stoves
  • Ovens
  • Clothes washers
  • Refrigerators
  • Refrigerator freezers
  • Freezers
  • Air conditioners
  • Dishwashers
  • Pool pumps
  • Battery chargers
  • Ceiling fans
  • Dehumidifiers
  • Microwave ovens
  • Portable electric spas
  • Air compressors

Biden’s regulations are intended to price these things out of reach of our middle- and lower-income groups of citizens. Things, mind you, like food preparation and storage tools, hygiene devices, devices for heating and cooling our shelters.

This is the utter contempt Party has for us American citizens.

What He Said

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The subheadline on Columbia Law’s School Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law Philip Hamburger’s Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed is spot on.

The First Amendment protects the right to hear alternative views, not merely to express them.

Hamburger went on:

People can’t develop their views with any sophistication unless they can consider opinions that enlarge, refine, moderate, or challenge their own. So, when government demands the suppression of some speech and chills even more, it reduces the diversity, value, and moderation of opinion—and thereby diminishes the opportunity for every individual to develop and express his own considered views. Censorship inhibits the output of critical voices, which lessens Americans’ intellectual input, which in turn limits their intellectual output. Reading and speaking are inextricably linked in conversation.

If we’re blocked from hearing another’s speech, however uncomfortable it might be to us, neither we nor the speaker have free speech.

Yet that’s the goal of the Biden administration: pressure speech outlets, especially social media platforms, to erase and to block future attempts to publish unpopular speech, speech the Biden administration personages cynically euphemize as “misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.” Never mind that those terms are defined by those same Leftist cronies in the administration.

Never mind, either, that the optimal response to misinformation, disinformation, malinformation—however defined—is with speech the hearer, or better, the listener—considers to better address the question than that objected-to speech. Simply suppressing objected-to speech isn’t mere laziness; it ranges from cowardice to naked power grabbing.

What Hamburger said, indeed.

Fundamentally Transforming America

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I’ve written elsewhere of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal, and of the destructive nature of that goal.

Here is the rank and file of the Progressive-Democratic Party, demonstrating how deep-seated is that desire to destroy our Republic:

  • nearly half of Democrats (47%) support censorship, and think speech should be legal “only under certain ­circumstances”
  • one-third of Democrats (34%) think Americans have “too much freedom”
  • 75% think government has a responsibility to censor “hateful” social media posts
  • a majority of Democrats (52%) approve of the government censoring social media posts “under the rubric of protecting national security”

It isn’t possible to fundamentally transform something without first destroying it so that the transformation can be done from the ground up. This assault is on that path if we choose wrongly in the fall of 2024.

ByteDance and TikTok

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Recall that TikTok, a social medium heavily favored by our children, is wholly owned by ByteDance. Recall further, that ByteDance is domiciled inside the Peoples Republic of China. Finally, recall that the PRC’s 2017 national security law requires every PRC-domiciled company to collect and deliver to that nation’s intelligence community any information that community requests. A bonus memory: TikTok’s executive team has been at pains to insist that, in the United States, they operate independently of all of that.

Against that backdrop, there’s this:

Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the US from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.

That’s not independence. Nor does it matter what top jobs, in particular, ByteDance’s transferred executives assume in TikTok. They work for ByteDance, which operates at the behest of the PRC government. Their presence at the top of TikTok only tightens that control.

Bottom line: it doesn’t matter how much gussying up ByteDance or TikTok executives do in their attempts to deny Peoples Republic of China control of TikTok; the PRC’s intelligence community can command TikTok to obtain and deliver any information regarding TikTok’s users that the intel community wants.

It’s past time the Federal government bans TikTok from any and all operations inside the US. Standing in the way of that are too many Congressmen and Senators, of both parties, who have taken “donations” from folks like Jeff Yass, who through his Susquehanna International Group owns a big stake in ByteDance, [and he] has also worked to fend off a US ban through organizations like Club for Growth. Among those…donees…are

  • Senator Rand Paul (R, KY), who received through a Paul-supporting PAC, $3 million
  • Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY), who has received $32,200 directly from Yass, his wife, and via a Massie-supporting PAC
  • Other [carefully unnamed] Republicans in Congress, including at least five others besides Paul and Massie, who received financial support from Club for Growth and have objected to legislation targeting TikTok.

Yass has rationalized his antipathy to banning TikTok with this:

TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.

Aside from moving to protect his investment in the PRC-controlled ByteDance, it appears that part of everything I believe includes the right of the Peoples Republic of China to spy on our children. Banning TikTok has nothing to do with interfering with free speech (or innovation, come to that). Banning TikTok would ban a tool used by the PRC against our children and our national security, to the extent it’s used by government officials at any level of our hierarchy or by business executives anywhere. Content, speech, all of that, could and would continue apace, completely unhindered, on any of the plethora of other social medium platforms.

Ban TikTok. No further delays.