Tag Archives: ethics

Self-Serving and Dishonest

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The Chicago Teachers Union wanted to raise dues on its Chicago membership to the tune of an additional $800 per year. They claimed they wanted the additional money for

win[ning] a majority of the first 21 person fully elected school board

and

resources to fund a statewide millionaires tax campaign

Union management doesn’t care that their own union bylaws say

…our dues are not used for political purposes—so our PAC relies on extra contributions from our members to support progressive candidates….

The CTU’s dues and its PAC are entirely separate from each other. So why raise dues in order to fund political purposes? Because CTU’s management is that dishonest and that contemptuous of union members’ intelligence.

It turns out that CTU members are not as dumb as their Betters think they are. The dues increase was voted down by roughly 3:2.

Members will need to be actively vigilant, though, these Betters have shown their colors, and they’ll be back with more attempts, or they’ll simply weasel-word their way around the members’ No and go ahead, anyway. This is, after all, Chicago.

The Strength and the Weakness

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In a Wall Street Journal article regarding Binance’s complicity, allegedly unwitting, in financing Iran’s behaviors despite sanctions to the contrary, there’s this tidbit that is the subject of my post.

The funds are part of billions in crypto transactions that have flowed through Binance to networks financing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the two years preceding the current US-Iran war, according to Binance compliance reports, blockchain data, foreign law-enforcement officials who track terrorism financing, and other crypto researchers and nonpublic documents.

It’s those blockchain data and their role in backtracking to the source of the funding that concerns me.

Blockchain is a highly useful, incorruptible means (so far; hackers and ever-improving computers include blockchain in the cyber arms race between the good guys and the nefarious) of proving the provenance of what’s being tracked, which is mostly financial transactions (again, so far). But that surveillance capability, in the hands of a government (and at bottom, there’s no practical way to keep it out of the hands of government) can be very dangerous to individual privacy, even to individual liberty.

We the People, and free citizens elsewhere in the free world, need especially to be vigilant and to respond quickly when government misuses that capability.

The “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

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I have some thoughts on this and how it might work. Of course, I’m speculating; no criteria for eligibility or payout have been set, the five-person “adjudication” panel has not been stood up, and it’s possible the funding will not survive Congressional purse-control oversight. Within that, here I go again.

Payouts, I expect, will be limited to actual loss, with no add-ons related to punitive matters. In many respects, this will be straightforward, but there are a number of areas where losses are not clearly specifiable and/or the alleged losses are highly subjective. These latter include losses from loss of jobs, loss of business revenue, closure of the business. Courts have gotten fairly adept, if widely variable across jurisdictions, in assessing this sort of loss.

Even hazier are things like loss through death of a spouse, loss of the spouse’s income (which is separate from his/her death, even if the income loss resulted from the death), loss of conjugal relations or alienation of affection resulting from divorce or the affair that led to the divorce—and yes, some divorces have occurred as a result of many of the J6 prosecutions and, in the present context, persecutions. Courts make guesses at these losses, but only guesses; they’re not very good at it.

The next, and the overwhelmingly most important, problem, though is this. Given provable or even merely articulable loss that meets fund eligibility criteria to this point, it’s going to be deucedly hard to prove the political targeting, lawfare nature of the cases for which an applicant is seeking recompense. At best, satisfying a court, most likely satisfying the succession of courts, appellate courts, the Supreme Court, with the potential for remands to lower courts for further consideration or for reconsideration, will take years and years to reach a final decision. And that decision may well be that the matter at hand was not, in fact, political targeting, and so no payout is due.

And one more question. Given a final decision, whence the monies for the legal costs of getting to one? Will the Fund pay the government’s legal costs apart from any payout ordered? If not, where will the government’s funding come from?

What Error did she Acknowledge?

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In James Freeman’s Best of the Web Wednesday piece, he wrote of Seattle’s newly elected socialist mayor Katie Wilson’s supposed acknowledgment of her problem vis-à-vis her disdain for big business in a competitive market. In her series of victory laps shortly after her election, she crowed while at a barista union rally,

I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either.

With the ensuing backlash, which includes an exodus of big businesses like Starbucks from Seattle, she then said,

Those comments were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good….

Freeman then quoted, without questioning, Danny Westneat, writing for the Seattle Times:

Admitting errors in public is hard…. Conventional political wisdom says it means you’re weak. In this case, I’d argue it’s a positive sign for the future of both the mayor and Seattle.
It means the mayor is at least more grounded in the real world than some of her blinkered progressive fans….
Maybe this is a chance to reset relations with businesses—at least ones other than Starbucks, where it may be too late.

But what “error” is Westneat claiming Wilson has admitted? In fact, it’s quite clear from Wilson’s own words, and Westneat has chosen to ignore it. Wilson admitted the error of her words, not the error of their intent, which is and always has been, her disdain for and assaults on free markets and the larger businesses that operate in them.

Competition

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In her Free Expression piece concerning the Harvard faculty’s vote to limit the number A grades (but not A- and lower grades) awarded to the school’s pupils, Mary Julia Koch had this:

It’s a fair point that a scarcity of A’s could crank up the competitiveness among an already ambitious group of college kids.

It’s a fair point? What, exactly, is wrong with competition among the pupils for the better grades, and so for the benefits ensuing, beginning with a less stressful and sooner successful job hunt? What’s wrong with increasing the level of that competition?

Harvard’s pupils, even after this grade inflation move (as small as it is), have no idea of the level of competition in our relatively free market economy. Those pupils have no idea of the benefits of competition, from improving their own skills to producing better products and services at the companies that employ them to the follow-on of more and better jobs and better pay.

One professor who doesn’t like the quota said that

she didn’t become a college professor to “rank my students against one another for the convenience of potential employers.”

But that’s precisely the purpose and the benefit of such rankings, and her attitude insults those students who take her classes. College graduates are not simple members of a commodity pool from which a company can select at random. Companies want to hire only the best because that’s what produces the best goods and services, which in turn maximizes the companies’ ability to thrive and grow and do R&D, which in the end maximizes job growth and so employment opportunities. One of the most important tools a company has in discriminating among a pool of brand new college graduates is an honestly done GPA.

The answers to my prior questions is that there’s nothing wrong with competition or with increasing competition. That’s what makes all of our lives better, including those of Harvard’s pupils, who now will be required to level up their game.