Tag Archives: freedom

Australian Regulators’ Mistake

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Australian regulators are pressuring X to take down—to delete—a video posted to X showing the real-time terrorist attack in a western Sydney suburb on a Bishop of the Christ the Good Shepherd Church. X has blocked access to the video from locations within Australia per the regulators’ request, but is balking from going further. The regulators, though, are demanding the video be deleted altogether. Musk has responded that that would set the dangerous precedent of allowing one nation’s regulators to control the content of the Internet everywhere in the world, not just within the regulators’ own nation.

That’s a valid beef, but it misses entirely the much larger problem.

Deleting a posting altogether is nothing more than rewriting history and pretending the event posted about, and the post itself, never happened.

History is how we know where we were—geographically, economically, politically, socially, genetically, and on and on—how we know where we are (itself at immediate risk due to demands for real-time excision of current events), how we know how we got from then to now, and how we can learn how to get from now to a desired future. Rewriting history as every bit as dangerous to us as is any war and far more dangerous to our civilization.

X needs to stand tall against the Australians’ demand for revisionist history, and its fellow social platforms, vis., Meta, who so meekly complied with the regulators’ demand to rewrite history, need to find some courage, and some understanding of what they’re doing, and stop deleting postings, however repugnant, or merely government-disapproved, they may be.

Government Convenience

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The Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission is vacuuming every scrap of data—including personally identifiable—on every single stock trade done by every single American, and it’s collecting these data from every single broker, exchange, clearing agency, and alternative trading system in the US.

It’s also doing this without any Congressional authorization to do so. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed suit to attempt to block the SEC from continuing and to get the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail, the mechanism by which the SEC collects and stores these ill-gotten data, completely eliminated. Peggy Little, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel:

By seizing all financial data from all Americans who trade in the American exchanges, SEC arrogates surveillance powers and appropriates billions of dollars without a shred of Congressional authority—all while putting Americans’ savings and investments at grave and perpetual risk.
The Founders provided rock-solid protections in our Constitution to prevent just these autocratic and dangerous actions. This CAT must be ripped out, root and branch[.]

The SEC’s argument in favor of its invasion is utterly cynical [summarized by former Attorney General William Barr]:

[I]t could investigate things more easily if it weren’t limited to gathering investor information on a case-by-case basis after suspected wrongdoing took place.

Barr’s response:

But the whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to make the government less efficient by making it jump through hoops when it seeks to delve into private affairs[.]

Indeed. The convenience of Government is no excuse for Government doing anything. We the People don’t exist to give Government something to do. Government works for us.

It’s time to thoroughly rein in the SEC, and a (not the) efficient way to do so is for Congress to cut the SEC’s budget to the bone, including reducing its payroll line item, until the SEC’s commissioners and staff straighten up or are replaced. And note that that payroll line item includes those commissioners’ pay.

Government Influence over the Means of Production

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The Biden administration wants to control—put a leash on—the development of artificial intelligence software, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach to the development of the Internet. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal Monday article.

The matter is far deeper and far broader than that. Biden’s move regarding AI is of a piece with his moves regarding ICE vs battery cars, solar and wind energy vs oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, and on and on.

In truth, Biden isn’t the first in this; too many prior administrations of both parties, have wanted to…influence…what our private enterprises, especially those that make things, should or can produce—or not produce. The efforts to control range can be indirect—Obamacare’s nationalization of our health provision and health coverage industries, in addition to Biden’s moves—and they reach as far back as Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful effort to nationalize our railroad system, Woodrow Wilson’s and Harry Truman’s outright seizures of a variety of factories and factory systems, ultimately overturned by the courts, and they include prior administrations’ indirect moves of subsidies for some industries—”green” energy, for instance—and no subsidies or significantly smaller subsidies for competing industries.

The matter reaches as deeply and broadly as our tax code, which by design gives overt preference to some industries and de-prefers some other industries.

The Biden administration has only greatly accelerated this trend of government intrusion into the affairs of private enterprise.

This expanding government insistence that private enterprise can make whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants so long as it has government approval (even if only tacit) to do so is textbook Fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government control of what gets produced and the amounts produced.

A No-Filibuster Senate

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The Wall Street Journal editors worry about Arizona’s Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision not to run for reelection, coupled with West Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement, and how those decisions will affect the Senate filibuster. The editors correctly predict the end of the filibuster if the Progressive-Democrats maintain their Senate majority after the coming elections, and they suggest the ravages of the resulting one-party rule:

  • doubling the national minimum wage
  • mandating a British NIH-style national health care program—Medicare for All—and damn the cost or reduction in quality of health care
  • enacting national “right” to abortion
  • a 35% corporate tax
  • union favoritism
  • enacting nationwide mail voting

The editors then, with breathtaking innocence, suggest that the next time Republicans were to control Congress and the White House, they could abolish all of these. However, once the Progressive-Democrats get control of our Federal government is so sweeping, filibusterless way, on what basis do these editors think any opposition party could ever win a national election again?

For all of those risks, though, the editors missed the one that would impact the last bastion of our republican form of government. With no filibuster, Party could easily stack the Supreme Court and install their activist Justices, who would then issue rulings entirely consistent with Party’s disdain for our Constitution. That would be the end of the Supreme Court, and of so much more.

The stakes for our republic are that high.

Not All It Can Do

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Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’ New York City government has a new way to spy on American citizens resident in that city, or even just visiting.

New York City drivers buckle up because Big Brother (aka the MTA) is keeping a watchful eye on you by installing cameras along New York City streets to track you. But why? Well, it all boils down to money, of course. The MTA is rolling out a controversial $15 per day congestion fee for all drivers venturing south of 60th Street. They’ve even given this area of Manhattan a snazzy name: the toll congestion zone.

That’s its publicly stated—look, a squirrel—purpose.

Another purpose, one Adams and his city government don’t want to mention, is to track those drivers to see where they go; where they park and shut down, presumably getting out of their cars; what shops they go to, at least identifying the shops within walking distance; and how long they’re there.

Because inquiring Government minds want to know.