Tag Archives: government

Charlie Gard and the British Government

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Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

The Mueller Investigation

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Is Robert Mueller running a legitimate investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign or officials in it and Russia?

Robert Mueller hasn’t decided whether to actually investigate Trump: Report

Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say

Mueller Seeks to Talk to Intelligence Officials, Hinting at Inquiry of Trump

Special counsel is investigating Jared Kushner’s business dealings

It isn’t possible for the Mueller investigation to be legitimate with all of these leaks about his investigation and its status and findings that he’s permitting to occur.  Or that, Comey-esque, he’s doing himself.

He’s plainly not investigating his leaks, else that would have been leaked, too.

On Whose Side Are These Guys?

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There is a move afoot in Congress to “overhaul” Dodd-Frank, at least to the point of adjusting the threshold size that banks would need to exceed in order to become subject to strict rules on “the capital, mergers, and other business” in which Government will permit these otherwise private enterprises to engage.  Under the present threshold of $50 billion or more in assets, some 37 financial institutions are subject to such Government diktat.

The trick will be reaching a compromise on what should come next.

Republicans tend to favor either setting a threshold of between $250 billion and $500 billion, or basing the designation on a bank’s riskiness rather than on its size. That new range would leave around a dozen or as few as a half-dozen banks facing stricter regulation.

No, there must be no compromise. Strict elimination of Dodd-Frank should come next.

Worse, raising the threshold would, indeed, shrink the number of institutions subject to Government regulation. That, though, would make it easier for Government to expand to completion its control over these institutions.

That’s the stuff of corporate fascism: Government control over what a putatively private enterprise will be allowed to produce and how much of it that enterprise will be allowed.  It’s dismaying that Republicans would propose such an affront to free enterprise and limited government.

Briefly

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President Trump has promised to roll back the regulatory state, but he’ll need the help of a judiciary that has for decades deferred too eagerly to executive agencies.

Indeed.  As the WSJ op-ed at the link says, that’ll require the judiciary to recognize its role in the Federal government and, in particular, its position in the hierarchy.

The proximate matter here is a DC Circuit ruling in US Telecom Association v Federal Communications Commission which used the Chevron Deference doctrine (which holds that the Court should be spring-loaded to uphold an Executive Branch agency rule rather than considering its constitutionality—its legitimacy—de novo on its merits) to find for the FCC.  Judge Brett Kavanaugh dissented, and he based his dissent in large part on decrying that deference doctrine.  The WSJ asked

Perhaps the High Court will accept his invitation to revisit a doctrine [Chevron Deference] that has long been abused.

But the existence of the doctrine is the abuse, not that the doctrine gets abused. The Constitution made the judiciary a coequal branch of the Federal government, not a deferential one.

Full stop.

Disruptions

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Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE) opined in the Friday Wall Street Journal about economic disruptions and how we’re undergoing the largest one in human history.  However, he exposed a number of misunderstandings about both disruptions and about proper policy responses the current one (stipulating that it’s the largest one in human history, but its size is irrelevant to the principle involved).  For instance:

[W]e don’t have a national-security strategy for the age of cyberwarfare and jihad.

This isn’t a matter of disruption per se, though. Defense establishments always have to adapt to new strategies and weapons systems. Even political disruption which he laid off to the 17th century’s invention of nation-states isn’t all that with today’s failed states and network entities like the terrorists Daesh and al Qaeda.  What did that Treaty of Westphalia of invent away from after all?  Political entities built around clans, principalities, networked entities like the feudal, often marriage-related polities.

We also lack seriousness about tackling the entitlement crisis.

True enough.  However, this, too, isn’t about responding to disruption per se.  A return to small, limited government handles this by putting solutions to the putative purpose of Big Government entitlement largesse back where it belongs: in the hands of American individuals and our families, friends, churches, and private charities.  Government does have a role here, even a properly small, limited government, but only from the bottom jurisdictions up, and only as a last resort, not the default entry.

And what about the policy implications of the economic disruption?

Again, this has nothing to do with disruption per se.  That return to small, limited government would handle this, just fine, including Sasse’s concerns regarding education and job (re)training.  Big Government involvement, especially here, is routinely obstructive.

[O]ur politics are not yet up to the challenge.

Nor need they be; this is Sasse’s underlying false premise. What is needed is more laissez faire and less Big Government fare.