Tag Archives: markets

Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.

Price Controls and Ways Around Them

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Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie, economics professor at George Mason University and emeritus economics professor at UC Irvine’s Merage Business Schoo, respectively, reflected on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ price control scheme and some ways around them.

[C]competitive market forces will encourage them to do so, even when illegal.

Competitive forces, especially, are human nature: all of us want our goodies for as little as possible, and where there are at least two suppliers of something, those suppliers will compete with each other on some form of price in order to get our business.

Thus:

  • “shrinkflation”— keep prices the same but shrink the portions of goods
  • nonprice adjustments, such as relabeling/redefining “select” grade steaks as higher-ranking “choice” grades
  • hire fewer workers
  • devote less effort to cleaning produce
  • reduce hours of operation

Another major way, for all that it’s an illegal path—that pesky human nature—is the black market. Price controls are an open door for these to thrive, even where they’re illegal. And yes, that includes here in these United States. Keep in mind, especially vis-à-vis black markets that human nature—wanting stuff for as little as possible—can be made to work strongly against black market: free markets, especially those without price controls, will always and everywhere be able to produce goods and services at less cost and so for lower prices than can any black market. The latter’s production costs always include things that are intrinsically absent in free markets: the cost of evading the lawman along with the risk premium necessarily charged against the likelihood of getting caught.

Downsizing Government

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Or, perhaps more accurately, an earlier buzz-term: right-sizing government. With our Federal government so bloated with employees, it may be that a partial solution is developing, particularly in DC, where the bulk of our Federal government sits.

The Biden administration has struggled to get more of the tens of thousands of members of the federal workforce in the District of Columbia back to the office on a more regular basis. That struggle is likely to continue if a Democrat wins the White House in November, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden endorsed Sunday when he announced he was exiting the race.
If [former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald] Trump returns to the White House, the district’s office market could be hit even harder. He has already pledged to abolish the Education Department, which has more than 2,500 employees in the district.

Trump is on the right track in eliminating no longer necessary Executive Branch departments. However, the Federal workforce is proffering its own solution, one that would work well in parallel with the Trump path: those who don’t return to the office to do their work are self-selecting themselves for termination from government employment.

There’s this, too, regarding the commercial landlords who might be hurt by such moves:

The district’s office market is poised to get worse regardless of the outcome of the election. ….
Six agencies, including the Justice and Treasury departments, have lease expirations between 2024 and 2027 in which they are expected to give up close to 600,000 square feet, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

A solution suggests itself for this, a solution that even Progressive-Democrats should love: DC, in partnership with those landlords, could translate those 600,000 square feet of space into affordable housing. Such a solution even would be intersectionally beneficial.

Alternatively, under a Trump administration, with reduced regulatory interference with the chief business of the American people (that being business, as President Calvin Coolidge noted), more businesses likely will move to DC and occupy much, if not most, of those newly available vacancies.

Dictating the Terms of Business

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is at it again, trying to dictate how private businesses in our, so far, substantially free market economy will be permitted to operate. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden intends to dictate to landlords:

Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: if you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

This isn’t just the big landlords, either, bad as that would be by itself. Biden’s proposed cap would apply to half the rental market in the country.

We’ve known this for a while. Here’s then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeting:

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.

He’s talked about fundamentally transforming our economy in his State of the Union addresses, also.

A Campaign Platform

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I’ll be brief. The Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate and current President Joe Biden, has a legislative and administrative history of

  • open to nonexistent borders, epitomized by his failed effort to codify the entry of 1.4 million or more illegal aliens per year (assessed at weekly intervals) before a President would be authorized to do anything toward closing our border
  • enormous inflation that’s only just abating, although the new price levels remain much higher than extant in the prior administration, with no sign those elevated price levels are abating
  • real wages falling relative to those extant in the prior administration as nominal wage increases, with some excursions to the topside, in the main have been smaller than price increase increases due to inflation
  • denigrating Israel as it fights for its survival against the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah—and against their masters, Iran—while moving to protect Hamas by demanding cease fires that only benefit Hamas
  • encouraging continued butchery in Ukraine by slow-walking and blocking weapons Ukraine needs while coddling the invader barbarian as sanctuary against serious counterattack by Ukraine
  • appeasing Iran in its desperation to get Iran to let this administration back into the failed Iran nuclear weapons development deal
  • appeasing the People’s Republic of China regarding that nation’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and its threats against the Republic of China
  • meekly accepting PRC military and spy bases in Cuba, elsewhere in the Caribbean, South American, in even more meek abrogation of our erstwhile long-standing Monroe Doctrine
  • active deprecation of our energy production and energy independence through constant attacks on and blocks of coal, oil, natural gas—even liquid natural gas export—in favor of unreliable wind and solar farms

Those are just the high points; the full list is quite extensive.

This is why Biden and Harris won’t run on policy and how their policies for the next term would benefit Americans. Instead, their campaign platform is personal; it’s focused against a man. They don’t even argue against his policies, past or future—only that the man himself is bad.

This lack of a coherent, reasoned platform is instructive of the capacity of the Progressive-Democratic Party to govern.