Tag Archives: markets

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

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Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages.  Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services.  He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors.  Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]

Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is.  It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform.  Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.

The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid.  Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.

The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills.  Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.

“Stand for Something”

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Howard Silver, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, in the aftermath of a tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey,said in a CNN interview cited by The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable & Quotable,

I think in this day and age, you really do have to stand for something[.]

This is after Rockets players apologized to the PRC for their GM’s tweet, Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta ran away from his GM’s tweet,

Listen….@dmorey does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets.

and the NBA as a whole affirmed their preference for PRC money over honor.

The NBA really does have to stand for something.

Absolutely.  Except when the NBA comes in for opprobrium from the PRC over a tweet supporting the citizens of Hong Kong. Then the league and its players and team management cower down.

Stand for freedom for the citizens of Hong Kong? They can’t: there’s no headroom under the bed.

WTO, Tariffs, and the EU

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The WTO ruled in favor of the US regarding a 15-yr-old dispute over French subsidies of Airbus that directly harmed The Boeing Company, to the tune of $7.5 billion.  The ruling allows the US to impose those $7.5 billion as tariffs, and the Office of the US Trade Representative says that we’ll apply

a 10% tariff on aircraft imported from Europe and apply a 25% import tax on other agricultural and industrial items on October 18….

France says they’ll respond with retaliatory tariffs if we go through with this.  French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire:

If the American administration rejects the hand that has been held out by France and the European Union, we are preparing ourselves to react with sanctions[.]

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom agrees with Le Maire:

If the US decides to impose WTO authorized countermeasures, it will be pushing the EU into a situation where we will have no other option than do the same[.]

Couple things about that.  One is that the US has already proposed both no-tariff-at-all and no-tariffs-on-autos trade régimes, but the EU has refused to discuss either, despite then-European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s promise to take the matters up.

The other thing is that, under WTO rules, it’s illegal to apply retaliatory tariffs in response to tariffs applied pursuant to a WTO judgment.  The French and EU threats regarding the WTO-permitted tariffs on the Airbus affair clearly demonstrate EU (and French) bad faith by themselves. Coupled, though, with the Eu’s refusal to discuss the no-tariff offers already on the table, it’s clear that the EU has no intention at all in dealing honestly with us on trade.

Our own effort at good-faith negotiation is just as clear:

The WTO had approved up to 100% tariffs, but the US decided to limit the tax.

Raise the Price

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…of a product, and with that, lower demand for it.  This is the sort of thing taught in high school introductory economics courses.  One way to raise the price is to raise taxes related to it, and to reduce tax deductions related to it.

The Manhattan real estate market [a generally hgh-end market] stumbled in the third quarter of 2019, new reports show, as prices plunged and fewer buyers were willing to purchase higher-priced properties in the wake of two recent tax increases.
The median sales price for properties fell 17% from the same quarter last year…. The average sales price dropped 12%….
Condo sales fell 8%….

Maybe this had something to do with it:

In July, New York City increased its mansion tax—a progressive tax that applies to home sales of more than $1 million—to a maximum of 3.9%, up from a flat-rate of 1%. The tax rates vary from 1.25% for $2 million sales, to 3.9% for sales of $25 million and higher. The city also increased a one-time charge on properties worth more than $2 million—known as the transfer tax.

And maybe the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) imposed by the 2017 tax reform bill is having an impact.

More on Free Speech

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Here’s another example of Progressive-Democrats and Party’s Presidential candidates objecting to free speech.

Senator [and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate] Kamala Harris said on Monday night that President Trump should have his Twitter account suspended over his tweets about the whistleblower whose complaint has helped launch an official House inquiry into his potential impeachment.

Trump’s terrible crime here? He expressed his desire to meet his accuser, a right all Americans have when accused of wrong-doing.

She went on, paraphrased by Fox News:

Harris said Trump’s latest tweets, in which he called the whistleblower “close to a spy,” is evidence that he is “irresponsible with his words in a way that could result in harm to other people.”
“The privilege of using those words in that way should probably be taken from him,” she added.

Of course, no harm can result “to other people” from such remarks.  Except in the fetid imaginations of the Left.

A President talking directly to ordinary Americans, bypassing the NLMSM Gateway and Party-approved mechanisms—how terrible.