Tag Archives: markets

A US Appellate Court Thinks Americans Are Grindingly Stupid

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Kellogg’s makes Cheez-Its, a cheesy, corny confection that’s attractive to lots of folks, especially at boring parties.  Some versions of this snack are marketed as “Whole Grain” or “Made With Whole Grain,” and the text on the packaging makes plain that this means 5 to 8 grams of whole grain for each 29-gram serving along with the primary ingredient being “enriched flour.”

This is too confusing for three women to bear, so they sued.  One of the women went so far as to claim she was injured by all of this, yet, were the packaging only changed, she would continue to purchase the products in the future (where are the feminists over this feigned stupidity?).  There started out some sanity in this idiocy:

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2017, ruling that the “Whole Grains” wording was factually correct. In toto, the label “would neither mislead nor deceive a reasonable consumer.”

Amazingly, the 2nd Circuit reversed.

Additional verbiage on the front and side of the package is no defense, the court said.

The 2nd Circuit thinks Americans are just too stupid for words.  Or it finds entirely reasonable that Americans are too mind-numbingly lazy to read a simple label.

France is Taxing

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The Macron administration utterly failed in its cynical effort to raise its taxes on the French working class and poor with its “climate” tax on transportation fuels, so now it’s going to go after American tech companies with carefully targeted taxes.  And that administration is desperate to get going, and it’s going to do it unilaterally.

In early December, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said France would give the EU until March to come up with a deal on taxing US internet giants. But ten days later he announced the tax would be introduced on January 1.

Wait, what?

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

And here’s the game, as confessed by Le Maire.

The digital giants are the ones who have the money.

So he intends to rip off uniquely tax our American companies for the heinous crime of outcompeting his precious French companies and then of being better tax managers than his precious French government.

Our companies need to think very carefully about the value they get from doing business in France compared with the French government’s imposition of wholly artificial costs for the privilege of doing business there.

Taxing Speech

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California has decided to kill two birds with one stone.  The State thinks it needs more money, so it’s going to raise a new tax.  The State is anxious to…manage…speech of which it disapproves, so it has chosen its target for its new tax.

California state regulators have been working on a plan to charge mobile phone users a text messaging fee intended to fund programs that make phone service accessible to the low-income residents, reports said Tuesday.

Here’s Jim Wunderman, Bay Area Council President, on the plot, though:

It’s a dumb idea. This is how conversations take place in this day and age, and it’s almost like saying there should be a tax on the conversations we have.

Wunderman understated the problem.  It’s not just a dumb idea, it works out to a naked attack by Government on its citizens’—its employers’—speech.

In the event, when the FCC decided to designate texting to be  an “information service,” and not a telecommunications service, the State decided to withdraw its proposal to tax it.  The State rationalized it decision by claiming “text messaging was not a classified service under federal law.”

However.

The FCC’s designation is a quibble that’s meaningless in this context. Taxing speech directly is the beginning of an effort to manage permissible speech by artificially driving up the cost of it.  The medium used for making speech–a “telecommunications service,” for instance–is just as critical to the freedom of speech as are the utterances themselves. Taxing the service is an opening toward managing speech indirectly by artificially driving up the cost of using a medium for speaking.

Beyond that, the State’s excuse that text messaging hadn’t yet been designated is disingenuous. Not every activity in which an American citizen engages needs Government designation in order to be engaged.  Only those activities to be explicitly proscribed or managed need designation.  That’s at the core of our founding principles of limited government that works for us and of individual liberty and individual responsibility.

As a result, questions arise concerning this Progressive-Democrat- run State’s move to use taxes to manage speech.

What other forms of speech will California try to tax?

Whose forms of speech will California try to tax?

What can we expect regarding speech–and any other individual liberty and responsibility–can we expect a Progressive-Democrat national government to attempt?  Especially in their universe of “you didn’t build that,” and “we’re a collectivist society in which it takes a village to most anything?”

Another Outcome of Supreme Court’s Abuse of the Takings Clause

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Recall the Takings Clause of our 5th Amendment:

nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Now recall three critical Takings cases decided by the Supreme Court.  Berman v Parker was a 1954 case in which the Supremes explicitly rewrote that clause to say for public purpose, not use.  Hawaii Housing Authority v Midkiff was a 1984 case in which the Supremes ruled that it was perfectly fine for a State government to take private property away from a private enterprise and give it to private citizens who leased the property from the business.  Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case in which the Supremes said it was jake for a State government to seize a private citizen’s property and give it to a private business for that business’ purposes.

That last shameful ruling led to a large number of States passing their own laws or State Constitutional amendments severely restricting the conditions under which eminent domain can be used.  The Federal government’s power as distorted by the Supremes in that trio of cases, however, remains the law.

This brings me to New York and New York City and amazon.com’s HQ2 move into the city.

In their bid for Amazon.com Inc’s second headquarters, New York City and state officials dangled prime real estate at the tech giant and offered to use eminent domain to scoop up any necessary properties for a campus, newly disclosed documents revealed Monday night.

These worthies planned the theft confiscation eminent domain seizures in four areas: Midtown West, lower Manhattan, along the Brooklyn waterfront, and Long Island City.

Such an offer wouldn’t have been possible except in the aftermath of Berman, Midkiff, and Kelo.  This is the extent of the destruction of private property the Supremes have wrought.

Google’s Boss Testified

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Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this week.  In the course of his testimony, he made some interesting claims.

“Even as we expand into new markets we never forget our American roots,” Mr Pichai said in his opening statement.

Not just roots, though. It’s important that Pichai and his team remember our American culture and values, too.  It’s not at all clear that he/they do.

As an American company, we cherish the values and freedoms that have allowed us to grow and serve so many users.  I am proud to say we do work, and we will continue to work, with the government to keep our country safe and secure.

Just how, exactly, does Pichai and his team propose to do that when they refuse to work with our defense establishment while enthusiastically working with our enemies—in particular, the People’s Republic of China and so with the PRC’s defense establishment?