Tag Archives: regulation

No More Private Ventures

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Our Progressive-Democrat-controlled government is continuing its actions to limit our private economy, this time moving explicitly against private enterprises.

In a meeting that starts at 10 am ET [last Wednesday], the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to vote on a proposal that would force hedge funds and private-equity funds to provide basic disclosures to their investors and guard against conflicts.

Because “private” can’t be allowed; Know Better Government must control what private companies do.

Because Know Better Progressive-Democrats must “protect” us grindingly stupid average Americans from our own foolishness or stupidity. Never mind that no one forces us to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds, with or without knowing the financial details of those funds.

Such decisions used to be our responsibility. But now Progressive-Democrats insist on arrogating our responsibilities to themselves.

Madness

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That’s what the Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, claims the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa is.

[a] nationwide insurrection driven by madness

Because the truckers disagree with the Canadian government’s diktats regarding individual health and individual decisions regarding health.

Now where have I heard before such characterizations of disagreement with Government being the definition of madness?

Oh, yeah—Nikita Khrushchev’s and his successor Tzar General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev’s, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (For completeness’ sake, they were only extending and expanding Josef Stalin’s use of psychiatry as a political tool of control, but that’s a separate story.) Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s USSR government would routinely decide dissenters were insane—suffering from delusions of reformism—and confine them to asylums until they were…cured. Or died from one cause or another. Major General Pyotr Grigorenko was only one of the more prominent ones “driven by madness.”

Now here is Sloly: a wrong-minded protest—his position—must perforce be an “insurrection,” and insurrections must be—again, his position—acts of insanity.

“in the event of an investigation into a user”

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The IRS is bent on using facial recognition to allow (or block) an American taxpayer to have access to his own tax records that the IRS maintains on each of us. The program is called ID.me, and it

will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store in a database, and use for future logins.

As the WSJ asks, What could go wrong? It then answers the question:

Tucked into the agency’s ID.me project document is a line explaining that the agency will also use the mobile phones that submit selfies as a “piece of identity evidence” and that “geolocation can be gleaned from [mobile network operators] in the event of an investigation into a user.”

This is People’s Republic of China-grade surveillance, this time by a weaponized IRS of each of us American citizens. This is the IRS whose weaponization was begun under the Progressive-Democrat, Barack Obama. This is the IRS whose weaponization is being expanded to republic-threatening levels by the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden.

Update: The IRS now claims it’s not going to do the facial recognition bit. But it hasn’t made any similar claims regarding “geolocation” or any other piece of “identity evidence” that it might hold, or get hold of, and would willingly pass along to support any “investigation” into a user.

Sort of like tax data and forms that it already has a history of passing along to the press.

The Fed and Social Engineering

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President Joe Biden (D) wants our Federal Reserve System to engage in economic social engineering, so he’s nominating as the Fed’s banking supervisor the climate activist Sarah Bloom Raskin. Among her lately remarks concerning credit allocation and climate change was her last-spring op-ed in The New York Times. She led off that piece with this:

Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.

She had this, too, in the same piece:

The Fed is singularly poised to seed strategic investments in future economic stability.

And this:

The decision to bring oil and gas into the Fed’s investment portfolio not only misdirects limited recovery resources but also sends a false price signal to investors about where capital needs to be allocated[.]

Raskin had this in her September 2020 Project Syndicate op-ed, reprinted by Duke Law:

US regulators need to be encouraged to think more imaginatively about how they can engage with local transition efforts. For example, how might financial policies from diverse agencies be stitched together to produce outcomes that enable firms to hit their net-zero targets? How can financial policy be used to help accelerate a transition that redeploys workers for new jobs, or to assist households that are being asked to change their spending habits? And how can regulatory changes relating to disclosure, access to credit, and pricing of risk support a rapid and just green transition?
…
In short…[f]inancial regulators must reimagine their own role so that they can play their part in the broader reimagining of the economy.

That’s not the Federal Reserve’s role, though. The Fed’s statutorily required goals are to maximize employment, stabilize prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. There’s nothing in there about climate change, or “guiding” lending to this or that government-favored group of Americans and away from that or this government-disfavored group of Americans, or any other sort of social engineering.

One more thing. Aside from Raskin’s own altered-state understanding of the Fed, a larger problem regards the present administration’s overall attitude. That Biden-Harris actually nominated Raskin says volumes about his own view of law and his own willingness to disregard it in order to increase his administration’s power.

The Lady [sic] Demonstrates Her Critics’ Point

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University of California, Berkeley’s, Associate Director for its Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership Genevieve Macfarlane Smith succeeded in this with her letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section last Thursday. Smith began by complaining

Lawrence Krauss writes, “I have a hard time understanding how people can be so hurt by the use of some words and names.”

Then she proceeded to make Krauss’ point for him.

Take “illegal alien”: This term brands a person “illegal” and implies they’re not human but “alien.” Beyond dehumanizing, the term is imprecise: It implies criminality, but lacking immigration documents is a civil, not criminal, offense.

Of course, “illegal alien” does none of that. The term brands no one as illegal; the individual involved has made himself illegal by entering our nation illegally.

Nor does the term imply criminality. As Smith actually concedes, “lacking immigration documents—” being an illegal alien—is a civil offense: it’s simply illegal, with no implication of felonious or civil illegality.

Nor does the term imply that the illegal alien is in any way not human. Here are the American Heritage Dictionary‘s definitions of “alien:”

adj.
1. Owing political allegiance to another country or government; foreign: alien residents.
2. Belonging to, characteristic of, or constituting another and very different place, society, or person; strange.
3. Dissimilar, inconsistent, or opposed, as in nature: emotions alien to her temperament.
n.
Law
1. An unnaturalized foreign resident of a country. Also called noncitizen.
2. A person from another and very different family, people, or place.
3. A person who is not included in a group; an outsider.

There’s nothing in there about the illegal alien being not human.

Smith then asked,

Still agree with Mr Krauss that reflection on language is a “waste of time” or “silly”?

Yep. Smith was making Krauss’ case. Unsatisfied, though, she dug a bit deeper.

Mr Krauss discusses efforts to replace “master/slave” from computer code with “primary/secondary.” … This type of language can signal that black people aren’t welcome.

I’ve worked in the tech industry for years. No one, not a single minority colleague, felt unwelcome from such terms. We all understood the context; we were software engineers and managers, not…social engineers. And context matters. More than Smith seems to understand.

Perhaps if Smith and her cohorts weren’t so desperate to change the ordinary meaning of the words of our American English language in order to support their quest for offense, her victims, the ones she’s pretending to want to protect (apparently because she considers them incapable of protecting themselves) would experience considerably less angst.