Monthly Archives: October 2011

Nigerian Scam Moved North?

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Has our Nigerian friend moved north?  You recall the gentleman: he’s the one who obtained millions of dollars from the Nigerian government, dollars of questionable source, and now he’s willing to share his windfall with you—if only you’ll pass to him your bank account access information, so he can deposit the funds.

Now The Daily Caller reports that one of their staff members has received an email from none other than the late Muammar Gaddafi’s widow.  It seems the poor woman is in fear for her own life and desperately needs TheDC staffer’s help, and of course she has access to ” billions of pounds and dollars” with which to reward him for his kind assistance.

From: Mariam Gaddafi ‪<mariam_gaddafi@yahoo.com>

Date: Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 2:33 AM

Subject: Hassana

To:

Greetings in the name of Allah, am the  wife of the late Libyan president Gadafi who was killed by rebels on Thursday 20th  oct 2011, please my life is in big danger and I would like to use you as my contact to move a huge some of money and start living a free life in your country for I have been covering my self as a Muslim since he married me, which is our religious rights nobody has seen my face or known me except my children and himself and I thank Allah for this.

I cannot be identified by anybody in the world now that things has gone bad.

Please let me know your mind for I will reward you greatly cos we are talking of billions of pounds and dollars.

Waiting to hear from you.

Hassana

Heads up….

Socially Redeeming Value

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Nicholas Brady writes in today’s The Washington Post about “Wall Street’s wealth.”  Among other things, he wondered about “…Wall Street…activities that had no redeeming social value, and…disoriented executive pay scales.”

I have to ask: whose socially redeeming value definition?  Whose standard of “disoriented” pay scales?  Based on what primacy of social standing do those who disparage stand in judgment of their peers?  What arrogance.

One man offered to sell something, and another agreed to buy it.  One man wanted something, and another man offered to supply it.  All four men became better off than they were before; each man gained something of value to him that he hadn’t had before.  The things gained had value to these men, specifically, not to some self-appointed arbiter of propriety.  How much more socially valuable can such activities get?

Are there activities that have no socially redeeming value?  Probably.  But is being valueless, whether socially or economically, necessarily harmful?  Of course not.  They simply are irrelevant, and those who wish to transact with these are fully within their rights as free Americans to do so; such transactions have no impact on their neighbors.  Let’s look at some other transactions that have caught some fame in recent years, things like transactions in mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives.  These and similar instruments like credit default swaps, and the institutions who traded in them, are blamed for starting the current economic malaise.  However, mortgage-backed securities are instruments of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.  Indeed, these two institutions were created explicitly to buy up lending institutions’ mortgages, package and securitize them, and then resell these new instruments on the open market.  The purpose of these and of the two FMs was to make it easier for lending institutions to lend mortgages, to make mortgages more readily available, to ease Americans’ purchase of their homes.  Government said transactions with these instruments was socially redeeming.  Hmm….

Along the way, derivatives of these securities were developed, credit default swaps were developed as “insurance” policies on these derivatives, and so on.  Were transactions in these derivatives and new securities and their derivatives at fault for the current economic straits?  Or was it regulations that hid the nature of these instruments and their derivatives so that buyers and sellers of them didn’t fully understand what they were transacting?  Or was it financial institutions that concentrated too much of their asset base in these instruments?  Or was it those buyers and sellers entering in that market that they didn’t understand?  Clearly, transacting in willful ignorance, and over concentrating assets were economically unsound, and in their impact, they were, in the context of social redemption, also unsound, not merely valueless.  I’ll come back to this in a bit.

On what basis are the pay scales deemed disoriented?  Are all skills of equal value?  One measure of the value of skills is easily assessed by anyone who cares to look.  One man offers to sell something, and another agrees to buy it.  Here that thing is the one man’s skill.  Does the employer get what it pays for?  Does the employer get sufficient value in labor output from the man possessing the skill to produce that output?  Does an athlete with a multi-million dollar contract, based on his skill at (throwing|hitting|catching a moving|stationary ball (of some shape)), bring in multi-millions of dollars in ticket sales and/or related marketing revenue?  Does the business executive with a multi-million dollar contract bring in multi-millions of dollars in revenue for the company that employs him?

In a free market, i.e., one that is not regulated into politically correctness or centrally directed because Progressives in government Know Better, the answers to those questions provide their own definition of “disorientation.”  If the employed are not bringing in multi-millions of dollars in revenue, they are not earning their multi-millions of dollars of pay, and they are terminated.  The same is true for the $10 dollar an hour laborer.  If his work isn’t worth those $10 dollars, he too, is terminated.  If the value received for the work is worth the cost of the work, neither the wage nor the salary is “disoriented.”  What is disoriented, to take this to its logical extreme, is to claim that washing dishes in the corner diner has the same value as the ability to put together deals that lead to the financing of an entrepreneur’s diner, or a chain of them.

Of course there are those who abuse the system, there are those who outright steal, there are those who hide behind the rules and/or obfuscation to obtain compensation out of proportion to the revenue their work produces.  However, these are corner cases or completely out of the envelope cases; they are not justification to claim that all high cost activities are socially valueless or that salaries are too high and unearned—or to claim that low wages are in some way too low.  They are justification only to let a free market correct the corner cases—the free market is a quite effective self-correcting system; they are justification only to let the legal system handle the out of the envelope cases—American jurisprudence, for all its presently Byzantine nature, remains both the best in the world, and on an absolute scale a quite effective system.

Thoughts on Privacy

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An individual’s right to privacy, that is to be confident that the things he wishes not to be exposed to the public will be kept to himself, is an inherent right of his existence, which acknowledgement is well rooted in our Constitution via the Bill of Rights’ 3rd Amendment barring the use of our homes by the government’s soldiers without our permission, the 4th Amendment’s more explicit acknowledgment of our right to “be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects” against the government’s prying eyes, the 5th Amendment’s self-incrimination bar, and the 9th Amendment’s acknowledgment that any right not explicitly assigned to the government remains in our hands.  Those roots are well fertilized by various Supreme Court decisions, including Griswold, Eisenstadt, Loving, and Roe.

Yet there is a growing move to reduce or eliminate that expectation, based on the increasing capability of technology to penetrate that privacy and on our increasing use of social media, and those technologies, to abrogate that expectation.  Indeed, questions are asked whether our individual privacy comes at too great a cost, or whether we have too much privacy.

People who want to meet us are only a click away via this or that social media.  It’s easy to join this or that group—even a useful group, such as a breast cancer survivor group—and that group wants us to join.  Therefore we’re obligated to do so?  Suppose we don’t want to meet that person?  Suppose we only want to interact with the group through private means and not publicly?  Or not at all?

I cannot think how the cost of privacy is too great given the costs from losing that privacy.  The question of too much privacy often is grounded in the premise that technology makes it easy to “share” our information, and that today such information has great value.  But the question elides certain critical additional questions that must not be ignored.

The ease of sharing as justification for forcing that sharing is on its face disingenuous.  As well insist that, since I can pick a locked file cabinet’s lock with a paperclip, I’m entitled (entitled!) to know the contents of the files in that cabinet.  Since I can open a door to my neighbor’s house, I’m entitled to enter it without that neighbor’s permission.

As to that value, the questions offered don’t address to whom that value applies.  That someone wants very badly, and so that information has great value to him, in no way justifies a requirement on my part to give him that information.  My information has value to me, also, and a lot of that value is bound up in the private nature of that information.  But I’ll pay a pretty penny, he says.  No, say I.  I decline to share my information.  Why not, he presses.  But this question is a non sequitur.  Indeed, to paraphrase Sir Thomas More, I will not say, and I will not say why I will not say.

I have no obligation to justify why I wish to maintain my privacy.  Indeed, that justification is part of my privacy.  But what am I hiding, some might ask.  My privacy, I answer.  And nothing more.

Why is privacy so important?  Honoring another’s privacy is to respect that other.  We don’t need to know every inner datum about another just to satisfy our own curiosity.  Further, privacy is critical to our liberties.  If we cannot be private in our affairs we cannot protect ourselves from an overreaching government.  We cannot prepare ourselves to respond to a government that goes too far, even with the best of intentions.  We cannot be free in our speech, for instance, if we cannot be private in our preparation of it, if we cannot make our decisions concerning what we will say publicly.  Aside from that, we have a property right in our privacy.  Any decision concerning the disposition of our privacy, or any part of it, is ours and ours alone.

If we cannot control our own privacy, we have no privacy.

We have transferred to government all the rights concerning our privacy it needs via those 3rd, 4th, and 5th Amendments, wherein we allow the government to penetrate our privacy under certain narrowly circumscribed conditions, with suitable government certifications to a court that the penetration is necessary.  No more control need be transferred to government or to our fellows.  No more private information need be transferred to government or to our fellows.

The technologies for penetrating our privacy can be valuable tools—get the appropriate court order or warrant and use the very latest technology to pierce the veil of privacy of a suspected terrorist.  The social media’s ability to make sharing our information with our friends and acquaintances, and potentially interesting strangers, is enormously valuable in its ability to facilitate the spread of useful information.  But that information must be voluntarily given.  It belongs to an individual until that individual decides for himself to publicize it.

Cutting

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The Tea Party Debt Commission, a project of the FreedomWorks organization, is working on the same goal as the Congressional debt commission [sic], that of devising a means of reducing the nation’s debt.  Rather than playing small ball, the way the Congress’ commission is, though, the TPDC is looking for a $9 trillion reduction over the next 10 years.  Further, the TPDC, unlike the Democrats on Congress’ commission, is looking to do this without raising taxes.

In support of this goal, the TPDC polled “activists across the country,” says The Daily Caller, for the top 10 sources of budget cuts, and they got these:

1.    Repeal Obamacare
2.    Reduce duplicative purchases of Pentagon supplies
3.    Eliminate the Department of Education
4.    Privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
5.    Reduce discretionary spending to 2008 level
6.    Block grant Medicaid
7.    End ethanol tax credits
8.    Sell needless federal buildings
9.    Eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development
10.  Reduce Medicare teaching subsidies

Naturally, I have my own view, and I have a bit more than 10.

1.  Repeal Obamacare
2.  Repeal Dodd-Frank
3.  Privatize Social Security and Medicare
4.  Push the States to privatize Medicaid, and block grant Medicaid’s Federal transfer payments, reducing each State’s payment by 10% of the 2010 total transfer to that State each succeeding year until the block grants are gone
5.  Open insurance to interstate sales on free market principles
6.  Eliminate the Department of Education
7.  Eliminate EPA
8.  Eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
9.  Eliminate HUD
10. Eliminate all “green” and all oil and gas subsidies
11. Cap Federal tax collections at 20% of GDP
12. Cap Federal spending at 95% of the average Federal tax collections over the preceding five years, with the excess collections going directly to paying down our national debt.
13. Cap Federal borrowing at 20% of GDP unless the President declares a national emergency and both the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader concur.
14. When the current national debt falls to that level, re-cap Federal tax collections at 95% of that prior limit.

While it’s useful to reduce Defense spending—and the spending by all the other Departments as well—through efficient-izing the Department’s spending through eliminating duplication, i.e., rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse, in general, this is easier said than done, and we need something done now.  The same difficulty applies to “needless” federal buildings.  It’s always a good idea to get rid of excess, to a point.  Maybe it’s better, though, to keep real estate in the government’s back pocket against future need, and lease the excess, instead.

Privatizing our health and retirement accounts, in addition to saving all those expenditures, leaves the tax money that isn’t funding those programs, anymore anyway, in our hands.  This both gives us the wherewithal to fund our own needs, and it leaves that money in the hands of those who are, empirically, better equipped and more skilled to do intelligent investing than our government has shown itself to be.

On eliminating all energy subsidies, neither “green” nor hydrocarbon energy sources need them.  The oil and gas industry will still make money without the subsidies, especially if impeding regulations also are eliminated.  If the “green” industry can’t compete in a free market without subsidies (and without impeding, or facilitating, regulations), that merely demonstrates that “green” technology isn’t ready for prime time.  In addition to which, the American people are fully capable of making our own decisions, via our free market, concerning our energy needs; we don’t need to be told what to do by government subsidy or EPA diktat.

We don’t need to privatize the FMs.  We need to eliminate them.  If our free market wants a means of “securitizing” mortgage loans—if there really is a market niche for this—the appropriate businesses will start with the appropriate entrepreneurs.  Besides, given the shenanigans of the FMs, there would need to be a 100% replacement of management all the way down to the secretarial pool (to date myself) supervisor before those two institutions could be trusted again.

Reducing discretionary spending to 2008 levels is a nice start, but it doesn’t address the long-term problem of too much spending—unless the pollees want discretionary spending permanently capped at 2008 levels.  There are two reasons such a cap, temporary or permanent, is insufficient, though.  The first is that a fixed, hard number doesn’t take into account future unforeseen, or future economic growth.  It would be better to cap at a percentage of GDP.  Also, capping discretionary spending only addresses a relatively small part of Federal spending; it ignores entitlement spending (which is a terribly indicative name for that category of spending, but it’s what we have).  “Entitlement” spending needs to be severely curtailed, also.

Chief Executive and Unilateral Actions

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President Obama, by Executive Order, is moving to ease the means by which some homeowners whose homes are underwater, can refinance their mortgages, and he is moving, also by Executive Order, to “ease the burden of student debt” for some students.  These moves come as part of an announced plan to make similar unilateral Executive Office moves on a periodic basis, and these moves come under the newly minted campaign slogan “We can’t wait.”

Of course there is a large hue and cry over this.  It must be unconstitutional, the President is bypassing Congress, and so on.  But is this accurate?  Is this executive overreach, or is this an executive officer acting like an executive officer?

Article II of our Constitution vests executive power in the President, and he is the Commander in Chief of our military forces.  The executive power authorizes the President to act unilaterally in emergencies so that a national response will not be delayed by waiting on the much slower-moving large committee that is the Congress.  The Congress’ involvement is not lost, though: when it catches up with the situation, it can overrule or condone, at its sole discretion, the President’s actions.  On the other hand, this is not license for the President to overrule the Congress.  His opportunity to do that is limited to his veto power and his authority to send his Attorney General into the courts to challenge—on Constitutional grounds, not simply any reason that might suit him—a law passed by Congress over his veto.

Yet the hoo-raw is based on the principle of the President acting unilaterally.  This smacks of being driven by party roles rather than being based on principle.  One party must support all of these actions, regardless of their legitimacy, because that is the role defined for it; the other party must vociferously object for the same mindless reason.

Certainly, the beef is given credence by those unilateral actions the President has taken in order to avoid Congressional oversight or in order to overrule the Congress altogether.  The recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to be his Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services explicitly to avoid the Senate’s hearings on his suitability comes to mind.  So, too, does the creation of  the position of Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for Dr Elizabeth Warren to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from his office, without recourse to the Congress.  And his decision to let stand a memo issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director, John Morton, that implemented various detention paradigms of the DREAM Act which Congress had explicitly declined to enact.

This sort of thing notwithstanding, though, of course the President can act unilaterally when the situation warrants.  This is what a President is for under our social compact.  The present economic situation demands prompt action: even our Defense Chief—whose military the President’s ability promptly to deploy and employ on his own authority, at least temporarily, is quite clear—and our Secretary of State are on record as acknowledging our economic straits and our national debt to be matters of national security.

The principle of unilateral action is sound.  There is plenty about which to criticize the President over these last three years.  But integrity and justice demand that we criticize his actions—and I have objected to much of his actions and decisions—we are remiss to criticize the Executive Officer solely because he acts like one.