Monthly Archives: September 2012

Voting Rights

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From The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog comes this hopeful sign.  A number of states have filed a Friend of the Court brief in support of South Carolina as that state prepares to defend itself against the Obama administration’s assault on its effort to protect the sanctity of the vote.  The money paragraphs in the brief speaks is this, and it needs no further comment from me.

Because Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act of 1965] applied arbitrarily to the Covered Jurisdictions [i.e., those states subject to the VRA], none of which uses discriminatory tests or devices, and many of which have higher voter turnout, or lower disparity in minority voter turnout, than many of the uncovered jurisdictions, the Covered States are denied the fundamental principles of equal sovereignty and equal footing.  Because the VRA’s purpose is to eradicate voting discrimination for all United States citizens, treating states differently is not congruent with the Act’s purpose.

The brief, BRIEF OF ARIZONA, ALABAMA, GEORGIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, SOUTH DAKOTA, AND TEXAS AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER, can be found here.

(Over)regulation

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Here’s an example, from The Des Moines Register.  Federal banking and mortgage company employment “guidelines,” issued in May 2011 and February 2012, respectively, require these institutions to not employ

executives and mid-level bank employees guilty of transactional crimes, like identity fraud or mortgage fraud.

Fear of Federal litigation, though, has driven these enterprises to apply the regulations across the board to all employees, even the most junior.  Natasha Buchanan, an attorney with Higbee & Associates in Santa Ana, CA notes that

Banks are afraid of the FDIC and the penalties they could face[.]

The results include this one, involving a customer service rep making the princely sum of $30,000 per year.  Richard Eggers is a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran with a conviction, 50 years ago, of using a cardboard dime to try to fool a washing machine in a Laundromat.  He spent two days in jail way back then, and he’s been an upstanding citizen ever since, including that tour in Vietnam.

Now it’s true enough that the FDIC, for instance, has a waiver process that (fired) employees can follow, but it’s a six month-to-a-year effort that might end in denial. Even with gaining a waiver, though, six months is a long time for a low-wage ex-employee to be without a job, especially when it’s caused by Uncle Sugar.  The FDIC also has an “automatic waiver” that supposedly works “faster,” but it’s limited to people sentenced to less than year in jail and who never actually were locked up.  Those two days disqualify Eggers even from this government largess.

This has got to be stopped.

Who Built That?

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A private enterprise built the car—a Ford—that I drive.  Private enterprise drilled the oil well for the oil, private enterprise refined the oil into gasoline, private enterprise shipped the gasoline to my local filling station—itself a private enterprise.

Private individuals, and collections of private individuals—businesses—built all of those.  And it was my own private industry that enabled me to earn the wherewithal to buy my Ford.

I built that.  All of us in that chain can say that.

Now, it’s true enough that infrastructure facilitated all of that.  It’s nice to have decent bridges and paved roads on which to drive my car and on which those fuel shippers could drive their trucks.  It’s good to have a communications system (vis., the Internet, a technology developed by a private enterprise to solve an internal data management problem) through which to talk with others and do some research enabling me to choose the car I’d end up buying.  It’s nice to have a set of laws that enables these private enterprises to compete with each other in a fair way, free of the depredations of brigands.

From where did this infrastructure come, though?  Some have insisted that Government built that.  Private individuals, private enterprise, had nothing to do with any of that.  More, that without that Government-provided infrastructure, private effort would have been impossible, and so by extension, I—and you—didn’t build our companies, either.

But without the desire to have a car, without private enterprise providing that long chain of support for the car, there would be no demand—and so no need—for that infrastructure.  Private enterprise—I, and all the other private entities—created that need.

Private enterprise built the roads and communications networks, and all the other infrastructure items.  Not the Navy’s Seabees, not the Army’s Corps of Engineers, not the USAF’s Civil Engineers—none of these were out there building that.  Those were private construction firms and private communications companies building that.

That legal system?  The courts are manned by individuals, not some nebulous “government” thingie, albeit those individuals are government employees.  Private individuals, choosing to lead for a time public, political lives, deliberate and enact the laws of that legal system.  They’re elected—and fired—by private individuals voting at the polls.

But surely government paid for all that.  No.  Government has no money of its own; it has only the money we private individuals and our private enterprises allocate to government in our tax payments.  It’s our privately originating money, pooled for the purpose, that paid for the construction of that infrastructure.  And that pays the salaries of those government employees and elected politicians.

Government didn’t build anything; it just acted as middle man for a small part of all that private building.

A Tax Reform Idea

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Close, but no cigar.  Here are some ideas that are being kicked around.

…the president is pushing for tax incentives for making products, especially high-tech ones, in the US.  He also wants more focused federal research programs, including funds for new privately run institutes to study advanced manufacturing techniques.

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI):

…legislation that would give tax breaks to help companies cover the cost of moving production back to the US and ban tax deductions for the expenses of moving operations abroad.

Congressman David Cicilline (D, RI):

…federal grants to help companies upgrade equipment and retrain workers.

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has these:

…repealing “excessive” regulation in such areas as environmental protection.  He also wants to require secret ballots for union-certification votes, which might make it harder for organized labor to win.”

The Democrats want Big Government solutions—that are careful to keep government’s hands in business’ pockets—and solutions that simply make an already excessively convoluted tax code even more so.  Romney’s ideas don’t even address the tax question; although they would help business.

No.  Instead of that claptrap, simplify and reduce.

Get rid of the tax subsidies.  Get rid of the tax credits.  Get rid of business regulations that do not actively support productivity improvement or enforce contract law—contracts between businesses and suppliers, businesses and customers, business management and business employees.

Lower—if not eliminate—tax rates on businesses.  They’re not the ones paying the taxes, anyway; their customers pay them in the form of higher prices, so that a tax on business is simply a second tax on private American citizens.  Including those 50% who pay little to no income tax of their own; including seniors who have only a fixed income with which to pay for their necessities.