Monthly Archives: February 2014

A Progressive Government’s Free Speech

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Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Brian Schatz (D, HI) are gathering colleagues’ signatures on a letter to the networks asserting that they’re ignoring global warming.

It is beyond my comprehension that you have ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, that their Sunday shows have discussed climate change in 2012, collectively, for all of eight minutes….

And

Sunday news shows are obviously important because they talk to millions of people, but they go beyond that by helping to define what the establishment considers to be important and what is often discussed during the rest of the week.

What [the networks] are saying is, climate change is a non-important issue, it is an irrelevant issue, and yet the scientific community tells us that it is the greatest crisis facing this planet….

By God, you’ll talk about what Big Government wants you to talk about, and you’ll talk about it when we want you to.  Or you’ll rue the day….

Sovereignty and Sovereign Debt

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Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, is upset with Germany’s high court.  It seems that this court has ruled, again, against the European Central Bank’s President, Mario Draghi, and the ECB itself in continuing to note that ECB moves to buy member nations’ sovereign debt not only is a violation of EU foundational law, it violates the sovereignty of those nations expected to put up their peoples’ money to buy that debt.  Germany’s highest court also committed the dastardly deed of kicking the latest matter to the European Court of Justice.  All in the name of protecting German national sovereignty.

So the docket of the German high court in Karlsruhe never clears, and the battle cry never stops: “It’s our sovereignty, stupid!”

And

The German plaintiffs’ key complaint against the ECB comes in Latin—ultra vires. They argue that it would go “beyond the power” of the ECB to buy sovereign debt.

The horror.  The horror.

While cynically ridiculing the idea of national sovereignty throughout his article, though, Joffe missed another point, perhaps caused by his evident lack of understanding of the nature and importance of national sovereignty.

The larger story proclaims: Europe is still far from the United States, a real union.  The EU has neither a real Federal Reserve, nor a common fiscal policy, nor commonly elected leaders to define the common good.  The logic of a “more perfect union” demands these commonalities, but it collides with the logic of nation-states rooted in 2,000 years of history.

Leaving aside the EU’s demonstrated contempt for the common man (recall its formation: some countries rejected the union in national referenda, so the governments involved told those impudent populations to shove it and signed the Maastricht Treaty, which dragged those populations into the EU against their will), Joffe’s remark misses the fact that the EU also has no common culture, nor does it even have a common view of the purpose of money.

Even in the EU—especially in the EU—national sovereignty matters.  A very great deal.

The Evil 1%

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James Piereson, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had some thoughts on these folks.

This crusade [against the richest among us] is based on three questionable claims.  One is that the wealthy are mostly Wall Street bankers benefitting from rising stock and real estate prices, or executives who pay themselves extravagant salaries.  Another claim is that such people unfairly benefit from a system that taxes capital gains at half the highest marginal rate paid by those who earn salaries and wages.  Then there is the assertion that the “super rich” have abundant funds that can be taxed to improve the living standards of everyone else.

All of these claims are false.  By promoting them, the president and his supporters may hope to distract attention from ObamaCare and the economy.

My father always said, “Never let the truth interfere with a good story.”  The difference, though, between my father and President Barack Obama and his fellow…crusaders…is that my father was joking.

[According to] data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1% received 15% of the national household income (before taxes) in 2010, up from 9% in 1980.  A taxpayer needed a taxable income of $307,000 to enter the top 1%, a figure that hardly qualifies as “rich” today, especially in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

And

[Top] performers earn their incomes in highly competitive environments and through the voluntary patronage of consumers.  Where does their money come from?

The top earners depend heavily on salaries.  In 2010 the top 1% earned 36% of their incomes from salaries and wages (what the CBO calls labor income); 22% from businesses, farms, and partnerships; and just 19% from capital gains.  The majority of their income would thus be taxed today either at the corporate or the highest marginal rate rather than at the lower capital-gains rate of 23.8%.

There’s this tidbit, too:

From 1980 to 2010, as the top 1% increased their share of total before-tax income to 15% from 9%, their share of the individual income tax soared to 39% of the total paid, up from 17%.  Most were paying federal taxes at the highest marginal rate[.]

A 60% increase in income share (from a very small share to a small share) “matched” by a 129% increase in income tax share from small to large.  Hmm….

Minimum Wage and Collateral Damage

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The CBO, the other day, looked into the Democrats’ proposal—demand, really—to raise the Federal minimum wage to $10.10 from the present level of $7.25 per hour.

The CBO found two key outcomes from such a hike.  The first is that the increase is almost certain to cost jobs, to increase unemployment.  While acknowledging that the headline number of jobs lost—500,000—is only an estimate, the CBO said quite clearly that the range of the number of jobs that will be lost from this forced wage increase runs from a “very slight decrease” in jobs to 1 million jobs lost.  Notice that.  No increase at all in job availability will ensue.  A “very slight decrease” in jobs is a decrease in jobs.  Full stop.

The other key finding is this: the

increase to $10.10 an hour by July 2016 would eliminate 500,000 jobs, but lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty from the total of 45 million projected to be living in poverty in 2016.

900,000 Americans will be able to use the wage increase to climb out of poverty.  But 500,000 Americans will be forever locked out of that opportunity, will be sacrificed in favor of those others.  Low-wage jobs—minimum wage jobs—are low skilled jobs, are entry level jobs, in which the worker can accrue experience with which to earn promotion, gain needed skills for better jobs, bring extra money home to the family so the family as a whole can have a chance to climb out of poverty.  These jobs are how teenagers, just starting out, can begin to learn a work ethic, can start earning some money for college or for a car, or just earn some walking around money.

These folks, though, apparently are just necessary collateral damage on the way to equal outcomes for the survivors.

So much for equality of opportunity.

The CBO’s full report can be seen here.

It Doesn’t Wash

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The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

Such a national license-plate recognition database, ostensibly, would “help catch fugitive illegal immigrants.”  But once in existence, to what use would (not might) government put that database later?  Can you say NSA, boys and girls?  The danger is illustrated clearly, if unintentionally, by David Roberts, International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Technology Center Senior Program Manager:

We’d like to be able to keep the data as long as possible, because it does provide a rich and enduring data set for investigations down the line.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation understands (see the first link) the danger of Roberts’ goal:

Ultimately, you’re creating a national database of location information.  When all that data is compiled and aggregated, you can track somebody as they’re going through their life.

Such an open-ended dragnet of no one in particular, but simply of all of us, for vague, undefined future purposes in not consistent with individual liberty—or responsibility.

Even though the courts have ruled on “presumption of privacy,” they’ve gotten it wrong, basing their “assumption” on a measure of mindreading that simply doesn’t exist in our species.  The fact that the loud, vociferous, even zealous, hue and cry over evasions of privacy—real or perceived—even exists demonstrates that there is a very strong presumption of privacy held by each of us, even as we move about in public.

Indeed, the logic is flawed, also.  The fact that what we do is readily apparent to our fellow citizens as we wander the mall, walk the sidewalks, talk on our phones, drive on our streets, etc, is in no way an agreement the government can track our movements, much less create dossiers on each of us as we engage in these activities in the view of, or in concert with, our fellow citizens.

The government is not our fellow citizen; it is our political employee.  Even so, it has far too much power to be trusted with watching the things we let our fellow citizens see us do without a court’s oversight, without, for instance, a specific warrant for which a specific probable cause concerning a specific individual among us must first be demonstrated and sworn to by the government official desiring to investigate one of us.

The relationship between us—or any one of us—and government is not at all symmetrical, and there is very little reciprocity involved.  Arguments supporting such government activities as tracking of our out-of-home movements assume, erroneously, exactly that symmetry.

There’s no doubt that such a…tool…could achieve much good.  However, the good achieved is through convenience to government, not through a fundamental change in capabilities for hunting down specific bad guys.  The dangers such a tool represents to individual liberty and responsibility—to what it means to be an American—far outweigh the benefits of that convenience.

Update: Now HHS Undersecretary Jeh Johnson is saying the idea of having a private company develop a national database of our license plates has been canceled.  So, where are we?  Is the idea done?  Or is it being brought inside HHS, to be pursued sub rosa?

And why is the Undersecretary making this statement?  Where are the HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius and her boss, President Barack Obama?