Monthly Archives: November 2014

Taxing Europe

Posted on by
Reply

Speaking at a gathering of the Group of 20 major economies in Brisbane, the former prime minister of Luxembourg defended his position, saying a lack of cooperation between European Union member states created a system where “very low taxation of companies” was legal. “Things of that kind could happen because of the divergency between national tax legislation,” he said.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that like he thought low taxes were a bad thing. Leaving more money in the hands of the folks who earned it, instead of transferring it to Government Know Betters is a bad thing.

Contra our own President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party, I don’t want us to be more like Europe.

Wrong Answer

Posted on by
1

At this week’s G-20 meeting in Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron outlined his proposed restrictions on speech as a mechanism for combatting terrorism and youth radicalization at home.

Cameron told the Parliament the root cause of extremism was not poverty, social isolation from the mainstream or foreign policy.

“The root cause of the challenge we face is the extremist narrative. So we must confront this extremism in all its forms,” Cameron said.

“We must ban extremist preachers from our country. We must root out extremism from our schools, universities and prisons[.]”

This is the wrong answer.

Youth “radicalization” is a part of growing up as children test boundaries, learn more, test more boundaries, and so on. It’s how they learn initiative and individual responsibility.

“Extreme” speech also is a way of pushing boundaries. More importantly, it’s a way of drawing the public’s and government’s attention to this or that problem, and of pushing authorities to take corrective action—where appropriate. The public, after all, is fully capable determining for itself whether the problem described really is worth any hoo-raw.

Most importantly, though, it’s an extremely dangerous thing for government to limit speech or radical behavior. What’s the limiting principle for such limits? In what way government draw the line here, and not one syllable further? In what way can government say this is too radical, but that is not? In what way can government discriminate incitement to riot from a misunderstood speech?

“I know it when I see it,” as a Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, is a poor standard, and it leaves the matter open to government abuse. If this speech is too extreme, then what about that speech? And the next speech? Absent a clearly stated limit—and Cameron appears to have offered none—there’s nothing to keep government from adding limits, extending them, barring, for instance, criticism of government as prejudicial to good order.

No, a better answer is to let the speech fly, let the “radicalization” occur. Give parents and schools the tools to teach better (which begins with holding the parents accountable for their failure to be parents). Let the “radicalized” go join the terrorists overseas—don’t let them come back. Punish the domestic crimes when they occur, don’t make additional crimes through legislation. There is already a sufficiency (and perhaps too many) conspiracy laws on the books which can be used to preempt domestic crime and terrorist activities; enforce these, don’t create more conspiracy crimes legislatively.

Cameron’s proposal is disappointing from the leader of the birthplace of John Locke.

Intelligence Fusion

Posted on by
Reply

Intel fusion is the process of putting together disparate—often widely disparate—bits of information, from a wide variety of sources, to achieve a larger, coherent picture of various goings-on (and to rule out as truly unrelated some of those bits).

We’ve had in our recent past (as far as is being discovered by the public) a number of not too disparate, but seemingly relatively trivial on an individual basis, hacks by the People’s Republic of China of lower level US government agencies. They’ve hacked, for instance, our weather systems and satellite network, corporate email networks, the Federal government’s OPM computers, the White House’s computer networks, state and Federal level DMV databases, and on and on.

Often, the hacks really are directly useful: they get intellectual property, proprietary financial information, defense secrets, and so on.

But these hacks, rather their entry points, also represent windows into the government house—the Chinese sneak into our house through a variety of windows, since the front (and maybe back) doors are more or less locked.

What does fusion say about these disparate hacks? Are they just random probes? Pokings around to see what’s what or to see what they can get away with? Or, what’s getting planted in the way of malware that, once through the window, moves along, penetrating more deeply, perhaps proliferating? Once past the outer firewalls (the software version of a house’s locked entryways), what thefts are being set up for future use, what Stux-like sabotage is being prepared for future mid-crisis execution?

Maybe nothing. Maybe….

I’d rather be foolishly paranoid, though, than innocent and vulnerable.

What’s next for ObamaCare?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the title of a Jim Angle article on Fox News.com. RTWT, but what interests me are a couple of comments he quoted in his piece.

The first comment is this one, by John Goodman, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute:

[I]if you repeal it, you’re going to have to replace it with something. And repeal and replace is just another way of saying we’re going to change ObamaCare into something different and better.

Of course. Free market solutions would work. “Change Obamacare” into…? Sure, if keeping the name proves tactically sound, that’s fine. Calling white black in order to get the black replaced with something better may be politically necessary, but it still won’t be black anymore. I’d prefer a better collection of names for the collection of smaller policies (rather than one large policy) that should replace this monstrosity, but that can come later.

Then there’s this bigger bit of nonsense from Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

[Y]ou need to not only say you’re against the ACA…, but you’re going to need to have a replacement plan to show people you have a better way of providing people with health insurance coverage.

That’s partly right. The upcoming Republican Congress does need to have a replacement plan. However, it’s not government’s job to “provid[e] people with health insurance coverage.” It’s the job of the market place and the private citizens interacting in it to provide people with the coverage they want—including no coverage at all. Government has no role in this whatsoever beyond its role of ensuring an honest market place.