Monthly Archives: February 2015

More Excessive Government

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US financial regulators are focusing renewed attention on Wall Street pay and are designing rules to curb compensation packages that could encourage excessive risk taking.

Regulators are considering requiring certain employees within Wall Street firms hand back bonuses for egregious blunders or fraud as part of incentive compensation rules the 2010 Dodd-Frank law mandated be written, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Including such a “clawback” provision in the rules would go beyond what regulators first proposed in 2011 but never finalized.

Congress created a bureaucracy, and it expanded it enormously with that Dodd-Frank. Now the bureaucrats have to do something to justify their existence. Regulators gotta regulate. And so we get this.

Never mind that the free market is a fine regulator, and “certain employees” and their “Wall Street firms” employers will be severely and promptly regulated when those excessive risks fail.

Government intrusion isn’t just not needed, though, it’s counterproductive. Now businesses, on and off Wall Street, will incur additional costs as they seek compliance, additional costs as they seek work-arounds, additional costs from the expanded field for nuisance suits (and legally legitimate ones), additional costs as they’re forced to negotiate even more complex compensation packages in order to hire the best, rather than the second best.

Such regulatory nonsense also is in large part duplicative and so wasteful. For instance:

Some banks are already voluntarily recouping money from employees who engage in misconduct or excessive risk.

We already have adequate laws (not regulations) on the books to handle both criminal and civil misconduct. Additional regulation here would be useless.

Too, that some businesses think such procedures are appropriate for them does not at all justify government interfering to impose such procedures on all of business.

Update: Corrected a typo in the third paragraph: Government intrusion isn’t just not needed….  <sigh>

5 questions every presidential candidate should answer: Terrorism Edition

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That’s the title of Michael Rubin’s article over at AEIdeas. Non-presidential candidate Hines essays some answers below.

1. How do you define terrorism? Terrorism is the use of mass killings, particularly of innocents, and associated destruction for the immediate purpose of causing terror in the hearts and minds of the target nation’s population. The intermediate and long range purpose is the use of that terror to cause the nation’s government—directly or by divorcing the population from the government through the former’s loss of faith in government—to accept in toto the terrorists’ demands.

2. Do you believe terrorism to be primarily motivated by grievance or ideology? Yes. Terrorists have an ideology—see Daesh, al Qaeda, Boko Haram for current examples, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff Gang for earlier examples—and they use the excuse of grievance to articulate their ideology. Daesh, for instance, espouses a very strict and harsh version of an ideology they center on Islam, with anyone who disagrees with them apostates and subject to killing on sight. Their grievance is that they’re oppressed and unable to press their ideology freely.

3. What is the theological component to terrorism? The question proceeds from a quasi-false premise. Terrorism is evil. Full stop. Quasi-false because while there are secular philosophies and ideologies that see very grave error, it’s primarily religion that has the concept of straight-up evil. In the end, though, there is no real theological component to terrorism; terrorism is outside of religion.

4. Should terrorism be treated as a criminal matter or a military threat? Yes. There are individual acts of terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. These are isolated incidents, and they’re properly treated as the fundamentally criminal acts that they are.

However, when terrorism is practiced as a matter of policy by a nation-state or a polity organized along networked lines, it becomes a state of war and a military matter. While the tools of law enforcement might be helpful here, those are in this context merely tools, and they must be used alongside and subordinate to military tools.

5. What countries do you believe are state sponsors of terrorism today? Any country that harbors terrorist organization(s) (note that a nation that has terrorist organization(s) within them but that is attempting to do something about that is not harboring them) is such a sponsor, as are nations that support terrorist entities and/or engage in terrorism themselves. Such nations include Russia, Iran, the Palestinian Authority (post-merger with Hamas), Turkey, Syria, northern Korea, Qatar, Venezuela, Cuba.

The Judicial Branch and the Law

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In a couple of weeks, the Supreme Court will hear a case involving Federal subsidies to health coverage purchasers who bought their plans on ObamaMart instead of State exchanges. The Obamacare law limits those subsidies to purchasers via State exchanges argue the plaintiffs; the government demurs.

Some ACA critics fear the Supreme Court may hesitate to block the current subsidies because of a lack of confidence in the legislative branch in general.

Against that backdrop, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said

The current Congress is not equipped really to do anything[.]

That claim is the pseudo-logic President Barack Obama uses to justify his Executive Orders and “executive actions” that deliberately bypass Congress, and unconstitutionally so.

Justice Ginsburg, and others of like mind on the Supreme Court, may be entirely right on Congress’ ability—or willingness—to act. However, she, and they, would do well to remember that the Constitution they’re sworn to uphold does not authorize the Court to legislate in place of, or in addition to, Congress.

Justice Ginsburg and her fellows would do well to remember that the judiciary’s task is first to determine whether a law comports with the Constitution as the Constitution is written, and if it’s legitimate, to apply that law as that law is written.

Full stop.

NLMSM Strikes Again

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Leading off an APNewsbreak piece Monday about how top Democrats want an extension to the sign-up period for Obamacare is this image:AP_3

The image is captioned [emphasis added]

In this Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015 photo, a laptop shows the HealthCare.com web site during an Affordable Care Act enrollment event at the Fort Worth Public Library in Fort Worth, Texas. For the second year in a row, millions of Americans have signed up for subsidized health insurance under President Barack Obama’s law. But as the 2015 sign-up season draws to a close Sunday, the future of the Affordable Care Act remains in doubt. (AP Photo/LM Otero) (The Associated Press)

Umm, no. That’s actually HealthCare.gov, the actual government-built (with your money, recall) ObamaMart portal for signing up for Obamacare. As the white field in the upper right corner of the page in the image clearly shows. Below, by the way, is what was being displayed last Monday on HealthCare.gov:AP_1

In fairness to the AP, even though their piece was datelined 16 Feb (the day after the signup period had expired), it likely was written Sunday, 15 Feb.

The image below is what the home page of HealthCare.com was displaying on 16 Feb. I have no idea of the legitimacy of HealthCare.com; use it at your own risk.AP_2

This sort of reporting has been all too typical of the NLMSM’s commentary regarding Obamacare, and it’s at the heart of the public’s confusion about Obamacare. This is no typo, nor is it particularly nefarious; it’s just sloppy reporting and non-existent editing.

HealthCare.com has this, in part, on their About Us page:

HealthCare.com is owned and operated by HealthCare, Inc. Since 2006, HealthCare.com has been committed to improving online healthcare for U.S. consumers making purchasing decisions.

Democrats and Those Pesky Laws

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Three senior House members told The Associated Press that they plan to strongly urge the administration to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year.

The three are Michigan’s Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. All worked to help steer Obama’s law through rancorous congressional debates from 2009-2010.

Because, voters. Because, law? That’s too inconvenient; just ignore it.

The Obamacare law—which Democrats have been trying to stifle debate about by insisting “It’s the law of the land”—specified the signup period. If these worthies want to change the signup period, they need to change the law—which they helped write this way—not ignore it.

The lawmakers say they are concerned that many of their constituents will find out about the penalties after it’s already too late for them to sign up for coverage, since open enrollment ended Sunday.

Wait, what? These Democrats haven’t been talking to their constituents about their responsibilities under these Democrats’ law? Not since 2010? At all!?

Oh, yeah. Voters.