Monthly Archives: January 2016

More Interference

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The Obama administration is proposing to spend nearly $4 billion in a decade to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars on US roads and curb traffic fatalities and travel delays.

No. The Congress needs to refuse to provide the funding for this.

Leave aside whether we want driverless cars on our roads. There’s an arguably positive role for government to actively support, even help fund, basic research. However, once the theory from such basic research has been developed sufficiently (a private enterprise-defined criterion), bringing any related concepts to market is purely an engineering matter and so must be solely a free market/producer/consumer decision. The work, then, should be funded only by private enterprise.

Government has no business picking winning or losing technologies, and that’s what it does when it funds bring-it-to-market schemes. That’s unavoidable, no matter the intentions of the politicians pushing such an expense.

President Barack Obama’s proposal here is intended to facilitate the development of regulations to govern driverless cars. Leave aside here the Progressives’ idea that Americans and our businesses need a government rule for every aspect of what we do, or don’t do. This…regulation development…is nothing more than another bring-it-to-market scheme.

The EU and Taxes

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Competition Commissioner [sic!] Margrethe Vestager called foul on a Belgian tax law the commission says unfairly saved 35 companies—most of them European—some €700 million ($763.3 million) in taxes since 2005. Belgium will now have to collect those taxes if it doesn’t appeal, or loses in court.

How terrible it is that a company should keep the money that belongs to its owners by following applicable sovereign law. For shame.

Here’s the thing, identified by the WSJ at the above link:

EU leaders and tax-happy populists are frustrated with slow political progress toward EU-wide, and maybe global, tax rules that would raise taxes on large companies. Ms Vestager thinks she’s found a way to push things along using antitrust law.

Indeed. Never mind that it isn’t the EU’s money. She and her EU government corporate cronies want it.

Even Conservative News Outlets

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Even putatively conservative news outlets are playing a foolish game, or are being carefully, timidly politically correct.

Here’s a Fox News headline over a piece concerning a terrorist assault in Burkina Faso Saturday:

At least 23 dead after Al Qaeda-linked militants attack upscale Burkina Faso hotel

No. These are not militants. Neither are they insurgents, as others are pleased to term such as these.

These are terrorists. These particular terrorists are Islamic terrorists. Full stop.

Republican Presidential candidates decry, rightly, President Barack Obama’s (D) refusal to name our enemy. So it is similarly wrong for our press to fear to name our enemy.

These are Islamic terrorists. And now they’re attacking an honest Muslim nation.

Malfeasance

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It’s rampant at the Veterans Administration. And “leadership” there and in the White House plainly don’t care, as their decision to be inactive demonstrates. Here are some examples, from The Wall Street Journal.

  • After the biggest scandal in VA history, in which 110 VA medical facilities across the country maintained secret lists to hide long waits for care, only three low-level VA employees have been fired for wait-time manipulation.
  • In September the VA’s Office of Inspector General revealed that two VA senior executives inappropriately used their authority to game the agency’s hiring system, allowing them to benefit from more than $400,000 in taxpayer-funded relocation expenses. [The VA reassigned them at their existing salary rather than terminating them for cause.]
  • In December the public learned of two internal VA investigations that found whistleblowers at the Phoenix VA Hospital were retaliated against by two senior managers…. More than a year after…the VA has refused to hold them accountable.

Robert McDonald, VA Secretary, promised to fix this sort of thing when he was handed the job 16 months ago. These failures are demonstrations of his decision not to rock the boat. That his decisions have been allowed to stand unchallenged are clear demonstrations of President Barrack Obama’s lack of concern for the welfare of our veterans.

veteranos administratio delende est

Two Mistakes

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One by folks on the far right and one by The Wall Street Journal. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) gave the Republicans’ response to President Barack Obama’s vaporous SOTU.

Her conservative critics unloaded. “Trump should deport Nikki Haley” went one tweet. The next morning on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump declared that Gov Haley is “very weak on immigration.”

Of course, these are slurs and comments utterly devoid of facts, as the WSJ noted.

The woman who says “illegal immigration is not welcome in South Carolina?” Who signed a law toughening the state’s illegal immigration reform act, which requires employers to verify the immigration status of new hires? Who has fought President Obama’s bid to resettle unvetted Syrian refugees? And whose state has joined 16 others in a lawsuit against Mr Obama for what they say is his unconstitutional executive order on illegal immigration?

But then the WSJ committed its own error.

A party that rejects Nikki Haley as a spokeswoman is one that doesn’t really want to build a governing majority.

Conflating these criticizers with Republicans also is a claim devoid of fact, beyond the most narrow, literal sense.