Monthly Archives: February 2017

Does a foreigner on foreign soil have Fourth Amendment rights?

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That’s the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  The answer should be obvious, too: it would be the height of jingo-ism to assert US government jurisdiction over non-citizens outside our borders—outside, for instance, the 14th Amendment’s subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Firing into another country at a foreign national, especially one that’s a citizen of the country being fired into, could well be a violation, but that potential would be a violation of a different set of circumstances than the question before the Supremes in the present case, Hernandez v Mesa.  That other set of circumstance has to do with international relations, foreign policy, the nature of casus belli, and on and on—and all purely political matters, not legal ones, and so not only a different set of circumstances, but a matter that’s outside the reach of court jurisdiction.

A Good Move

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There’s a new sheriff in Phoenix, the one replacing Sheriff Arpaio, who was defeated in the election last fall.  The new cop has withdrawn Arpaio’s policy of holding prisoners for as long as “necessary” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to come get those flagged for deportation.

I agree.  Cooperation with the Feds is a two-way street; the Feds have to work with the locals, too.

[New Sheriff Paul Penzone] won’t hold immigrants flagged for deportation by federal authorities past their release date in a major policy change.

He can’t, with any legitimacy.  ICE will need to do their part and move faster even as Penzone continues to cooperate fully with them.

Penzone said ICE officers will remain in his jail to screen everyone who is booked, but he will no longer detain inmates past their release dates to accommodate the agency.

Media Bias

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Here’re another couple of examples, this time by (not reported by, but by) media “critic” Howard Kurtz, writing for Fox News.

What President Donald Trump tweeted:

What Kurtz said—right after he presented the above tweet:

The media are not the enemy.

Notice that cynical strawman: carefully censored from the tweet by Kurtz was the modifier—there in all caps—FAKE NEWS.  Just to drive the point home so that maybe even Kurtz will recognize it, what Trump said was the enemy was fake news media, not media generally.

Here’s Kurtz again:

Trump was able to change the subject from the firing of Michael Flynn, the withdrawal of his Labor nominee and the fact that he still hasn’t appealed the travel ban ruling to, well, himself.

Here’s Kurtz attempting to change the subject away from illegal, potentially criminal, intelligence leaks; SecDef’s trip to Iraq as the Mosul campaign picks up; and tax reform and Obamacare repeal and replace to, well, his media.

How biased is that, if not outright dishonest?

Foolish

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Bill Gates, the co-founder of  Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots  that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

He said, and he was serious,

Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things.  If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.

No, I wouldn’t.  Leave aside his blithe assumption that that money is the government’s in the first place, and not the property of the human worker.  Leave aside his blithe assumption that the government needs the money.  Leave aside his blithe assumption that a human worker should be taxed for a stranger’s current retirement and medical needs (Gates omitted the Medicare-related taxes also collected) instead of his own future retirement and medical needs.  Leave aside Gates’ omission of the employer’s payroll taxes on that human worker’s labor.

The whole point of automation is to hold down costs, is to be competitive with other companies, and an outcome of all of this is lower costs to the consumers who are using—in some cases dependent on—the goods and services being sold.

Recode, citing a McKinsey report, said that 50% of jobs performed by humans are vulnerable to robots, which could result in the loss of about $2.7 trillion in the US alone.

Loss to whom?  One “loss” is to government revenues—but there is no submission of a justification for Government’s need for the revenue.  Another loss seems more real: to the private sector.  The money isn’t lost, though, it’s misallocated—to unnecessarily high cost labor, which translates into unnecessarily high cost to consumers.

Besides—the robots already pay taxes, at every company along the production path that leads to a completed robot: costs of acquisition of that stage’s components—from the mine on up—and income tax on their part of that stage company’s income, and on the final assembly’s cost allocation in the production of the final good or service.

Human workers don’t pay much of this at all.  This is just another backdoor effort to prop labor costs artificially above the value of the labor.  And it’s foolish.

Free Speech for Me; You Shut Up

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University of Chicago pupils (I can’t call them even students in the scale of pupil-student-scholar) are objecting to non-Left speakers being allowed on “their” campus.

The [pupils] objected to the school’s Institute of Politics’ invitation to former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. They claim that allowing him to speak “normalizes bigotry” and provides a platform for fascism.

These precious ones are actively ducking away from a clear opportunity to “denormalize bigotry” by running away from him.

The coalition of students from U of C Resists, Graduate Students United, Students Working Against Prisons, and UChicago Socialists claim that the school’s “commitment to free expression doesn’t require the institution to host him….

Speech should be free only for the Left, they claim.  They are the epitome of the fascism and bigotry these wondrous ones pretend to oppose.

Alternatively, these precious ones are just so terrified of a different view, just so unconfident of their own reasoning faculties, that they’d rather run screaming for the Midway and avoid debate rather than face the alternatives and demonstrate with rational discourse, logic, and fact the suboptimality of their opponents’ viewpoints.  Or they’re aware of the fragility of their own and so of their own inability to mount a coherent, reasoned demonstration of the superiority of their own.