Author Archives: eehines

It’s Not Morally Dubious

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Allysia Finley has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that talks about the arrogance and self-appointed moral superiority of scientists in our nation. One of her comments especially drew my attention, though. In the context of abortion and Roe v Wade, she wrote,

…the American Medical Association’s then-President Jack Resneck Jr asserted that states that restricted abortion would be “risking devastating consequences, including patients’ lives.” Why? Because “evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications.”
Comparing the risk of giving birth with that of terminating a pregnancy is morally dubious.

Including patients’ lives. Resnick doesn’t care a fig for the patients he so cynically ignores: those babies being killed by abortion. That’s the devasting consequence[] that Resnick ignores.

There only thing dubious about Resnick’s overt comparison is the comparison itself. What Resneck was comparing, and what Finley seems to have missed in his comparison, in fact was the certainty of the death of the baby from abortion with the mere, and empirically very small, risk of death from abortion-related complications and the empirically nearly as small (because 14 times nearly nothing still is very close to nothing) risk of death from childbirth complications. That comparison is not at all morally dubious. It’s clearly morally wrong, and it’s undisputedly morally abhorrent.

Nationalizing Companies

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The Wall Street Journal editors are badly mistaken here.

Mr Trump accused Kamala Harris of being a socialist, but the Biden Administration never nationalized companies.

Routine political polemics on the first part of that; functionally, and obviously, wrong on the second part.

Nationalizing individual companies is piffle. The Obama reign nationalized a whole industry—our health care “insurance” coverage industry via Obamacare, which required all of us to buy an Obamacare policy whether we wanted to or not, whether we needed one or not.

It’s true that the Biden administration didn’t formally nationalize any companies, but it functionally nationalized far more industries than that piker Obama with the Biden administration’s excessive regulation: ICE-powered vehicles and our energy production industries, our banking industry with its pressure to lend to these types and refuse to lend to those types, and even our press with its pressure to spike these news reports and to push those news reports, all the while pushing for editorials that favored administration ideologies while panning or ignoring policies of which Biden and his minions disapproved.

None of this is to suggest that the Federal government taking an ownership stake in Intel or any company is a good idea or even an acceptable one. It isn’t. But it’s telling that these opinion writers can make such an obviously wrong claim at the outset of their piece.

Add some Teeth to It

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Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ) is proposing legislation that would modify the DC Home Rule Act. The piece of interest to me is his Make DC Safe Again Act. Biggs’ proposal would lengthen from 30 days to 180 days the emergency period in which the president can take control of DC police.

I’d like some teeth added to that. Specifically, require DC to pay the costs of the Feds assuming control of the local police unless the DC governing body requests Federal intervention. I’d also like to see legislation that would apply that principle nationwide. Portland of 2020 (especially, but also extending into today) and Los Angeles of the current summer stand as firm examples of that necessity.

Vast Rightwing Conspiracy?

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Nah. Just a vast force out there. That’s the view of some venture capitalists who are launching PACs to support political candidates who favor as little AI regulation as possible and to oppose candidates who want strong regulation of AI and of AI development regimes. Josh Vlasto and Zac Moffatt, for instance:

There is a vast force out there that’s looking to slow down AI deployment, prevent the American worker from benefiting from the US leading in global innovation and job creation and erect a patchwork of regulation[.]

The polemics from the other side are just as extreme: AI will be the death of society, even the death of us all.

It’s certainly true that AI—like all sharply new technologies—carries risks for the current order of things in our economy, as well as benefits for us all on the other side of the disruption, but the extremes from either side and both sides’ ignoring those benefits do none of us any good.

There does need to be serious discussion and debate regarding the appropriate level of regulation of AI and of AI development, and serious discussion and debate regarding how that regulatory setup should itself evolve as AI and AI development evolve.

Notice that word “serious,” though. That takes the discussion and debate, or should, out of the realm of politics and into the realm of tech experts and, critically, us citizens who must live with the outcomes of regulatory decisions. Especially, us citizens must have the final decision regarding these (and all other, come to that) regulations.

A Justice…Misunderstands

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Justice Ketanji Br own Jackson dissented strenuously with a Supreme Court ruling that, in part, upheld the Trump Administration’s request for an emergency stay of a lower court’s blocking of NIH from canceling $783 million worth of grants.

The money part of the woman’s (dare I use that term on a person who doesn’t know what a woman is?) dissent:

the high court’s way of preserving the “mirage of judicial review while eliminating its purpose: to remedy harms.”

No. Not at all. The purpose of judicial review is critically—and solely—to ensure that the action before it, along with the statute(s) involved, follow the text of our Constitution and the text of those statutes. Nothing more and nothing less.

But the woman wasn’t done with shredding (to use the in-vogue term) “judicial review” [emphasis added]:

It would have been much simpler for the Court to just announce that, regardless of the plain text of the APA or what Congress intended to authorize, we no longer accept that the Government’s grant-termination decisions are subject to arbitrary-and-capricious review or that vacatur of an arbitrary grant-termination decision is an available remedy.

The greatest harm that is in play here is ruling on the basis of a particular judge’s or Justice’s personal definition of “harm.” Yet, this is exactly what Jackson presumes to attempt with her setting aside the petty text of a statute from which her august self demurs.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, including Jackson’s dissent can be read here.