Category Archives: ethics

Blame-shifting to Middlemen

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Now Biden-Harris is throwing a billion dollars at the food supply chain problem, even as he’s blaming food supply chain middlemen for his supply problems.

This is just more blame-shifting by Biden-Harris.

Middlemen can, indeed, price gouge. So can end-sellers. So can original producers. However, in the vast main, middlemen drive prices lower: they insulate original producers from end sellers, giving those producers more flexibility in to whom to sell, the middlemen more choices to whom to sell, and they give end sellers more choices of from whom to buy. Competition among middlemen and on both sides of the middlemen drive prices down.

And never mind the risks taken by middlemen. They don’t broker deals between original producers and final buyers; they buy from those producers, own the product, and subsequently must find buyers to whom to sell. Even if middlemen think they’ve lined up their buyers prior to purchasing from producers, many of those deals are only potential and can fall through, or the agreed future price can prove to be wildly inadequate in the realization of delivery.

Biden-Harris actually claimed with a straight face, through his unsigned “fact sheet,” that

[m]ost farmers now have little or no choice of buyer for their product and little leverage to negotiate, causing their share of every dollar spent on food to decline.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But a farmer has far more choice than if there were no middlemen to take the risk of a bumper crop driving down the price he can get on sale after harvest, or of a poor crop driving up the price he could have gotten had the crop done poorly before he committed to sell.

Biden-Harris, aside from the dishonesty of their blame-shifting, in the particular case of farm production is pretending to be ignorant of the time lags involved from crop planting to final crop delivered to the end user, and of the time lags involved from crop planting to final delivery to the livestock rancher to the end user.

Military’s Attack on Religious Freedom

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The US military is flatly refusing even to seriously consider members’ requests for religious accommodation requests regarding excusals from getting vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus. Members who apply are getting boiler plate denials of their requests. Every single one of them; no request has been granted to date.

The Chief of Staff for the USAF, for instance, is insisting that

vaccination is the least restrictive means of furthering the military’s compelling governmental interest.

The business is on appeal through the USAF (and Navy and Army) internal appeals processes; I strongly suspect members will wind up in Federal courts after the DoD appeals processes rubber stamp the service chiefs’ decisions to deny.

In that event, I suggest that all courts hearing such cases should order the Secretary of the Air Force to provide the facts and logic that support the claim of least restrictive means. No Federal court should accept the bald, unsubstantiated statement as in any way dispositive.

There’s another action Federal courts should take: should require the service chiefs to provide the specific reasons for denying the RAR for each case in which an RAR was denied.

One Federal court, since I first wrote this post, has taken some action.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Navy from enforcing its Must Have Vaccine move. He wrote, in part,

There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.

And

There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.

The judge’s ruling can be read here.

The Senate and the Republic

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR) has said the quiet part aloud (to coin a phrase). His immediate venue is the coming Progressive-Democrat effort to Federalize our nation’s elections, which by our Constitution are set by each State’s own legislatures and only modifiable under narrow circumstances by the Federal Congress.

You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging. One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.

No, these are not different “forces” at all. The functionality of our republic depends on our Federal Senate remaining the bipartisan body that it was designed to be. In the present case, that requires the Senate’s filibuster function to remain as it is, which enforces the Senate’s bipartisan nature.

It gets worse, though:

[Progressive-]Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules.

This is Party being openly, loudly and proudly racist. There are no minority voters or “other” voters or non-minority voters. There are only American voters. As a man said not so long ago,

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

Even if that man turned out actually to not believe his words, the concept he pretended to espouse is true, nonetheless.

But, then, this is just another aspect of the Progressive-Democrats’ drive to fundamentally change America. The next year, and the two years after that, are going to be very dangerous times for our Republic.

Censorship in New York State

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Now the wonders of the New York State Senate want to ban, formally by statute, speech of which they disapprove.

A New York Senate bill if passed would criminalize the promotion of content that “includes a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.”

This is rank censorship. Whose definition of “likely?” Whose definition of “fraudulent theory?”

Here are just a few items that are threatened by this censorship:

  • Advertising
  • Political ads/speech
  • Satire
  • Comedy
  • Ridicule
  • Exaggeration for effect
  • Irony

This is an all too typical effort by Progressive-Democrats to control our speech.

O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t in this new year of New York.

If It’s a Good Idea….

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One sub-bill in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill would have removed a loophole that lets foreign purchasers of US real estate dodge a tax that could reach 30% on the profits generated by those holdings.

The loophole works like this:

Instead of buying a building directly, a foreign investor creates a shell company in an offshore location like the Cayman Islands.
That shell company then lends money to a US entity called a blocker corporation, which in turn buys the building. Instead of paying any profits from the building directly to the foreign investor, the blocker corporation sends interest on its loan to the offshore shell company, which then passes it on to the foreign investor. By taking this detour, the foreign investor avoids the tax on foreign real-estate owners.

It works because the blocker is a corporation domiciled in a territory that’s a US tax haven, and so those corporations avoid the tax.

There are a couple of implications from closing this loophole.

[P]roponents say it could raise billions in tax revenue.

That works for me. On the other hand,

Property owners worry it could also lead to fewer foreign purchases of US commercial real estate.

I’m having a hard time seeing any serious downside to that beyond a temporary (I say) downward pressure on real estate prices, or more likely, a slowing of increases in real estate prices, in the initial period following the closure of the loophole. After that initial period, though, the real estate market would adjust to the new regime, and real estate prices would resume their normal behavior.

If this sub-bill is a good idea—and I think it is, at least in principle—than it should be excised from that reconciliation foolishness and presented by itself in a clean, stand-alone bill. In January.