Category Archives: ethics

Circularly Self-Serving

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Or self-servingly circular. You decide.

The IRS, this time at President Donald Trump’s (R) behest, is moving to block the trial of a couple of IRS whistleblowers who are suing the agency over its non-payment of whistleblower rewards they believe are owed them over their exposure of alleged tax irregularities inside Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation.

“In this case, the Whistleblower Office denied petitioners’ claims because the petitioners’ claims were never considered in an IRS action. Here, the Whistleblower Office forwarded petitioners’ claims to a classifier,” the IRS motion to dismiss argued last week. “Following the classifiers’ preliminary review, the Classifier declined to forward petitioners’ claims to exam and recommended that it be forwarded to the CI [criminal investigation] division.
“The IRS did not proceed with any potential action when it investigated petitioners’ claims,” the IRS added.

The IRS’ claim is this: we didn’t do anything about the beef, therefore, there is no beef about which to sue us.

This is one more example of an agency’s adjudicative facility being judge, jury, and executioner at the direct expense of justice for the individual(s)—or justice for the people if a proper Article III court were to find for the agency.

12 Million Don’t Use The Health Insurance They Have

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The lede lays out the background.

ObamaCare really is a gift that keeps on giving—for insurers. The law forces Americans to buy pricey plans with benefits they don’t need. And now the Paragon Institute reports that taxpayers are subsidizing insurance for nearly 12 million people who never use their coverage.

As the WSJ puts it, here’s the wild part:

More than a third of all enrollees generated no medical claims last year, according to Paragon’s analysis. That includes 40% of those in plans that are fully subsidized. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of enrollees who didn’t use their health coverage more than tripled to 11.7 million from 3.5 million.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that being forced to buy something that isn’t needed or wanted bit. The other is that “purchasers,” after paying those enormously high premiums, or having the government pay those premiums with OPM, still would have to pay out of their own pockets for any health care throughout the year because of the enormously high deductibles those ObamaCare plans hide behind.

Forgive us for being old-fashioned, but why should taxpayers subsidize insurance for healthy people who don’t need or use it?

Indeed.

No, It’s Not

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On the matter of an organization’s cybersecurity responsibilities, Kurt Knutsson opened with this in a Fox News article:

When a hospital or nonprofit falls victim to a cyberattack, it’s hard to place blame. Cybersecurity isn’t their strength, and many lack the budget for a dedicated security team, let alone a chief technology officer.

It’s completely straightforward to fix blame in such a case, as in all other cases. Knutsson identified the culprits even while denying the difficulty of identifying them. The lack of sufficient budget and (not or) the lack of security-capable IT personnel is directly the fault of the hospital or nonprofit’s management team, who refused to provide the budget necessary to have proper security against cyberattacks.

Especially for hospitals, which maintain so much personal and personally identifying medical data, such conscious decisions to not perform are inexcusable. Cybersecurity needn’t be an organization’s strength, but cybersecurity—and the personnel and resources needed to achieve and maintain it—most assuredly need to be a serious undertaking.

Disingenuous

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The Canadian government has ordered binding arbitration in the dispute between Air Canada and its flight attendants union, the latter which struck the airline a week ago last Saturday. The union is crying foul over not having gotten its way, accusing the airline, in typical union fashion, of sandbagging (the union’s term) the negotiations.

On the other hand, there’s this, also, from the union regarding those negotiations.

The airline said it offered its flight attendants a 38% increase in total compensation over a four-year period. The proposal also offered a 12% to 16% rise in hourly pay in the first year. The union said the pay offers failed to help its members recover after historically-high inflation this decade.

Leave aside the minor fact that the airline didn’t cause the inflation, the Canadian government’s response to economic factors did, so the union’s beef regarding the effects of inflation is properly between it and the government.

What the union is choosing to ignore in its inflation beef is that the airline suffers just as much from that historically-high inflation and must also deal with the resulting price increases and current elevated price levels.

Land Swapping

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President Donald Trump (R) is upset with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the latter’s pointing out that he cannot, under the Ukrainian constitution, agree to any land swap with Russia, as a condition to a ceasefire or for any other reason.

On this matter, though, Trump is badly mistaken on two grounds. The first is that Zelenskyy must follow his nation’s most basic law (as well as all of its legislatively generated laws), and that forbids him from agreeing any land swap.

The other ground is at least as big an obstacle. Russia is not offering any land to swap for Ukrainian land. The barbarian is only offering—and only may be offering here—to swap some barbarian occupied land in return for being allowed to retain other barbarian occupied land. This is akin to the burglar offering to return some of the jewelry and other valuables he stole if, in return, he’s allowed to keep the rest of the jewelry and valuables he stole.

Trump should know better than this.

He’s anxious to force this deal, though, because he’s chary of all the killing that’s going on in the barbarian’s war, and he wants it to stop. Trump needs, however, to recognize that he’s dealing with a barbarian chieftain, not a civilized leader of a civilized polity. The killing won’t stop in the wake of this sort of sham deal.

The fastest way—if only because it’s the only way—for the killing to stop is for Ukraine to win this war outright and decisively, the only way that can happen is for Ukraine to succeed in driving the barbarian wholly and completely back out of Ukraine, and the only way that can happen—and it’s virtually guaranteed to happen if this criterion is met—is for the US, which is to say Trump, to stop slow-walking and instead to transfer arms and logistics of the kind the Ukrainian military say they need, in the amounts and at the pace they need them and without limits on targeting, to Ukraine. Additionally, Europe (with or without pressure from Trump to do so) needs to execute the same arms and logistics support.

The faster Ukraine wins this war, the faster the killing about which Trump is so worried will end.