Category Archives: morality

This Is Not Your Grandfather’s EU

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I hope, because EU, look at you now (OK, some of you following along at home might see that I’m mixing ads and old songs.  Noted.)

Mady Delvaux, a Socialist MEP from Luxembourg, thinks robots should be considered to be persons and have rights.

Delvaux authored a report that proposes giving legal status to robots and categorize them as “electronic persons.”

But we should be able to kill those robot persons solely on our say so.  They should have kill switches which we can activate when we think they’re going to cause “dangerous damages.”  And this requirement of Delvaux’:

You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human.  You must never think that a robot is a human and that he loves you.

There are persons and there are persons, so, you know, separate but maybe not so equal.  But she has a solution for that, too.  Robots should be

made with operations that comply to all applicable laws and ethical principles.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ve done such a wonderful job of programming humans to comply with all applicable laws—even those laws that conflict with each other—and we’ve done an even better job of programming our laws to comply with our ethical principles—whatever we’ve been able to determine those to be.  Sure.

Only in the EU.

“How Barack Obama rescued the US economy”

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That’s the headline on a recent Financial Times piece (sorry, the FT has a paywall) by Martin Wolf.  It’s a silly headline, for a silly article.

How should we assess the economic success or failure of Barack Obama’s presidency?

This is a difficult question to answer.

No, the question is easy to answer.  Obama’s economic policies have been abject failures.  It’s also straightforward to lay the bulk of responsibility on Obama and his administration.  While it’s true that the Panic of 2008 began in the prior administration, it was Obama’s “stimulus” package that both blew up the nation’s debt and failed in its purpose of stimulating our economy with shovel ready jobs in a massive so-called Keynesian stimulus and its bailout of failing large banks.  It was his Federal Reserve’s policies (yes, yes, the central bank is supposed to be independent, but it was Obama’s Ben Bernanke, extended at Obama’s decision, and his Janet Yellen appointment) that degraded money discipline with their decisions to ease the money supply and hold interest rates artificially low.  It was his excessive—explosively so—regulation that limited business’ ability to function in the market, that limited small business’ ability to get started, that limited job growth and employment recovery.

It was the Obama administration’s Dodd-Frank, with its too big to fail policy that distorted those big business’ risk-taking decisions, decisions that used to be made in a free market but that under Dodd-Frank are made with the perception—courtesy of that “stimulus” bailout—that if the business messed up, Government would bail them out.

[S]hockingly, most congressional Republicans opposed all significant monetary, financial and fiscal actions taken to deal with the crisis.

This isn’t shocking at all; what’s shocking is the blind, knee-jerk rejection of free market principles by a Democratic Party (soon to become a Progressive-Democratic Party) suddenly in complete control of our government and cut loose from any restrictions on their power.  Absent the “stimulus,” the Panic might have been steeper, but it also would have been much shorter.  One only has to compare the Depression of 1920-21 with the Great Depression to see the efficacy of government non-response compared with Government intervention, and the Panic of 1907 with both to see another example of the efficacy of private response compared with Government intervention.  Of course, the Democrats knew—and know—this history, yet they acted as they did, anyway.

He tried to move the US closer to the universal health insurance taken for granted in other high-income countries. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has added an estimated 20m adults and 3m children to the insurance rolls.

He didn’t try, he did it by Party fiat and then by Executive diktats—lots and lots of diktats.  Further, while Obamacare has provided health welfare to those adults and children, it also has thrown millions more out of their health insurance plans and denied them access to their doctors in direct—and knowing—contravention of Obama’s explicit promises that these denials would not happen.  The claim of cost growth reduction is a cynical one, also, being limited as it is to the cost of selected groups of Americans.  In fact, the cost has exploded, with premiums rising in double-digit per centages, deductibles going to 10s of thousands of dollars—an annual expense—the departure of heretofore health insurance companies from the health welfare plan “market,” and the cost to taxpayers similarly growing rapidly to pay for the subsidies of those given essentially free access to this health welfare.

Wolf’s discussion of our “jobs” recovery is misleading, also. Labor force participation rate is at historic lows, held back by those policies’ suppression of job creation.  Even the male labor force participation rate, which has been in a declining trend since its early ’50s peak, is farther below that long-term trend than it ever has been in that time frame.

Finally, this graph summarizes the efficacy of the Obama administration “recovery” as compared to post-WWII economic dislocation recoveries.

Even at the end of 2016 rate of 4.7% unemployment of 4.7%, the Obama administration’s economic policies have held back the recovery by years.

Failure of Hate Laws

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The failure stems from an inability to define hate, but mostly it fails from the irrelevance of hate as anything other than a motivator for committing a crime.  Motive, though, belongs solely in the jury box during the punishment phase given a conviction of a crime; it should not be foreordained by a Government’s attempt to define the hate or by Government’s more evident attempts to discriminate among groups of Americans and single some out for favorable treatment at the expense of other groups of Americans.

That’s demonstrated by Illinois and Ohio law, which comes up from case of the four blacks who attacked a white disabled man and live streamed it on Facebook, as discussed by Eugene Volokh in his Washington Post article.  For instance,

The focus, then, isn’t on “hate.” For instance, if a thief selects a physically disabled victim simply because he thinks it’s less likely that the victim will fight back, that too is covered as a hate crime under Illinois law.

And

Similarly, the Amish beard-cutting case was prosecuted as a hate crime on the theory that the targets were chosen by fellow Amish perpetrators because of the targets’ dissenting religious beliefs within the Amish community.  …  Choosing someone for attack based on his religion would be a hate crime whether the motivation is hatred, theological disagreement, or whatever else.

You see the irrelevance of hate in such crimes, yet Government, in these instances Illinois’ and Ohio’s, arbitrarily tacks it on, just because.

As Volokh put it,

But the Illinois statute and the federal statute [another of his example laws], like most other hate-crime statutes that I’ve seen, focus on discriminatory selection, not the underlying emotion behind the selection.

Indeed.  I pick you for my crime victim because I think I’m more likely to get away with it than if I’d selected someone else or because I’ve decided (legitimately or not) that you’d done me wrong, and I was determined to get you back, and I do the crime.  But if you happen to belong to a government-favored group of Americans, my crime—completely unchanged in its nature or motivation—becomes much more serious solely because of Government’s own discrimination: it has chosen to favor your group over other American groups and so to discriminate against those other American groups.

Which also is an argument for doing away with Governments favoring, for any purpose, this or that group of Americans over other groups of Americans, which Government has decided should be disadvantaged by that favoring.  That’s hate crime by Government.

Is It 20 January Yet?

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It’s always someone else’s fault with these Democrats.

At a final press conference in Washington, DC Thursday….

Kerry disagreed with the narrative that Obama failed to enforce the red line, however, saying the president did intend to act—but was steered off course after the British Parliament narrowly voted against bombing Syria in August 2013.

The motorboat skipper said this:

The president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, did decide to use force. And he announced his decision publicly and said we’re going to act, we’re going to do what we need to do to respond to this blatant violation of international law and of warnings and of the red line he had chosen[.]

Now, we were marching towards that time when, lo and behold…before the Friday decision, Prime Minister David Cameron went to Parliament…and he sought a vote of approval for him to join in the action that we were going to engage in. And guess what? The Parliament voted no. They shot him down.

They shot him down.  !?  It’s the Brits’ fault?  No, not a bit of it.  President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama (D) and his motorboat pilot were too timid to act on their own.  Obama and Kerry were so used to popping off that they never thought they’d actually be expected to honor their commitment, and so when al Assad called their bluff, they cut and ran for their desk bottoms.  (Would it have helped if James Taylor had sung, in the Rose Garden, about having a friend?)

Say, though, arguendo, that the Parliament vote was somehow legitimately influential in getting Obama to walk away from his proudly announced red line.  The outcome remains: Obama failed to enforce the red line.  Full stop.

Nile Gardiner, Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Director, had this:

[Kerry’s remarks are] a reflection of a broader disdain for Britain that runs through the Obama presidency[.]

No, it’s much worse and much broader than that.  How despicable can one administration be?

A Thought on Edward Snowden

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This one is prompted by a Letter to the Editor published in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  The relevant part of the letter is this:

If we start at the beginning, it was the US government, including the National Security Agency, that stole information that belonged to me—my phone and internet metadata. Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the government’s thieving. Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.

Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.  He is, and worse. That the NSA screwed up/stole private data/abused its role/what-have-you doesn’t alter that simple fact.

Were Snowden a whistleblower, he wouldn’t have run to the PRC’s Hong Kong and then proceeded to Russia where he’s continuing to give up American secrets.

Were Snowden engaged in civil disobedience, he would have returned long before now—indeed, would never have left—stood trial, making his case before the American people and a jury of his peers, and with his arrest and trial, emphasized the absurdity of the law that facilitated the NSA’s behavior.

But he did the one and didn’t do the other.