Category Archives: politics

Experts Everywhere

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A couple of professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics want a body of Experts to supervise risks from emergent AI, saying that such a body would be better than an FDA-like regulatory body, or Congress through statutorily enabled product-safety laws.

They’re right that having a government body of experts like the FDA do this sort of thing is determinedly suboptimal. They’re right, also, regarding Congress, although Congress is considerably more malleable than a department or agency of bureaucrats.

But another body of Experts?

Bank supervision, which emerged in the Civil War and took its current form out of the Great Depression, offers the best framework for overseeing the most advanced AI labs.

After all,

Frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are different.

And there’s always an excuse for standing up yet another bureaucratic regulatory body. In the case of their bank supervision model, about which they’re so enthusiastic, they give their game away [emphasis added].

Banks are too complex to govern through legislated rules alone, too important to leave to market discipline, and too dynamic for one-time approval.
Bank examiners often sit inside the institutions they oversee.

That’s the problem with our economic system government overlords. With the Panic of 2008, the Federal government created out of whole cloth the myth of some (ultimately government favored) businesses are too big to fail and so must always be guaranteed a government bailout. That confidence in the Federal apparatchiks sitting inside the banks also is misplaced. It’s only necessary to see the failures of the Silvergate, Signature, and First Republic banks to see the intrinsic failure of this. Those banks didn’t only fail through their own mismanagement; they also failed because their regulators were incompetent enough or lazy enough or complacent enough to miss those bank managers’ basic economics error of borrowing short-term while lending long-term and letting those two get ‘way out of balance. That allowed their short-term debts to come due before they had the long-term debt income to cover.

But the good professors want a board of Expert Apparatchiks inside the OpenAIs, Anthropics, and DeepMinds to oversee how these handle risks of emergent AI.

And this:

Banks share information with supervisors that they could never safely disclose publicly.

AI software is too important, too critical to national security, to share with apparatchiks of government. Our Federal government is infamous for its inability to defend against PRC cyber espionage. It’s infamous, also, for its bureaucrat employees leaking confidential financial data about businesses and persons of which those bureaucrats personally disapprove.

And this:

An AI risk supervisor could be funded by industry fees. Its leaders should be Senate-confirmed and removable by the president, but its expert staff should be insulated from day-to-day political pressure.

No.

Experts have their uses, often very important uses. On the witness stand to explain this or that aspect of a crime, balanced by another expert on the witness stand with a differing explanation. In police department forensics sections. As teachers in environments where their expertise is more important to the teaching than their teaching style. In medical and mental health doctor offices.

But in government? Not so much. Experts are useful when they’re part of a range of experts advising, as employees, the government’s decision makers. But as government decision makers? Definitely not so much. For the lack of utility of that last role, it’s only necessary to look at the Fauci-Collins-led experts as bureaucrats, or at the experts of the John Brennan and James Clapper CIA and ODNI, respectively.

The Supreme Court was right when it greatly reduced Chevon Deference in its Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling, making clear that “experts” in government aren’t owed any particular deference on matters of government behaviors and decision-making.

So it is with emergent AI.

One Way to Reduce Welfare Fraud

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The lede laid out the breadth of the problem.

The Trump administration’s work to pare back waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government has reportedly exposed a vast network of taxpayer-fleecing scams, abuses of immigration, and of the citizenship process across all corners of the United States.

It’s necessary, certainly, to act to correct these abuses and to bring the abusers and fraudsters to justice—including State officials who ignored the problems in their States or were actively complicit in them.

It’s necessary, though, to act proactively against these frauds on the American people. One means of going on offense is simple and straightforward, if politically difficult (though only difficult in the minds of timid politicians). That is to set about reducing the opportunities for fraud. Eliminate some welfare programs that are redundant or overlapping and to greatly reduce the scope, eligibility for, and funding of the remaining welfare programs.

With less money to steal, there’ll be less opportunity to steal it, and more usefully, those attempts will be more readily detected and the fraud wannabes caught and jailed.

Symptomatic

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Alex Shepherd, writing in the 7 May edition of the Left-wing The New Republic, exposed the core position of the Progressive-Democratic Party going into this fall’s mid-term elections and the continuing run toward the 2028 Presidential election.

…the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.

That’s it. That’s the sum of what Party has on offer for the coming election cycles. No substantive policies to tout and to contrast with Republican or Trumpian policies. Nothing to say about how their positions are better than Republicans’ or Trump’s for our nation.

Just anti-Trump, no to all things Trumpian or Republican, Never Trump.

A party with no substance, only anti-ism and hate, is a party that cannot be trusted with the reins of power.

New Style Job Hunting

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FCC commissioner and sole Progressive-Democrat agency member Anna Gomez wrote a letter in her official capacity to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro (Disney owns ABC) advising him that the FCC’s investigations of ABC were nothing more than a weaponization of the FCC and a campaign to censor news media.

It’s bad enough that a Federal government bureaucrat would so blatantly seek to blow up an agency action with which she disagrees, and she should be fired on that ground alone.

It gets worse, though, as the news writer at the link noted at the end of his piece.

In her letter, Gomez pledged to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

Gomez knows full well that she won’t successfully block the FCC’s investigation; she can only cast those public aspersions. This isn’t an FCC Commissioner seeking fairness and justice in a government action. This is a Federal government bureaucrat trying to burnish her resume and set up her job hunt, first with Disney or ABC, for when she leaves government. This is abusive even for revolving door bureaucratic practice.

Don’t Mention Cutting Spending

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Don’t you dare. The newly proposed Australian budget contains some tax cuts here, some tax structural changes nearby, and some tax increases there.

The tax cuts and structural changes are small steps in the right direction. The tax increases, though, are rationalized in this way: Saul Eslake, ex-Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in Australia is claiming, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

If the process of reform is to be extended from here, policy makers should consider increasing and/or broadening the country’s goods-and-services tax to repair the revenue side of the federal budget and help ease the significant tax burden faced by wage earners and companies[.]

“Repair the revenue side?” What’s to repair? It isn’t the government’s money; it belongs to the good citizens of Australia. Their government only takes the money away from them; any seeming shortfalls in collections are nothing less than more money in those citizens’ hands.

And this from Shane Oliver, AMP Ltd‘s Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist:

If you do one reform without looking at income tax, then you miss the bigger picture[.]

There are two things wrong with these criticisms. One is the utter lack of justification for the amount of money the government collects through its taxing regime, whether current or as proposed. That “need” is simply assumed as received wisdom. The other is the equally utter lack of consideration of government spending cuts. The supposed necessity of current (or increased) spending levels also is simply assumed as received wisdom, albeit the spending is occasionally weasel-wordedly justified by announced social need—but even that isn’t seriously justified, merely announced from on high.

If Australia—and others, including us—want serious, durable prosperity, it’s necessary to cut taxes and cut spending further. That’s not austerity, no matter how hysterically the Left generally proclaims it to be. Leaving more money in the hands of the citizens is not austerity being inflicted on them, it’s their prosperity being restored to them. And that’s the bigger picture that Oliver is missing.