Category Archives: regulation

Food Processing Plant!?

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Progressives just can’t stand to see freedom of choice, just can’t stand to have any sort of enterprise not under their regulatory thumb. Case in point: Londonderry, NH, school district. The superintendent of schools pulled the high school out of the Federal government’s National School Lunch Program and to have the school’s cafeteria serve the school’s meals. You know—sort of like school cafeterias used to do before all this government intervention.

Having escaped regulation from the NSLP, though, which sent significant fractions of food served directly from the serving line to the garbage cans, the Department of Agriculture stepped in. Seeing an unregulated enterprise, the DoA has decided the school is a food processing plant—because the cafeteria does what school cafeterias did just find before regulation, it cooks the students’ lunch meals—and it must be regulated like one.

Remember this Progressive Democratic Party regulatory overreach in a year and a month.

Unintended Consequence?

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Or was it intended? Big banks, banks the Warren/Obama regulations deem systemic risks—too big to fail—are driving away cash deposits. Never mind that those deposits are loanable funds (oh—regulations, again, discouraging lending while Progressives contradictorily jawbone and pressure financial institutions to make risky loans to poor credit rating borrowers, because—regulations again—those credit ratings are somehow racist).

For instance,

State Street Corp, the Boston bank that manages assets for institutional investors, for the first time has begun charging some customers for large dollar deposits, people familiar with the matter said. JP Morgan Chase & Co, the nation’s largest bank by assets, has cut unwanted deposits by more than $150 billion this year, in part by charging fees.

Because:

The banks’ actions are driven by profit-crunching low interest rates and regulations adopted since the financial crisis to gird banks against funding disruptions.

The latest fees center on large sums deemed risky by regulators, sometimes dubbed hot-money* deposits thought likely to flee during times of crises.

Because honest Americans wanting to earn money off their cash mustn’t be allowed to do that. And banks can’t be trusted to know what they’re doing with hot deposits; Progressive Know Betters are the only ones equipped to dispose of OPM.

Or: this is a tacit recognition that Progressive policies over the last seven years have been utter failures, and all that stored cash has to be flushed back into the economy, and the latest regulations have nothing to do with risk, systemic or otherwise, regardless of the surrounding Obamatalk.

It harkens back to FDR’s assault on business by demanding they disgorge themselves of cash—retained earnings—because they were “hoarding” or on a “capital strike.” Hoarding, “striking” because business had no viable place to invest its cash, due to FDR’s economic policies.

 

*Note: Banks usually attract “hot money” by offering relatively short-term certificates of deposit that have above-average interest rates. As soon as the institution reduces interest rates or another institution offers higher rates, investors with “hot money” withdraw their funds and move them to another institution with higher rates.

A Bipartisan Misunderstanding

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Congressmen Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) and Randy Neugebauer (R, TX) rightly decry the partisan nature of the Elizabeth Warren/Dodd-Frank Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but their solution is wholly wrong. They want the existing single-director power structure replaced by a multi-person bipartisan commission, one that wouldn’t be so prone to the party in White House…influence.

As an example of how well a bipartisan commission would work, the Congressmen cite the SEC, the fair and balanced commission that uses in house judges to act on and punish those the SEC accuses of illegal investing practices.

It’s interesting that they didn’t cite the FCC, of Internet interference notoriety, or the NLRB, the commission that’s an arm of Big Union.

No, the proper correction to the partisan nature of the CFPB is to get rid of this wholly unaccountable even to Congress, with budgeting on demand from the Federal Reserve Bank, monstrosity altogether.

Replace with what, then? Nothing. The function is not needed. American citizens aren’t as slack-jawed, droolingly stupid as the Know Betters in government—of either party—make us out to be.

Fatal Flaw

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The “problem” with encryption of private communications is becoming empirical rather than hypothetical. Hillar Moore, District Attorney for East Baton Rouge, LA, says he’s one of 16 prosecutors to write the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for back doors into encrypted devices for law enforcement.

He, and other state and local prosecutors and police have a mix of smart phones owned by deceased victims and suspects that those government representatives can’t get into for any evidence related to the crimes being investigated because the phones are locked and the passwords are unavailable or the suspects refuse to give them up.

While I’m sympathetic to the government’s problem in such cases, the fatal problem is those back doors into the encryption. Back doors destroy the encryption. Back doors are openings for nefarious individuals to steal from the phone’s owner. Back doors are openings for out of control governments to abuse the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

That there aren’t easy answers to the conundrum—yet—doesn’t alter that simple fact. Nor does it alter the fact that the convenience of government is not an excuse for circumscribing individual liberty.

In the meantime, if government wants to know something, get a warrant.

A Politicized Cabinet

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From a Hamilton Jordan memo to President Jimmie Carter on creating the Department of Education:

Political Considerations

The following are the major political considerations that you should be aware of in making this decision:

  1. The teachers organizations—particularly the National Education Association—are the fastest growing, most active, and by many standards the most effective political organizations in this country. With a membership that exceeds two million, they comprise one of the most committed and articulate political constituencies in our country.
  2. These groups—particularly the NEA—have been our political friends in the Presidential campaign and our allies on many crucial legislative battles. For the first time in its 114 year history, the NEA endorsed a Presidential candidate in the 1976 general election. . . .

Conclusion

I would strongly recommend that you support the creation of a separate Department of Education for the following reasons:

*Your unequivocal promise in the campaign to do so

*The teachers of this country have been our political friends in the past and can be our valuable political allies in the future

*The arguments for the creation of a separate department are at least as convincing as the arguments are against it

If you make the decision not to create the separate department, I would strongly recommend that we not pursue some organizational middle ground that would allow us to claim that we have met our campaign promises to the teachers. We promised a separate department, and I think that it would be an insult to our teacher friends to argue that some internal reorganization is a satisfactory substitute for the separate department they were promised.

DoE was established in the fall of 1979. It was created for purely political reasons having nothing to do with educating our children. It’s been nothing but a political organ for teachers unions and the Politically Correct Class since.

Or, maybe more properly, a political cabinet. Idealistic, maybe, but that wasn’t the purpose of Executive Branch cabinets. Get rid of the Department of Education. And, as Hamilton Jordan correctly recommended, don’t do half measures. Don’t replace the Department with anything, and return the current employees—every single one of them—to the private sector, don’t reassign them within the Federal government.