Category Archives: regulation

Let’s Increase Taxes

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…and the costs all of us must bear from that. But the real story is this…proposal…Hillary Clinton has dreamed up for her Presidential campaign.

The centerpiece idea would require drug makers to devote a sufficient portion of revenue to research and development. Those that don’t would risk losing federal support, such as research grants or an R&D tax credit.

Never mind that drug companies already spend 15%-20% on R&D. This fine businesswoman, who’s never run a company in her life and who was dead broke when she left the White House, says that’s not enough. Never mind, too, that she has studiously avoided saying how much is enough.

This is just another Democrat who hasn’t met a tax she didn’t like. This is just another Democrat who thinks Big Government knows more about running a business than the businessmen, who have to operate in a competitive environment or fail.

Power Grab

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Here’s one worthy even of President Barack Obama’s legendary reach.

France’s data-protection regulator on Monday rejected Google Inc’s appeal of its order to expand Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to Google’s websites world-wide….

The French presume to extend their legal reach beyond their legal reach—beyond their borders.

France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe’s right to be forgotten to “all domain names” of the search engine, including google.com—or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Here is France saying, “Do what we tell you to do anywhere you are in the world, or we will break you.”

Rank extortion.

It’ll be interesting—and instructive—to see whether Google management has the moral courage and the integrity to say, “Non.”

A Two-Faced Move

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PRC President Xi Jinping is moving to revive Confucius and his philosophical tradition. Xi wants to “inoculate Chinese people against the spread of Western political ideals of individual freedom and democracy.” He’s “seeking a fresh source of legitimacy by reinventing the party as inheritor and savior of a 5,000-year-old civilization.”

Renew reverence for authority—with the Communist Party of China the authority.

And, tellingly, one of Xi Jinping’s favorite Confucius sayings is this:

No calamity greater than to be discontented with one’s lot; no fault greater than the wish to be getting.

Be content. Party will give you what you need. You don’t need any more than that.

The EU Wants a New International Trade Court

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The proposal is described in Tom Fairless’ piece in The Wall Street Journal. I want to focus on a couple of comments in that article, though.

Campaigners [for the proposed new trade settlement court] claim that the current system constrains governments and leaves policy makers vulnerable to legal proceedings from overseas investors.

Kind of like those impertinent American companies do with the US government.

And

[O]pponents [of the existing trade settlement system] warn that large US companies could use the dispute-resolution mechanism to challenge European laws and regulations on labor, food and the environment.

As a matter of principle, what’s the downside of either of these?

Only Big Government proponents fear government being held to account by its…lessers.

Tax Pollution

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That’s what Richard Revesz thinks we should do, instead of subsidizing this or that energy company or industry. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Revesz thinks that “greenhouse gases, smog precursors and other pollutants” should be taxed and all those subsidies done away with.

He’s half right. Subsidies have no place in American economics. To the Democrats who say “green” energy companies need the subsidies in order to grow (quickly or at all), they’ve answered the claim themselves, although they’re loathe to admit it: if a company needs a government subsidy to exist or to grow in our competitive economy, it isn’t ready for our economy. To others who say the oil and gas companies need the subsidies (a relative pittance, anyway, compared to green’s subsidies), the answer also is no they don’t. They can compete.

Revesz would be fully right if we could arrive at an accurate definition of “pollution.” Consider the current en vogue “pollutant,” atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pseudo-climatologists and other “environmentalists” like to fear-monger over CO2 in our air. They carefully ignore the fact that increases in atmospheric CO2 come after planetary warming by some 800-1,300 years. Far from being a pollutant, it’s the ordinary output of respiring life and with those lagging increases it confirms the increasing health of the planet and its burgeoning life.

Until facts stop getting in the way of the money flow, there’s no possibility of accurately defining “pollutant,” and so there’s no reasonable way to tax it.