Category Archives: regulation

Free Speech

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So long as the government determines what’s free to be said.

There’s this American rock band, all of whose members are of Asian heritage, who call themselves The Slants. When they tried to trademark their name, the US Patent Office refused, claiming the name is “disparaging.” The matter is now before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the appellate court that hears such cases. The Court is hearing the matter en banc, or the whole court is handling the appeal instead of the usual three-judge panel.

The government is censoring naming. At oral argument,

Judge Kimberly Moore asked what would happen if the government started rejecting copyrights for controversial art or other expressive works as it is doing with trademarks.

Would there be “no more porn? No more crucifixes in urine?”

The government is arguing, and it’s serious,

[T]he law governing trademark registrations does not violate the First Amendment…. Its purpose is not “to help people to make a political statement or prevent people from making political statement[.],

Indeed. However, the government’s lawyer, Daniel Terry, is arguing that Government is the one that will determine what is political speech that the government must protect and what is not political speech that the government gets to censor. And Terry argued with that claim that Government has determined that a name can never be political speech.

Mass Shooting and Gun “Control”

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President Barack Obama, in his crocodile tears speech after the Oregon shooting, called for some statistics on gun control and gun deaths. Here’s one under a surprisingly misleading headline by The Wall Street Journal.

The researchers counted 23 mass shootings in 13 European nations plus Russia from 2000 to 2014, with a total of 203 deaths. During that time, the US saw 133 shootings and 487 dead….

Twenty-three mass shootings averaged almost nine deaths per mass shooting. In the US, the 133 mass shootings averaged a bit over three and a half.

When a gun is hard to get, you have to make it count. Or, just maybe, good guys, who are able to have guns, are able to cut short the mass shooting events.

Capital Risk

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There are a number of forms of capital risk, which in the main represents the likelihood that an investor (person or company) will lose some fraction of his investment, up to and including all of it. Two such forms, when doing international investing is currency risk and political risk. Currency risk is the risk that the exchange rate between the [company’s] home nation currency and the currency of the nation in which that [company] is investing will move against the company. This risk exists in any international transaction (treating the eurozone as a financial intranational region).

Political risk is the risk that the government of the invested-in nation will interfere with the repatriation of any moneys—principle or profit—to the company’s home nation.

Enter the PRC. But invest there at your peril.

China has capped the amount of money Chinese holders of bank and credit cards can withdraw outside the country, in its latest effort to discourage people from moving badly needed capital offshore.

So far, this only applies to PRC citizens. Its purpose, though, is to stem the outflow of cash from the PRC’s economy. That means it’s a short walk to limiting a foreign company’s ability to repatriate any part of its principle investment or profit.

Government Responsibility

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At least one charity is figuring out the impediment that is government involvement in what is, at bottom, an individual responsibility.

Andrea Koppel, Mercy Corps’ Vice President of Global Engagement and Strategy, wants the UN’s involvement in the current Middle East refugee crisis severely downsized. Her focus is on the UN as a quasi-government, but she’s also moving further and wanting sovereign government roles downsized, too.

The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil society groups and different levels of government. This, the report says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster and more easily with local communities when national governments are virtually non-existent.

It’s not an explicit call for government(s) to be the last resort rather than the first, but it’s a move in that direction.

Hypocrisy of the Left

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Sanctuary City San Francisco has

proposed new city regulations, which could only be aimed at High Bridge Arms, would have required the shop to take and preserve video of all transactions and turn customers’ personal data over to police on a weekly basis.

There was only one gun shop left in San Fran at the time these new rules were proposed. That shop already had 17 cameras installed and turned video over to the police on their request. However, as the shop’s General Manager said,

it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods[.]

Rather than accepting that increased invasion, not just of an honest business doing business, but of the privacy of honest Americans doing honest business, the gun shop is closing.

Clearly, the Sanctuary City’s government and the residents that elect them care more about the ability of illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime to get guns than they do about honest Americans’ ability to defend themselves.