Category Archives: regulation

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.

More Big Government

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And more interference from that Big Government.

President Barack Obama has signed is going to sign—and do his usual bragging about signing—an Executive Order requiring all government contractors to give their employees paid sick leave.

On top of that,

The White House wouldn’t specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order, which Obama was to address at a major union rally and breakfast in Boston. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings that contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.

Neither Obama nor Labor Secretary Thomas Perez produced any data to support their bald claim because they don’t have any. Their position is based solely on the arrogance of “We’re Big Government. We Know Best.”

There is, too, that Democratic Party ethos. Perez said

The Republican Party is out of step with similar conservative governments around the world.

Yeah. Someone else is doing it; therefore, it’s the right thing to do. The rightness or wrongness of the thing isn’t at all inherent in the thing. Popularity creates right. I’ll ignore the fact that Perez’ “around the world” is Europe, and that there aren’t any conservative governments in Europe.

It’s certainly true that paid sick leave has merit. However, the decision about paid sick leave is best left in the hands of the employer and his employees and prospective employees. What other countries, what other domestic companies are doing, has nothing to do with it.

It’s not at all true that every good idea must be turned into a government edict that everyone must follow. Including when the costs of this or that good idea will vary from time to time, situation to situation, company to company, industry to industry.

Especially since Americans are fully capable of acting on their own choices. We’re not as stupid as Big Government assumes us to be.

Irrelevant Questions?

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An 11-year-old successfully defended himself, his 4-year-old sister, and his home during an attempted mid-afternoon home invasion by a 16-year-old and an accomplice, by shooting the 16-year-old and driving off the accomplice. The children’s mother was out at the time.

Now the police are questioning the mother—no word on what they’re doing with the accomplice, who was caught a short time after the successful defense.

[P]olice want to know why the children were home alone and why the 11-year-old had access to a gun.

What’s the problem with being home “alone?” The 4-year-old was being babysat.

Why shouldn’t the boy have access to a weapon? He’s eleven years old, and there’s no indication he’s not been properly trained. He fired a single shot to effect his defense, though—that’s either a potful of luck, or perhaps he’s had the training.

Police believe the mother bought the gun after prior break-in attempts.

There’s a hint there.

The police are wasting resources.

What Do They Know?

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Stanley Kurtz has asked a very important question regarding Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous handling of our nation’s secrets on her personal, private email server while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair (or in her airplane seat as she jet-setted around the world on her State Department travels.

…shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information?

Kurtz also quoted from a Daily Beast piece a related aspect:

[S]enior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.

That brings me to my point: there’s no need to assume the worst; by inspecting Clinton’s private server—forensically, if needs be, since by her own admission she’s committed the felony of evidence tampering by deleting a potful of emails—we know what the Russians and Chinese (and the Brits, Israelis, Germans, and any script kiddy with an app) know. We don’t have to spend a lot of resources or money guessing at that.