Category Archives: regulation

Clinton’s Emails

Posted on by
Reply

Ex-First Lady, one-time Senator, and woman who once sat in the Secretary of State’s chair had a press conference.

QUESTION: How could the public be assured that when you deleted emails that were personal in nature, that you didn’t also delete emails that were professional, but possibly unflattering?

And what do you think about this Republican idea of having an independent third party come in and examine your emails?

CLINTON: Well first of all, you have to ask that question to every single federal employee, because the way the system works, the federal employee, the individual, whether they have one device, two devices, three devices, how many addresses, they make the decision.

So, even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that.

In the first place, Madam, no, we don’t have to ask every single federal employee; we are, though, asking you. In the second place, even if every single federal employee made that error of judgment, it wouldn’t excuse yours. I notice, too, that you didn’t answer the question about how the public can be sure you didn’t also delete….

Nor is it lost on any of us that you ignored the second part of that question, too. Should we conclude, then, that you don’t want an independent evaluation?

Then there’s the apparent evidence tampering and the apparent violation of the Federal Records Act:

QUESTION: Did you or any of your aides delete any government-related emails from your personal account? And what lengths are you willing to go to to prove that you didn’t?

Some people, including supporters of yours, have suggested having an independent arbiter look at your server, for instance.

CLINTON: … I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done. When the search was conducted, we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records, and that’s exactly what we did.

[T]he process produced over 30,000 you know, work emails, and I think that we have more than met the requests from the State Department. The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private….

It’s a much longer-winded obfuscatory answer; I’ve excerpted here. But notice: she never did get around to answering the question of deletion and how anyone would know. She did, though, say that the server she used to conduct government business will remain private, and she was clear that she and her people were the ones who determined the work relevance of what she kept and what she deleted. She also continued to elide the question of an independent evaluator’s judgment.

Finally, a small aside: 30,000 work emails works out to about 20 emails per day over her four-year tour—an unbelievably small amount of email traffic for a SecState.

Keep this in mind during the Primary Season, and if she passes through it, in the fall of 2016.

Crony Capitalism

Posted on by
Reply

Corporate fascism is, at its core, government management of each of the several economic sectors in a nation’s economy—agricultural, manufacturing, technology, communications, transportation, and so on. This management is executed by government through otherwise privately controlled business entities. De facto corporatism also is useful for reducing opposition and rewarding political loyalty.

Crony capitalism, on the other hand, is government influence of individual businesses in a nation’s economy—agribusinesses, automobile companies, alternative energy companies, telecommunications companies, and so on. Crony capitalism also is useful for reducing opposition and rewarding political loyalty.

How is crony capitalism different from corporate fascism? So far, the individual cronies can choose whether or not to play according to their government benefactors’ rules. So far.

Off Ramps

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the cool, new buzz phrase. Congressmen John Kline (R, MN), Paul Ryan (R, WI), and Fred Upton (R, MI), Chairmen of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Energy and Commerce Committee, respectively, used it Monday in The Wall Street Journal to propose alternatives to Obamacare should the Supreme Court strike down Federal subsidies related to health care coverage plans bought through ObamaMart rather than through the State exchanges that the Obamacare law requires for Federal subsidy eligibility.

In the main, their alternatives are good ones, but there are a couple points with which I wholeheartedly disagree, and it’s disappointing that three men who know better would propose them.

We would allow parents to keep children on their plan until age 26.

That’s fine, but 26-year-olds aren’t children; they’re grown adults. They stopped being children at 18, or 20, or 21 depending on the jurisdiction. They stopped being children when they became eligible to make their own binding decisions on legal documents. Retaining sons and daughters on parents’ plans should be a matter of negotiation between the plan seller and buyer; government shouldn’t be involved in magnanimously granting permission—which carries with it the authority to rescind that permission later.

We would prohibit insurers from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

This is especially disappointing. This, too, should be a matter of negotiation between the involved parties. Mandating an expense to the company, which this plainly does, forces a cost on the customer. There is a greater cost for paying out over an indefinite lifetime than there is for paying out over a known and fixed interval. Denying the company the option to offer either forces the company to pass on the greater cost to the customer, whether the customer wants that much coverage or not. It’s also an unacceptable denial of market choice to the customer.

[W]e would offer those in the affected states a tax credit to buy insurance.

This comes from the false premise that government should be the default source of welfare, and not the last resort. From that, it jumps the gun: the magnitude of the need is not at all established, especially given the initial fluid market environment that would be created were the competition across state lines part discussed in their op-ed actually passed. Only after private sources of aid have been exhausted, in that stabilized environment of lower basic cost for health plans, should government aid become available. (It’ll also be interesting to see how these guys propose to pay for these tax credits, but perhaps that’s for a later op-ed.)

A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts

Posted on by
Reply

It’s out.

This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

Of course, these two major divisions of Domestic Policy are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I’m separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

The book is available in eBook form from amazon.com () and

Rule By Law—Spying Edition

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Republic of China is on the verge of enacting a law that would make legal corporate spying by the PRC government. Of course, the Chinese are couching this as a wholly innocent effort at countering terrorism.

The draft law requires both foreign and domestic telecommunications and Internet service providers to create backdoors in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access, hand over copies of their encryption codes and assist government agencies with decryption when asked, among other provisions. Also, companies would be required to store Chinese users’ data on servers in the Chinese mainland; otherwise, they wouldn’t be allowed to operate in the country.

This sort of thing really should make it impossible for any honest company to do business in the PRC or with a PRC business. They should accept the Chinese offer of not “be[ing] allowed to operate in the country.” The financial gains to be had on the mainland—particularly with the money repatriation restrictions the PRC already has in place—can’t be worth this surrender of control over a legitimate business to the PRC government.