Category Archives: regulation

Throw Money at it

Posted on by
Reply

The letter-writer seems to be writing from the Left. Opening with Praise for Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for attacking Medicaid fraud, he quickly pivoted.

States need more funds to address fraud….

How typical.

No, States do not need more funds to combat and drastically reduce, much less “address,” fraud. Were States actually to get serious about combatting and reducing Medicaid, they’d uncover 10s of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fraud, and they’d recover significant percentages of those dollars. Those dollars then could feed back into the program to help keep Medicaid fraud down to an absolute minimum.

To address the problem for long-term of vastly reduced fraud and commensurate reduced fraud recovery funds, States need only to reallocate existing spending. They most assuredly do not need more money blindly and blithely tossed over the transom at the problem.

The Nub of the Matter

Posted on by
Reply

An article concerning the nature of “sex work” and the debate over whether it ought be decriminalized and destigmatized, there was this characterization:

On [one] side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

And this, from a woman who ultimately escaped from the environment:

Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.

There it is, in all its glory, from the life of an individual once in the environment and from the broad movement looking to decriminalize “sex” work. It isn’t about sex; it’s about faceless male gratification, for whom the woman isn’t even a human being; she’s just a body temperature, organic inflatable sex doll. It’s not even a matter of buying a selling sex; it’s only renting a warm doll for a hour or a night, otherwise akin to renting a power tool.

Say, though, that in an amoral yet otherwise ideal world, this work is entirely legalized. On what basis would we believe the women involved really are engaging in it on their own initiative and entirely free of coercion? Pimps will still be there, now legalized as agents or brokers for the firms renting these commodities. And they’ll still control the women, who they engage with, what they’ll do—be required to do under the terms of their employment—during those engagements.

Would a woman be free to leave one…employer…for another whenever she chose to do so? Would she be free to leave the…industry…altogether and seek employment doing other things wholly apart from being a rented sex doll? Those answers seem obvious.

Tellingly, too, the movement wholly ignores the men who are trafficked or pimped out as male prostitutes, and worse, the movement wholly ignores the children, of both sexes, who are trafficked for sex.

The answer to “sex work” isn’t to legalize it. It’s a multipart question: help the women (and the men and children) recover from the damage done by their present strait and then learn other means of earning a living—a legitimate living and one in which they keep all of their wages. In parallel, hammer severely the traffickers and pimps making these victims—and that’s what the women (and men and children) are to five nines significance—”available.” Hold criminally liable the customers of these pimps and traffickers for receiving illegal goods. They’re certainly not customers of the women; they’re receivers of the pimps’ and traffickers’ product. And publicly shame those customers for their abuse of the women whose bodies are the product they rented.

Experts Everywhere

Posted on by
Reply

A couple of professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics want a body of Experts to supervise risks from emergent AI, saying that such a body would be better than an FDA-like regulatory body, or Congress through statutorily enabled product-safety laws.

They’re right that having a government body of experts like the FDA do this sort of thing is determinedly suboptimal. They’re right, also, regarding Congress, although Congress is considerably more malleable than a department or agency of bureaucrats.

But another body of Experts?

Bank supervision, which emerged in the Civil War and took its current form out of the Great Depression, offers the best framework for overseeing the most advanced AI labs.

After all,

Frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are different.

And there’s always an excuse for standing up yet another bureaucratic regulatory body. In the case of their bank supervision model, about which they’re so enthusiastic, they give their game away [emphasis added].

Banks are too complex to govern through legislated rules alone, too important to leave to market discipline, and too dynamic for one-time approval.
Bank examiners often sit inside the institutions they oversee.

That’s the problem with our economic system government overlords. With the Panic of 2008, the Federal government created out of whole cloth the myth of some (ultimately government favored) businesses are too big to fail and so must always be guaranteed a government bailout. That confidence in the Federal apparatchiks sitting inside the banks also is misplaced. It’s only necessary to see the failures of the Silvergate, Signature, and First Republic banks to see the intrinsic failure of this. Those banks didn’t only fail through their own mismanagement; they also failed because their regulators were incompetent enough or lazy enough or complacent enough to miss those bank managers’ basic economics error of borrowing short-term while lending long-term and letting those two get ‘way out of balance. That allowed their short-term debts to come due before they had the long-term debt income to cover.

But the good professors want a board of Expert Apparatchiks inside the OpenAIs, Anthropics, and DeepMinds to oversee how these handle risks of emergent AI.

And this:

Banks share information with supervisors that they could never safely disclose publicly.

AI software is too important, too critical to national security, to share with apparatchiks of government. Our Federal government is infamous for its inability to defend against PRC cyber espionage. It’s infamous, also, for its bureaucrat employees leaking confidential financial data about businesses and persons of which those bureaucrats personally disapprove.

And this:

An AI risk supervisor could be funded by industry fees. Its leaders should be Senate-confirmed and removable by the president, but its expert staff should be insulated from day-to-day political pressure.

No.

Experts have their uses, often very important uses. On the witness stand to explain this or that aspect of a crime, balanced by another expert on the witness stand with a differing explanation. In police department forensics sections. As teachers in environments where their expertise is more important to the teaching than their teaching style. In medical and mental health doctor offices.

But in government? Not so much. Experts are useful when they’re part of a range of experts advising, as employees, the government’s decision makers. But as government decision makers? Definitely not so much. For the lack of utility of that last role, it’s only necessary to look at the Fauci-Collins-led experts as bureaucrats, or at the experts of the John Brennan and James Clapper CIA and ODNI, respectively.

The Supreme Court was right when it greatly reduced Chevon Deference in its Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling, making clear that “experts” in government aren’t owed any particular deference on matters of government behaviors and decision-making.

So it is with emergent AI.

Who’s In Charge?

Posted on by
Reply

Is it a company’s leadership, ultimately hired by the company’s owners, the shareholders. or is it a couple of proxy advisers, whose income depends on being the ones consulted over management decisions?

Exxon Mobil, having grown fed up with the anti-business climate of New York, has put before its owners, its shareholders, the proposition that the company should go out from New York, move to Texas, and redomicile there.

The two largest Proxy Advisors aggregate to somewhere between 90% and 97% of the American proxy advisory market. The two, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, are pushing those shareholders to reject the move.

(Aside: they’re not even American companies. Glass Lewis, although headquartered in San Francisco, is owned by Peloton Capital Management, a Canadian company. Institutional Shareholder Services, although headquartered in Rockville, MD, is owned by the German company, Deutsche Börse AG.)

Their motive is obvious. Texas, for instance,

lets companies domiciled in the state require that investors hold at least $1 million in market value, or 3% of voting shares, for six months to submit shareholder proposals. Companies can also require shareholders to own at least 3% of shares to bring lawsuits for breaches of fiduciary duty and self-dealing.

A successful move to Texas would encourage lots more companies to leave States with high business taxes, excessive regulatory environments, and especially relevant to this context, a heavily advisor-permissive suite of regulations. This is a significant reduction in the “advisors'” ability to…influence…the companies they choose to target.

Who runs, then, Exxon Mobil: the shareholders or Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services?

Disregarding our Constitution

Posted on by
Reply

Here they go again. This time it’s Virginia’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated legislature and Governor who think our Constitution is just something to be used or ignored at Party convenience and that, in the immortal words of a Leftist “journalist,” isn’t binding on anything and it’s hard to understand, being over 100 years old (or, as he later “corrected,” more than 200 years old.

This time, it’s Party’s disregard of our 2nd Amendment and of Supreme Court rulings holding that keeping and bearing Arms is an individual inalienable right of which a well regulated militia is a beneficiary not the purpose and that the keeping and bearing cannot (not just may not) be regulated except in consistence with our nation’s traditions. That last includes, explicitly, firearms that are in widespread lawful use—these cannot (not just may not) be restricted from our possession of them.

Virginia’s reigning Party has banned what it’s pleased to call “assault” weapons along with the 30-round magazines that are an integral part of the semi-automatic rifles that are subject to the ban. This is in direct and deliberate violation of our 2nd Amendment and is a nose-thumb at our Supreme Court.

This miscarriage is now in both Federal and State courts, looking to get this blatantly unlawful Party gun grab tossed. It should, in the end, be tossed, but honest citizens shouldn’t have to spend the time or treasure going through this.

It’s time to remove this lawless Party from the halls of political power at the next election and in subsequent election cycles.