Category Archives: regulation

A Bureaucratic State

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The Hong Kong protestors have called for Hong Kong’s legislators to resign, which would trigger elections right there in Hong Kong and which would also serve as a popular referendum on Hong Kong’s—and the PRC’s—government policies.

Hong Kong’s response? From Chief Secretary Carrie Lam:

There are no arrangements in place for a so-called referendum in Hong Kong’s electoral and political system….

The bureaucrat is incapable of imagining doing anything non-standard, the bureaucracy cannot find a way to accommodate the people when there’s nothing in their written-down procedures to show them the way. The bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is incapable of dealing with the noise of democracy, whether popular or republican or any other form. Bureaucracies simply have no flexibility.

Yes, I’m being generous in laying this off to bureaucracy and not anything else, but the point is valid in any event: despotism is even more inflexible, especially regarding things of which the despot disapproves.

Commercial Space Flights

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…and accidents. Last week an Orbital Sciences commercial rocket, launched on an ISS resupply mission from NASA’s Wallops Island, VA, facility, exploded shortly after launch. There were no injuries. A few days later, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo exploded shortly after release from its mother ship; this time, one of the pilots of SpaceShipTwo was killed and the other injured.

The handwringing has begun. These two accidents may spell the end of commercial manned space flight. They may be the death knell of commercial rocket flight. They may spell doomsday.

Nonsense.

Both of those programs are in early development stages; accidents and failures are a normal, if unfortunate, part of the process. That a man died in one of them is especially unfortunate, but that also is a risk that’s run in this sort of development.

Another commercial rocket company has been flying resupply missions to the ISS for two years—not always glitch-free, but successfully. It remains on track to begin flying manned resupply missions to the ISS in the 2017 time frame.

NASA’s manned space flight program lost astronauts to space capsule fires while on the ground; it lost astronauts to Shuttle explosions both on launch and on return to orbit. It almost lost astronauts when an explosion occurred on an Apollo capsule that was in space, headed to the moon.

Our aircraft development programs have lost pilots to accidents during development, and we have lost passengers to crashed production commercial airliners, including one that disappeared last spring while enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Certainly Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic need to learn what went wrong on these flights, as did NASA need to do and aircraft developers need to do. Airlines need to understand what went wrong regarding their accidents. All need to correct those things. They did, and they do, and OSC and Virgin Galactic will, too. It’s all a normal part of development.

Commercial space flight, whether manned or unmanned, is not at risk from these two accidents, but only from the angst being drummed up by the doomsayers.

When, not if, commercial flight becomes routine—whether for tourism or for operations—we’ll all be the better off for having gotten another industry, seeded by government, out of government’s hands.

Why the Left is so Anxious to Govern

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Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer have a book out describing how the Left got control of the State of Colorado as recently as 2008, titled The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado.

Early in this book, Rob Stein, who is among other things the founder of the Democracy Alliance, laid out why the Left wanted control of Colorado and why especially they want control of our Federal government.

The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power,” Stein continued. “One president in this country, when he or she takes office, appoints…5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors—a workforce of 12 million people—that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.”

So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing…and the way we get progressive change, is to control government,” Stein said. “That’s what this is about.”

Get out and vote.

 

h/t Power Line

Regulation of Speech

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The Democrats on the Federal Election Commission want to extend it.

The top Democrat [Vice Chairwoman Ann Ravel] on the Federal Election Commission strongly suggested Friday that regulators look at extending their authority to election-themed Internet videos—an area that for years has been largely hands-off for the government.

This woman, in line to become the FEC Chair, is beefing among other things that the FEC ignores the Internet’s influence on politics. Meanwhile, she seems to be ignoring the print, broadcast, and cable media’s influence on politics.

Oh, wait—speech already is regulated there. Those media and the ad generators on them are required to report, among other things, the cost of their political advertisements and to include in the ads “disclaimers” identifying who’s “responsible” for “the content of this ad.”

Ravel has insisted that rules applicable to these ads should apply to Internet ads, also.

That last is a fair beef. Here’s a proposal, then: how about deregulating speech in the other venues?

Nah. No Democrat is willing to do that.

In Which the IRS Gets Away with It

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Judge Reggie Walton, of the DC District Court, dismissed all counts brought by the conservative non-profit, True the Vote, against the IRS for the IRS’ harassment of the organization when it tried to register as a 501(c)(3). The IRS had, on receiving that application

IRS was subjecting [True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht] to multiple rounds of abusive inquiries, with requests to provide every Facebook and Twitter entry I’d every posted, questions about my political aspirations, and demands to know the names of every group I’d ever made presentations to, the content of what I’d said, and where I intended to speak for the coming year.

Under the law defining a c3 organization, none of this information is relevant to the IRS’ application investigation. Indeed, Walton’s ruling explicitly makes no reference to the legitimacy of Engelbrecht’s charges.

Walton dismissed the counts because the IRS—eventually, but before this lawsuit was resolved—registered True the Vote as the c3 for which it had applied.

Unless an actual, ongoing controversy exists in this case, this Court is without power to decide it….

Because

The defendants’ grant of tax-exempt status to the plaintiff, and the defendants’ suspension of the alleged IRS targeting scheme during the tax-exempt application process, including remedial steps to address the alleged conduct, coupled with the reduced “concern about the recurrence of objectionable behavior” government actors….

Never mind that this is a purely voluntary “suspension,” subject to removal at IRS whim, conservative speech remains chilled, other attacks against other conservative entities remain (think Wisconsin), and so on. The present assault has stopped, so there’s nothing for a good judge to decide.

Let me see if my understanding of this is correct. If I stop beating my wife, wholly voluntarily and on my own initiative, I’m home free? My wife has no recourse? Never mind that I’ve only voluntarily suspended the beatings, never mind that my wife remains intimidated and vulnerable, I’ve got nothing to worry about from any court?

Walton’s ruling can be seen here.