Category Archives: regulation

A Gun Control Loss

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The gun rights sheriff incumbent, David Clarke Jr, defeated his Democratic primary challenger for the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) County job (and he’s in because there’s no Republican challenger for the fall general election). This also had been, among other things, a referendum on ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control philosophy, as that one had thrown down $150,000 on TV ads in his own attempt to influence the election.

However, primary challenger Milwaukee Police Lt Chris Moews‘ own justification for gun controls demonstrates the fallacy of the gun control position:

If I have the opportunity to defend myself and my family I will do so to the best of my abilities but I’m certainly also going to call 911 if I have the ability because I need the cavalry to come and help me.

Indeed. Because the cavalry—those police on the other end of that 911 call—are minutes away, plus the time to make the call, the man on the scene is the one who must deal first with the situation.

Moreover, as Moews intimated, it might not be possible for the man on the scene to make the call, leaving him without aid in facing the threat.

And there’s Moews’ implied strawman that an armed man wouldn’t call 911 at all.

Forcing that man to remain unarmed maximizes the danger to him.

A Capital Strike

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Here is an argument for not doing business with the Federal government at all. It’s rapidly becoming not worth the cost—in hassle, in dollars, in business’ ability to control over their own operations. This is another of President Barack Obama’s barrage of Executive Orders, and this is how The Wall Street Journal described it over the weekend:

Under the order signed last week, contractors and subcontractors who receive more than $500,000 in federal money will be obliged to report to government agencies any labor-law violations going back three years. The order covers violations of everything from family and medical leave to federal wage and hour laws in the three years before applying for a contract.

And

When unions are in a collective bargaining fight with a company, they typically file complaints with the likes of OSHA, the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Under the new executive order, the government will have the ability to revoke the contracts of those with violations. That’s punishment above and beyond any remedies meted out by the NLRB.

That would be another finger on the scales to force settlements on terms favorable to the President’s political allies. If you’re a government contractor, any time a union files an unfair labor practices charge, the pressure to settle becomes overwhelming. Choose to fight and you face not only the civil penalties of violating a law but the risk of having your federal contracts revoked or suspended.

And

[T]he executive order includes a transparency provision that requires contractors to provide their employees with information about pay, overtime pay, and deductions as a condition of receiving a federal contract. The plaintiffs bar has complained that inadequate record-keeping is a stumbling block to their litigation. Now, via the Obama pen, they’ll have more data to feed lawsuits over the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Who needs this nonsense, this continued attack on private enterprise? Maybe it’s time for private enterprise to go back to being private and stop being dependent on government contracts. Maybe it’s time for private enterprise to stop doing business with the Federal government.

After all, this EO applies only to government contractors and subcontractors. So far.

Freely Traveling and Peaceable Assembly

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The US government offers no adequate method for people to challenge their placement on its no-fly list, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case involving 13 Muslims who believe they’re on the list.

US District Court Judge Anna Brown found people lack a meaningful way to challenge their placement on the list, which bars them from flying to or within the United States. She also said the 13 people who sued the government have been unconstitutionally deprived of their right to fly.

The Federal government’s no-fly list is treated as secret, and it’s through this list that the Federal government determines who is barred from flying from or to US airports.

Brown earlier had ruled people had a constitutional right to travel and via this list, the Federal government had violated that right.

How do I get from this to peaceable assembly? These 13 innocents, by their placement—against their will—in company with terrorists who are on the no-fly list is one path. The government’s denial of their right, through denying them a pathway, to protest against that association and be removed from it is another. Preventing these 13 from traveling via a transportation of their choice—and so of associating themselves with travelers of their choice (strangers they may be, but still fellow air travelers)—is a third path.

Entitlements and Taxes

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Dr Ben Carson had a couple thoughts a while ago; they’re still valid.

On taxes:

What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.

We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle. He didn’t say if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithe, or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes.

On health care:

Here’s my solution: when a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there’s nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they’re going to learn how to be responsible.

The only place I disagree with him is on the degree of heritability of the HSA. Given the slowness of growth of the relevant supply (of health-related services) compared with the rapidity of growth of its demand, accumulating wealth in an HSA would over just a couple of generations create too much money earmarked for health services; this money would rapidly increase health services prices. And that would price those just starting out—newborns, new immigrants, and so on—out of the health services market, just as the present system and its immediate precursor have done. Instead, let the dearly departed’s remaining HSA be passed into his estate as an ordinary asset of the estate, and let each new entrant—those newborns, new immigrants, and so on—start their own HSAs anew.

Nonetheless, The Wall Street Journal titled their article about these thoughts “Ben Carson for President.” We could do worse.

Obama Is Legally Allowed to Enforce—or Not Enforce—the Law

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Amazingly, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law school wrote this in the New Republic, and he’s serious. Yet he cites not a single clause from the Constitution, not a single phrase, to support his…thesis.

Eric Posner wrote, among other things,

Would President Barack Obama, by refusing to enforce the immigration laws against millions of undocumented immigrants, be engaging in “domestic Caesarism,” as Ross Douthat charges [in a New York Times op-ed]?

…if he chooses not to enforce immigration laws against “up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants,” as Douthat claims, the president wouldn’t be doing anything different from what his predecessors have done (or rather, not done).

There’s that Progressive morality, again. The rightness or wrongness of a behavior isn’t at all inherent in the behavior. No, the behavior’s morality is determined solely by whether someone else did it first or is doing it also.

And

The president cannot suspend or change the law: when he leaves office, the law will remain the same as it was, and the next president will be free to enforce it or not.

No, no president, nor Obama nor any “next president,” is free to not enforce the law (nor has any past president been, although past ones have been guilty of this, also; Posner is right on this much). Here’s what Article II, Section 3, has to say on the matter:

he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed

Full stop. There’s nothing in there about taking Care if he feels like it or taking Care not to faithfully execute.

And

The executive branch spends a lot of time not enforcing laws. Congress has illegalized an enormous amount of activity without giving the president the resources to enforce the laws, so the executive has no choice but to make a list of priorities and devote its attention to law violations that, in its opinion, are the most serious.

with

Nearly all of this non-enforcement takes place with implicit congressional acquiescence….

This merely means Congress may be failing its tasks, too (“may be:” Congress has no obligation to allocate money to be spent in amounts a president might demand. A case can be made, in fact, that Congress allocates too much as it is); it in no way legitimizes Presidential lawlessness. Certainly, a lack of resources does increase the difficulty for a President. However, the difficulty in no way legitimizes choosing not to enforce.

This is, also, a straw man. This President also chooses not to enforce laws for which he has the resources: the Business Mandate and the Individual Mandate of the ACA; border security; delivery of subpoenaed documents to the Congress that subpoenaed them, including Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS; refusing to comply with Congressional oversight; the list runs on.

Then there’s this:

People like Douthat wrongly think that separation of powers means that the president must do what Congress decides. That’s not the principle of separation of powers….

This is another straw man. The Constitution gave the President executive power for the purpose, among others, to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, not to choose among them to enforce only those convenient to him. In this guise, the President must, indeed, do what Congress decides: he must enforce the laws that they pass—and that become actual law when he signs the bill and thereby enacts it, or when they pass it again, over his veto. To do otherwise is the principle of Executive supremacy, embodied in monarchies like an earlier Britain’s, against which we rebelled some years ago.

And this:

If Congress cannot pass any laws because of gridlock, then it has violated its obligations under the Constitution, and accordingly the president has the right to use his enforcement powers to implement policies that serve the public interest.

Of course, a President has no such right. There’s that pesky Art II, Sect 3 clause, after all, which also contains no syllable of authorization for a President to create “law” on which he might then presume to act. Further, in the entirety of that second Article of our Constitution, there’s no such “right,” or power, or authority identified.

Above all that, the President has no authority to decide what “policies…serve the public interest.” That’s the province of We the People, who are the public, and we make those determinations through our elected representatives in the Congress.

Posner’s piece goes on, but you get the idea.