Category Archives: regulation

Government Convenience

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The Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission is vacuuming every scrap of data—including personally identifiable—on every single stock trade done by every single American, and it’s collecting these data from every single broker, exchange, clearing agency, and alternative trading system in the US.

It’s also doing this without any Congressional authorization to do so. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed suit to attempt to block the SEC from continuing and to get the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail, the mechanism by which the SEC collects and stores these ill-gotten data, completely eliminated. Peggy Little, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel:

By seizing all financial data from all Americans who trade in the American exchanges, SEC arrogates surveillance powers and appropriates billions of dollars without a shred of Congressional authority—all while putting Americans’ savings and investments at grave and perpetual risk.
The Founders provided rock-solid protections in our Constitution to prevent just these autocratic and dangerous actions. This CAT must be ripped out, root and branch[.]

The SEC’s argument in favor of its invasion is utterly cynical [summarized by former Attorney General William Barr]:

[I]t could investigate things more easily if it weren’t limited to gathering investor information on a case-by-case basis after suspected wrongdoing took place.

Barr’s response:

But the whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to make the government less efficient by making it jump through hoops when it seeks to delve into private affairs[.]

Indeed. The convenience of Government is no excuse for Government doing anything. We the People don’t exist to give Government something to do. Government works for us.

It’s time to thoroughly rein in the SEC, and a (not the) efficient way to do so is for Congress to cut the SEC’s budget to the bone, including reducing its payroll line item, until the SEC’s commissioners and staff straighten up or are replaced. And note that that payroll line item includes those commissioners’ pay.

Financial Institutions Retreating from ESG Claptrap

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Or are they? Are they, maybe, simply moving to disguise their ESG claptrap in other ways or only altering their rhetoric without materially altering their censorious behavior?

States have responded [to the explosion of ESG irrelevances] with a barrage of legislation that restricts the use of ESG factors or targets entities that boycott certain industries.
Financial institutions are reacting to these state-level actions with what appears to be a retreat from their commitment to ESG, but there are questions if they are changing or just regrouping the efforts under new names.

One way to control for financial institutions’ weasel-wording around those State-level bars (whether those institutions are looking sub rosa to avoid the bars or not) would be to require financial institutions that decline a loan application, or cancel an account, or otherwise restrict one relative to similar accounts of other customers is the following.

Require financial institutions to explain their adverse actions to their customers in concrete, measurable terms supported by including in their letters of explanation the hard, factual data they used to form their adverse actions, along with the concretely termed concerns the financial institution claims to have toward its adversely affected customer/prospective customer. Simply asserting that the enterprise/individual doesn’t align with the financial institution’s values doesn’t cut it. Which value? How? Show them the hard data supporting the assertion. Explain how any data provided by the enterprise/individual falls short.

There are no serious compliance difficulty/cost concerns here. The financial institution taking the adverse action already has collected and organized the data and concerns underlying its action; the institution has merely to copy/paste those materials into the letter advising its customer/prospective customer of the adverse action.

The Forgotten Man

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A recent Wall Street Journal editorial correctly pointed out the costs to us ordinary Americans of a variety of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden administration plans. The editors were particularly concerned with the administration’s plans for bank and credit card fees that these institutions charge individuals who overdraw their account or make late payments on their credit cards and that these institutions charge businesses for using the various ATM and credit card payment networks.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency proximately responsible for the latest round of regulations capping those fees at markedly lower levels,

acknowledges[] the lower penalty may cause more borrowers to pay late, and as a result incur higher “interest charges, penalty rates, credit reporting, and the loss of a grace period.” This would make it harder to qualify for an auto loan or mortgage.
The agency concedes that credit-card issuers may also raise interest rates, reduce rewards, “increase minimum payment amounts or adjust credit limits to reduce credit risk associated with consumers who make late payments.” Because some states cap credit-card interest rates, “some consumers’ access to credit could fall.”

The editors closed their piece with this bit of naivete, though:

The forgotten man always pays.

Who says they’re forgotten? These are the ones the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to trap into welfare, so Party can trade welfare payments for votes. Imperial Rome did bread and circuses; Party does welfare dolings.

Government Making Crime Pay

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Now the Progressive-Democratic Party reigning in the New York State government wants to reward felons for their crimes. After those felons have paid their debt to New York society through their jail time (and apparently before they’ve served out the rest of their penalty in the form of parole), the State wants to give them $2,600 for their trouble.

The legislation, introduced by State Senator Kevin Parker [D] and Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs [D], would allow inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.
As the bill currently stands, there are no limitations on how or where the money can be spent, according to Fox 5 New York.

They’re looking at setting aside $25 million for this reward fund.

Instead of paying criminals for their crime, maybe this taxpayer money (the original $40 the felons routinely get on release came from their garnished wages from the jobs they held while in jail) would be better spent going to a victim rehab/make whole fund instead. Alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money would be better spent countering, if only a little, the State’s Defund the Police movement.

Alternatively alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money—evidently excess collections since it’s aimed at such foolishness—could be returned to the State’s citizens. After all, as Progressive-Democrat Gibbs complains,

In this economy that [the original $40] amount is barely enough to get groceries or purchase clothes for a job interview[.]

That’s also the case for the honest citizens of New York, both jobless and working poor.

It’s highly useful to help released felons readjust to life on the outside and start to recover (or begin) an honest life. Paying them for their crimes doesn’t accomplish that. Thus, and additional alternative: commit the $25 million to programs—not State-run!—jail house training in the trades, half-way house rehab and job prep, and the like. Gibbs and Parker like the idea of no strings attached for the felons’ spending their $2,600 each; they should have no trouble committing, unrestricted, their aggregated $25 mil to private enterprises to run these programs. Or—the horror—paying the $2,600 per to the employer who hires a newly released felon.

It’s instructive that of all the plethora of alternatives available, these Progressive-Democrats picked the absolute worst of the lot, the one that directly rewards the felon with free cash.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.