Category Archives: regulation

More EU Bad Faith

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Finance operations, a key industry for Great Britain but not so much for the European Union, is being excluded from existing Brexit transition negotiations. That much is on the Brits as well as the EU, but the EU is abusing the mutual error.

In anticipation,

European regulators have demanded banks base certain operations currently conducted in London in the EU post-Brexit. … The EU last week committed to rules governing derivatives that will prevent London-based traders at EU banks from continuing business seamlessly after Brexit is completed on New Year’s Eve.

Derivatives trading is a significant fraction of the Brits’ financial industry, and the new rules prevent even London-based branches of EU banks from trading with UK-regulated firms unless those transactions occur in other jurisdictions recognized by both sides.

As Tim Cant, a London-based Partner at Ashurst Group, notes,

This is part of a wider strategy of moving finance into the EU[.]

It’s also part of the EU’s wider strategy of punishing Great Britain for its effrontery and of warning the more uppity remaining member nations to not even think about doing such a dastardly thing as leaving their Betters in Brussels.

Legalizing Drugs

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The citizens of Oregon have voted to legalize “small amounts” of a variety of drugs—including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and the like.

Others demur from that decision.

I have a larger concern.

For those advocating the legalization of “small amounts” of drugs–whether cocaine, heroine, marijuana, or anything else—a question: what’s your limiting principle? What natural limit–not your well-intentioned promise, or the behavior of those who succeed you—prevents you from increasing the upper limit of “small?”

Absent that limit, the only reasonable limit for legalizing such drugs is Zero. And, given the damage done not just to the user but to others around the user (vis., the damage done the user’s family through the debilitating effects of the addiction even from a “small amount” or the damage done the store employee(s) and customers as the user commits robberies under the influence in his effort to obtain the wherewithal to pay for his next “small amount”), perhaps the optimal reasonable limit should remain Zero.

NASDAQ is in the Quota Business

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The stock exchange has proposed a rule—and it’s actually serious about it, if you can imagine that—regarding business governance that must be satisfied if a business is to be considered by the Know Betters of the exchange fit for listing on its exchange.

The second largest exchange in the world has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to impose a quota system on the boards of its listed companies. The new rule would mandate that corporate boards have a minimum of one woman director and one who is a minority or LGBTQ.

So: a black lesbian–a three-fer.

It would be not just an idiotic rule, it would be immoral. It also would be coarsely unfair to the board member. Did she get the job because she was qualified, or did she get it because she filled three squares? She’d always be faced with that stigma.

It’s also a naked interference in the way a business governs itself, which is far outside a stock exchange’s DOC.

Maybe it’s time for NASDAQ’s several hundred companies to take themselves off the exchange.

Time to Buy

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D), he of the open contempt for ordinary Americans, us bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country (i.e., the vasty expanse of America that lies between the western coast and the northeastern coast), is at it again.

Former President Barack Obama, in his latest memoir, criticized Americans for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than they care about “the environment”—even during a catastrophic event like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

And

…many American voters for decades had “bought into the idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better….”

That last is fully vindicated by the arrogant Know Better attitude of Obama and his ilk, who insist that Government is the only solution, and us petty voters need to sit down, shut up, and do what we’re told.

It’s true enough that business is imperfect and often screws up. However, even with that, it’s axiomatic that business always knows better than Government.

With Obama spouting off again, it looks like it’s time to go out and buy a Humvee and a muscle car or two.

The Dangers of a Biden Judiciary

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It’s well enough known that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden disdains the conservative nature—which is to say that of adhering to the actual text of our Constitution and any statute in a case—of the judiciary as populated by President Donald Trump (courtesy of Biden’s BFF, ex-President Barack Obama (D), who left so many judicial seats empty).

Now, it’s become especially crystalline. Here’s Cynthia Hogan, who was then-Vice President Biden’s counsel and earlier, then-Senate Judiciary Committee member Biden’s counsel:

Joe Biden thinks the law should be interested in protecting the little person. Not to determine an outcome, but to say people should not be at a disadvantage because they’re working class, they’re poor, they’re Black, they’re women, they’re immigrants.

Laudable as those goals are, they’re fundamentally political and not judicial goals. Demanding potential judges and Justices to push for those ends from the bench can only accomplish two things. One is to force those judges to violate their oaths of office to support and defend our Constitution rather than to alter it from the bench. Related to that is forcing those judges to agree similarly to alter the text of any statute before them, and thereby arrogate to their bench legislative authority that is the sole province of our Congress.

The protection of the little person, the person who is working class, poor, black, a woman, an immigrant is best done through strict adherence to our Constitution, which is changeable, legitimately, solely by We the People, us citizens. That protection is best implemented by us citizens through our choices for representation in our Congress and our White House—a representation that has the responsibility for legislating the means by which those goals will be implemented and that protects all Americans. Its also a representation that is directly answerable to us.

Those two tightly related things aggregate to the second, even more dangerous, thing: it makes our judiciary a political branch rather than the legal, judicial one that it is designed to be. That would reduce our nation from a nation of laws to a nation ruled by a few robed individuals who would make law according to their views. Law would no longer be a political matter determined by We the People through our elected political representatives.

Those few men, unelected and so unanswerable directly to us, will not protect all Americans, not even the little person. Instead, law—our very Constitution—will be whatever those few say it is. Beyond that, what those few will say will change over time and vary widely from man to man as each acts according to his own imperatives.

In very short order, those few will be protecting those imperatives, not Americans, not even the little American.

Mark Gitenstein, a former Judiciary Committee chief counsel under Biden:

We want to have as many vacancies as possible and get as many modern progressives in those slots as we can.

Indeed.

And Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidante:

We want to make sure that the courts, and not just the Supreme Court, really are a mirror of America[.]

Here is the danger emphasized, as these worthies don’t care that the courts are designed to be mirrors of our Constitution and of our statutes. It’s the elected political branches of our government who are the true and sole mirror of America.