Category Archives: rights

An Iron Curtain

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The USSR set up an Iron Curtain around its nation and its “sphere of influence” in Europe that was designed to keep its citizens from leaving for greener pastures. The Curtain became a real, physical barrier in the form of the Berlin Wall. To a large extent, it worked: even though citizens did manage to escape, the outflow was reduced markedly, and far too many citizens died on the Berlin Wall (or under it) attempting to escape.

Now the proud Progressive and Democratic Party Presidential candidate wants to erect an Iron Curtain around the United States designed to keep American businesses from leaving.

Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the US will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.

Never mind that American business owners and managers have a fiduciary duty—embedded in our laws as well as our morality—to maximize profits for the company and its owners—partners, shareholders, Mom and Pop. Never mind that this mandate to maximize profits necessarily includes minimizing costs. Never mind that the US taxes its businesses at the highest rate in the world, and that these tax bills are significant costs.

Never mind that minimizing the tax bill is a necessary part of that fiduciary duty, and it must, then, include consideration of foreign tax environments—and tax inversions, the process of buying, or being bought by, companies in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates and then moving the company into that lower tax jurisdiction.

Mrs Clinton would…require[e] companies to pay US taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold….

The current “threshold” is current law that allows inversions so long as the American company’s shareholders will own less than 80% of the new, merged company. Clinton’s lower threshold is, carefully, not yet specified.

This is the sort of barrier to our economic freedom, the sort of increase in Big Government taxation, the sort of destruction of our individual liberties to which we can look forward if we get this Progressive Democrat for President.

This is only a precursor to additional barriers to free movement we can expect from this Progressive Democrat.

No Fly Lists and Guns

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President Barack Obama said in his Oval Office speech Sunday evening that it’s insane to let people on the DHS No Fly List have access to guns. Obama also said that it’s wrong to operate on the basis of suspicion and hate.

While folks on the No Fly list aren’t necessarily objects of hatred, they are targets of suspicion. But that’s all they are. They’ve done nothing, and they’ve not been convicted for anything—other than of being objects of suspicion. Stephen Hayes was on the No Fly list; he’s a target of suspicion solely because he’s an Evil Conservative and an Evil Journalist. DHS employees are on the No Fly list. They’re targets of suspicion because…? Then-Senator Ted Kennedy (D, MA) was on the No Fly list. Say, what?

What none of these suspicious persons have been through, though, is Due Process. Not being able to fly into the US does not block them from entering the US; it just inconveniences them: they have to travel via other means. Not being able to have access to firearms is more than an inconvenience, regardless of one’s view of gun control. That denial is a blanket denial of one’s access to one’s Constitutional rights, and that requires a due process proceeding first.

What’s insane is denial of due process, of violating the law, whenever that becomes inconvenient. What’s insane is operating on suspicion rather than the law. What’s insane is decrying operating on suspicion while operating on the suspicion of a government List.

Driver Licenses and Illegal Aliens

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Five illegal aliens are suing Oregon over an Oregon citizen-passed (by two to one) law that denies driver licenses to illegal aliens.

This is about as cynical as it gets in the illegal immigration movement. One of the signs held by protestors supporting the suit (not visible at the link unless you play the video) insists that “driving is a privilege not a crime.” The sign is correct. What the sign holder misses, though, what the movement misses, what the suit carefully elides, is that driving also is not a right and that driving without a license is a crime. Driving is a privilege, and it’s awarded to those legally in the state in the form of a license to drive issued by the state. Being present illegally in no way confers a “right” to the privilege.

[T]he lawsuit alleges Measure 88 is unconstitutional because it “arbitrarily” denies driving privileges based on membership in a “disfavored minority group.” It alleges Oregon voters were motivated by “animus toward persons from Mexico and Central America.”

This is an example of the cynicism. There’s nothing arbitrary about the law: it targets illegal aliens. It denies access to a privilege (not to a right), not to a disfavored minority group, but to those present in Oregon illegally. Unless citizens with driver licenses suspended for this or that series of law violations also are a “disfavored minority group.” Neither does it show animus toward persons of particular nationality or “regionality.” It shows no animus at all; it only says illegal aliens aren’t entitled [sic] to the privileges of citizens and aliens present legally.

Long time readers of this blog know that I take a very loose and open view toward immigration. I just insist that immigrants enter legally and that if they choose to remain, they do so legally. Those currently present illegally need only take steps to become legal—admittedly hard to do under our current immigration system, and much easier to do were my proposals or those of some of the Republican Presidential candidates passed into law, but possible to do nonetheless.

SEC Dishonesty

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I’ve written before about the SEC’s internal administrative judge stacked deck system.

Judge Brenda Murray explained to [eight] brokers that the commissioners who run the SEC and approve all the civil charges filed by the agency don’t want its judges second-guessing them.

“So for me to say I am wiping it out,” Ms Murray said at the [motion to dismiss] hearing last year, “it looks like I am saying to these presidential appointee commissioners, I am reversing you. And they don’t like that.”

It doesn’t get any more blatant than that.

And yet, there’s this:

In another glimpse inside the SEC’s court, [Judge Cameron] Elliot told the defendants during settlement discussions on a case they should be aware he had never ruled against the agency’s enforcement division, said a person who was there. The judge said the defendants might therefore want to do a deal with the agency rather than fight their case at a hearing before him[.]

No extortion here. Mm, mm.

Whether this is dishonesty or rank cowardice isn’t material here. What is material is that these performances by SEC administrative judges are, by themselves, reason to do away with the SEC’s administrative judge system altogether and refer cases the SEC brings to Federal—or State—courts, where the defendants can get an actual fair trial.

These sham performances also should prompt a Congressional review of all administrative judge systems, Federal government wide, with a requirement that each entity having such a system prove it needs it and that the Federal and State court systems cannot handle the cases.

Free Speech and AIs

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Toni Massaro, Regents’ Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita at the University of Arizona College of Law, and Helen Norton, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, discuss whether Artificial Intelligences might ever gain free speech rights. After all, as Citizens United affirmed, lots of non-human entities have at least some aspects of a right to free speech.

Indeed, it is a question that warrants consideration: do only humans have full free speech rights, or do AIs, also; do sentient beings of any stripe have full free speech rights; and if the answer to either of the latter two is “Yes,” then what’s the threshold of intelligence beyond which such rights must be acknowledged (or granted: is our endowment of inalienable rights imbued by God in humans only, or in other beings, too?), and how do we measure that threshold?

Massaro and Norton, in their paper Siri-ously? Free Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence look into the question (absent any religious aspect) as it relates specifically to AIs. It’s a paper well worth the read, if only for the thought experiment aspect that is the authors’ purpose.

I’m interested in a particular part of their argument, though, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [emphasis in the original].

The idea becomes less preposterous, according to the scholars, when one focuses not on who or what is doing the speaking, but on who is doing the listening.

Such an approach, emphasizing “expression’s value to listeners” or the “listeners’ enlightenment,” yields “many similarities…between much computer speech and human speech that we already protect,” the professors say.

Listening is a hugely important aspect of our freedom of speech, no doubt. The right of the listener to choose for himself the speech to which he will listen or not listen—the right to assess for himself the value of the speech—is absolutely critical; without it there is no freedom of speech.

But.

The right to choose which speech to which to listen or not can only be derivative of the right to speak freely. After all, if the speech can be blocked in any way, or censored in any form, there can be nothing to which to listen, and so no choice of listening can exist. Within that, the value of the listened-to speech, and of the ignored speech, is in the mind of the speaker first and in the ear of the listener/ignorer second. There is no third. Government’s view, including court’s view, of that value never enters into it.

The authors dilute IMNSHO their argument to a large degree by basing a significant fraction of their argument on the value to a listener of that derivative aspect.