Keys to Watch

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Damian Paletta, of The Wall Street Journal, has identified some keys to watch to see if the deal with Iran is a real one.

The Strait of Hormuz. Trump suggested that the Strait of Hormuz…would be opened after the deal is formally signed on Friday.

We’ll see. Iran has a long and hoary history of welching on its deals.

The blockade. The White House has imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ships, with the goal—essentially—of economic strangulation. … If the blockade is removed, Iran might be much more likely to continue negotiating with the White House on other things, as it could ease pressure on their economy.

Paletta’s interpretation is wrong. With pressure taken off, the men and women of Iran’s government and of its shadow government, the IRGC, will be much less willing to do any serious negotiation. They will, instead, be much more likely to continue tapping us along.

Israel. One of the biggest strains on the talks in the past months has been Israel, which has continued bombing inside Lebanon. Iran has said this was a deal breaker. Trump initially brushed aside concern about Israel’s strikes against Iran, but in recent weeks he has become furious that Israel wouldn’t stand down.

This is President Donald Trump’s (R) mistake. The fight between Iran and Israel, with the former using its satrap Hezbollah for its continuing fight, is an entirely separate war from the conflict between the US and Iran. Trump needs to openly recognize this and refuse any connection between the Israel-Iran war in Lebanon and our own conflict with Iran.

The Gestating Parent Governor

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New York’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Nancy Hochul, styles herself as her State’s “mom governor.” Maybe not anymore.

Under the bill that passed in Albany last week, the word mother would be replaced by “gestating parent” and father would become “non-gestating parent.”
The bill says that proceedings to establish “parentage” (the new word for paternity) can be started by “the gestating parent or alleged non-gestating parent.” The argument made for this rewrite is that current law doesn’t reflect the diversity of family life in the 21st century, which includes same-sex couples and surrogacy arrangements.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party—the party of misogyny, now extending to ignoring what it is that makes a woman a woman—her biology. Now it’s up to Hochul: if she signs the legislation, she’ll be insulting millions of New York’s citizens while pandering to Party’s central and left wings. If she vetoes it, she’ll likely be harassed by Party for the rest of her term. If she neither signs nor vetoes, but merely allows it to become law without her signature, she’ll be showing herself a coward, afraid to take a stand.

Horning In

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President Donald Trump (R) has potentially reached an interim agreement with Iran that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz as an international body of water to international shipping, end the embargo, and produce negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with the apparent deal good for 60 days.

France, Great Britain, et al., all declined to provide any assistance at any time during the conflict, bleating that fighting was too dangerous for their militaries. Now that it might be safe enough, though, we get this from Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (apparently the longer the title is necessary to manufacture importance for the position), as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

the pact marked a potential breakthrough and her team was ready to assist with nuclear expertise.

No. As usual lately, we’re better off going it alone, rather than having a yoke around our necks. The EU and UK can continue to spectate from the safety of their porches. Cheering optional.

Lies of Government

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Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—ADS-B Out—is an aviation safety aircraft transponder system that broadcasts, via satellite, an airplane’s location, altitude, speed, and identification number so that the FAA’s air traffic controllers can more readily track the airplane and its physical relationship with other aircraft in the vicinity. It’s an expensive addition to aircraft that was inflicted on sold to general aviation pilots on the government’s promise that the system would be used only for aviation safety and for no other government purpose.

The lie:

ADS-B gave them [government taxmen] an instant high-tech snoop tool, including the ability to claim owners are registering planes in one place but parking them elsewhere. Jeff Prang, the assessor for Los Angeles County, recently bragged to Politico that the county is using ADS-B to take the tax hammer to owners of 1,000 planes it claims have been “avoiding” “$35 million in local property taxes.”

Now we get ADS-B In, proposed in House and Senate bills, which allows pilots to see for themselves the aircraft around them.

House Republicans…used the revival of the [ADS-B] issue to remedy the original tax sin, forbidding any government agency from using ADS-B “for the purpose of obtaining revenue.”

And we get the response from the Left:

[S]afety means little to the tax officials wailing that they will lose this new “efficient” way to tax—as if Americans are obligated to make their jobs easy. It also means little to Democrats, who see a new front in the class war

It’s more than just petty taxman convenience, though. According to them, the money an employer pays an employee isn’t that employee’s money. It belongs to the government; the employee is merely a middleman on that road. Or, as that LA tax assessor implied, a highwayman needing handling.

Notice that it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are defending ADS-B Out’s use as a tax collection facility and who are demanding to use ADS-B In for the same purpose.

Trade-Through Elimination

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The SEC’s trade rule, in effect for a bit over 20 years, requires trading platforms operating in the US to execute investors’ trades at the best price available across the market, even if that means one platform must go to another platform to execute the trade. The SEC wants to rescind that rule as no longer necessary. The SEC says,

Currently, the US equity markets are highly automated and interconnected and the Commission’s concerns expressed at the time of [the rule’s] adoption in 2005 regarding the lack of mechanisms to connect markets is no longer an issue[.]

The SEC now argues that (as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal)

stockbrokers already have a strict legal duty to execute trades with the most favorable terms for their clients, making the trade-through rule superfluous.

The exchanges’ “legal duty” is all well and good, but then there are the enforcement costs for violations of that rule. These costs are incurred by the government (i.e., us taxpayers) from enforcing compliance with a case’s outcome, incurred by individual (and institutional) investors from raising a ruckus in the first place, and incurred as opportunity costs during the time between detection of a violation and final adjudication.

Then there’s the difficulty of detecting a violation in the first place, especially for retail investors.

The SEC also argues that rule rescission would save the platforms the cost of buy[ing] expensive market data feeds linked to a bevy of exchanges.

Yet, in order to satisfy that legal duty, the platforms still would need access to some version of those data feeds, or at least to the data in them, in order, in real time (which is microseconds in today’s interconnectivity), to identify that best price available.

This is a rule that should remain in effect. The cost to the platforms is trivial: $54.2 million to $77 million annually, compared with nearly $30 billion in aggregated US platform income. Violations of the trade-through rule, importantly, are far more easily detected, including by retail investors.