Another Power Grab

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This one by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A proposal under consideration by the agency would generally require brokers to route small investors’ market orders into auctions, where trading firms would compete to execute them, people familiar with the matter said. …
Brokers would have a way out. Instead of sending the orders to auctions, the brokers could attempt to have them filled at the midpoint price or better, the people said.

And

The proposed midpoint requirement and auctions would apply to market orders. Commonly used by small investors, market orders are instructions entered through a brokerage to buy or sell stocks at whatever their current market price is.

This sounds good, but in reality, it’s a solution for a nonexistent problem.

I’m one of those poor, downtrodden small investors, and my broker already uses a price improvement procedure whereby my market orders are routed to the trading house that offers the best execution price—which is the price shaded above the mid-point toward the buy price if I’m selling and below the mid-point toward the sell price if I’m buying. I’m already getting a better price than the mid-point.

My broker isn’t alone, either; most brokers offer/provide that procedure: it’s a means of competing for the small investors’ business.

But wait—don’t those trading houses pay the brokers for the orders to be routed to them? Why yes, yes they do. And those trading houses compete among themselves for the brokers’ business, which means the brokers get a range of trading houses from which to select the best price improvement for their customers.

The SEC’s…proposal…is just another exercise in power for the sake of power being carried out by SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.

Progressive-Democrat Lies

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These two are especially egregious in this final runup to voting in two weeks.

The first is by Joe Biden, our Progressive-Democrat President:

The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office[.]

No, the most common price of gas in America as of the week ending January 25, 2021, the week Biden was inaugurated, was $2.39 [hit the full history XLS link for “U.S. Regular Gasoline Prices*(dollars per gallon)”, and select Data 3 in the resulting spreadsheet]. (Lots of good data on the US Energy Information Administration site.) Biden knows the actual price of gasoline, both then and now.

The second is by Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Progressive-Democrat Governor. In last Tuesday’s debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, Dixon said Whitmer kept Michigan schools closed longer than any other State. Whitmer claimed

That’s just not true…. Kids were out for three months.

Whitmer made that claim even knowing that tens of thousands of Michigan’s students still can’t get in-person/in-school learning in the present school year, which has been in progress for two months.

In fact, Whitmer didn’t even recommend, much less require, schools open for in-person learning until March 2021, a year after she ordered schools closed in March 2020. In March 2021, also,

23% of Michigan schools were fully in person, compared with 47% in Ohio, 54% in Wisconsin, and 76% in Indiana.

Those three surrounding States were reopening, strongly, for in-school learning. Whitmer knew this at the time she made her claim, even as she tried after the debate to weasel-word her answer:

[Whitmer] referred only to her or her Health Department’s orders in making the “three months” statement.

Never mind that she took no overt countervailing action for that subsequent year and more.

Putin Wants an Arms Race

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Russia threatens arms race in space if commercial satellites do not stop assisting Ukraine in war, goes the subheadline.

And:

[Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Konstantin] Vorontsov argued that commercial satellites used to benefit Ukraine in the war violates The Outer Space Treaty and warned it could start a “full-fledged arms race in outer space.”

An arms race in space.

I say bring it. The Soviet Union couldn’t handle a Reagan arms race in space; the USSR couldn’t keep up with the technology developments, and its economy couldn’t keep up with anything—military or civilian.

The Russian economy is in worse shape. Let’s have that arms race. Russia will lose this one, and just as catastrophically, even if the nation doesn’t actually disintegrate the way the USSR did.

A Raise in Pay

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Chicago’s Progressive-Democratic Party Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is at it again, this time in an obviously self-serving way.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday proposed an ordinance giving the office of the mayor an annual inflation raise capped at 5%.

Wow.

There are two reasons for an organization giving a pay raise to an employee. One is that the organization is doing better than in the past and is expected to continue at that increased level. This often garners pay raises for all employees, from the top to the bottom.

The other reason is that a particular employee has done especially well and can be expected to continue performing at that level, or the raise is granted after a period of exceptional performance to encourage the employee to continue at the elevated level.

The organization known as Chicago is a failed city. The tip of that failure:

  • violent crime in her city has increased 37% over 2021
  • the murder rate, in particular, is skyrocketing, even compared to 2021, which itself was up markedly over 2020
  • motor vehicle thefts to date are up 74% compared to the same period in 2021
  • major companies fleeing the city

There is no reason to expect this performance trend to do anything other than to worsen. The organization of Chicago is not doing well enough for across the board pay raises, much less for the Mayor or for anyone in the mayor’s office.

Lightfoot is the city’s MFWIC, and not only is the city’s failure her fault by dint of her role as the one in charge, the city’s failure is a direct result of her policies and behaviors. Lightfoot, in particular, deserves no pay raise.

Beyond that, in no way at all does anyone running this organization deserve automatic pay raises, which are independent of performance.

National Digital ID

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The Senate’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (as are all Senate and House committees in this Congress so dominated) passed out of committee a plan to impose a national digital ID system for US citizens—the better for Government tracking of its subjects.

Supporters claim that such national IDs could be

the key to unlocking access to financial services, various government benefits and educational opportunities, as well as a number of other critical services.

What they ignore is that such things also could be key to freezing those same items when they’re held by those of whom Government disapprove—just as the Progressive-Democrat-run IRS targeted conservative political action entities, and as the Progressive-Democrat DoJ is (still!) targeting mothers who object to school board wokeness as domestic terrorists, and as the Progressive-Democrat-dominated FBI still is targeting Trump-supporters, and as the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is naming half of us average Americans pseudo-fascists.

Jay Stanley, a Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU on national digital IDs:

…digital IDs could prove to be a privacy nightmare. “But digital is not always better—especially when systems are exclusively digital.”
“There’s a reason that most jurisdictions have spurned electronic voting in favor of paper ballots, for example,”

That’s the best purpose that a national ID could serve—and it’s anathema to individual liberty. But it’s part and parcel of Party’s avowed purpose of “fundamentally transforming America.”

No.

We already have a national ID. It’s our passports. The critical difference is that generation of and possession of a passport is strictly voluntary and done solely on the initiative of each individual American citizen.

What’s next from the Progressive-Democrats? Internal travel documents? They tried that, after all, in some areas at the height of the Wuhan Virus situation, barring travel unless the traveler could present suitable vaccination papers to relevant authorities.