Yet Another Reason…

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…to stop doing business in or with the People’s Republic of China.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission is implementing changes to its rules governing publicly offered securities investment funds. These rules include requiring foreign-owned fund managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity to create Communist Party cells when operating in China.

And

In January 2021, HSBC executive Noel Quinn was unable to confirm to the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee that the bank had no party cells in its branches in Hong Kong and the mainland.

His own bank, and he doesn’t know how tied it is to the Chinese Communist Party.

The CSRC’s rules dovetail nicely with the PRC’s national intelligence law that requires companies operating inside the PRC to collect and deliver whatever intelligence information the intelligence community wishes (and companies domiciled in the PRC to go outside the nation to collect that information and deliver it).

It’s just not worth the national security risk to do any business with or within the PRC.

Excuses

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On the matter of the disagreement between Elon Musk and Twitter over whether the former must buy the latter or the latter has failed to provide the data needed—for instance, to assess the level of bots doing Twitter’s tweeting—to properly assess the value of the purchase target, “data scientists” claim that the number of fake and spam accounts

isn’t easy to objectively determine.

And

Coming up with a precise, objective, and authoritative number of fake or spam accounts, where hundreds of millions of tweets are posted daily, is an impractical task.

It’s hard, so it’s impractical? And hiding behind the vagaries of “precise” (how precise? Five 9s precise? “Close enough” to illustrate the general magnitude of the number?)?

This is just “expert” fee seeking. “Not easy” means possible. It’s time for the obstructionists to stop obstructing, to stop manufacturing excuses, and to get to work.

The New Pen and Phone

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) infamously bragged that he had a pen and a phone available if Congress wouldn’t do his bidding. And he proceeded to use them to reign via diktat—diktats often overruled in court (and remember, this was before former President Donald Trump (R) was able to restore textualist sanity and restrain judicial activism).

Behold, the President Joe Biden (D) version of the pen and phone tool for ruling, rather than governing: the permanent “public health emergency.”

The Biden Administration claims the declaration provides critical regulatory flexibility.

You bet it does.

Rent Control vs Market Competition

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Here’s an example of the failure of no competition in affordable housing, this one in St Paul, MN. The residents of St Paul last November voted to cap rent increases at 3% per year, forever, with no exceptions.

Mercatus Center [Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity project] Salim Furth compared St Paul building permits in the five months after passage of rent control with the average of the same months in the three years prior [i.e., immediately preceding the Wuhan Virus situation onset]. By that metric, St Paul’s multifamily permitting is…down 55%.

And

City data shows St Paul’s building permit revenue from January to May 2022 was $3.699 million, down from an average of $4.176 million from 2018 to 2021.

The claimed purpose was to protect affordable housing availability.

However.

St Paul’s rent control creates an incentive for developers to build luxury apartments to recoup their construction costs. But builders are also opting to leave St Paul. Citing rent control, investors recently paused development on the 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project. Its builders would have set aside 20% of units for affordable housing, with 10% going to those earning 30% or less of area median income.

The only ones who wouldn’t have predicted this outcome, who don’t understand its inevitability, are those who can’t stand the thought of individuals or private businesses making their own decisions, or free markets making their own aggregated decisions, independently of the limits and requirements set by Know Betters.

A Thought on Money-Follow-the-Child Programs

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters had one.

Quoting Toni Jennings, retired teacher and former Florida Lieutenant Governor, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute CEO, wrote

The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, “Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.” Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.

Absolutely, and those public schools are not only failing those children, they’re defrauding those children’s parents, whose tax money is paying for those schools.

Here’s another thought, this one from me, flowing from this bit in Trabert’s letter:

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math, and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse….

Even if that achievement gap didn’t exist, and those minority children also were at that 31% rate, the rate is unacceptably bad and illustrates the magnitude of the failure of our public schools.

We need vastly more competition in our K-12 system, not less, in order to both eliminate that achievement gap and to bring the college-ready rate up to acceptable levels. That means the Federal government must butt out of the business [sic] or be butted out by the States rejecting Federal funds; it means that State and local education funding must follow the child not the institution; and it means that State and local jurisdictions must stop, or be stopped from, using their regulatory powers to obstruct the opening of charter and voucher schools or of the nascent homeschooling pod alternative.