Tag Archives: economics

That Was The Point

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The subheadline on a Sunday Wall Street Journal article says it all.

European voters have viewed the process so negatively that even EU-skeptic parties have mostly dropped talk of leaving the bloc or the euro

That was the entire motive for Brussels’ extended bad faith pseudo-negotiations with Great Britain after those uppity citizens voted to go out from the European Union. To be sure, Brit politicians, who insisted they Knew Better than their subordinate citizens, contributed to the mess with their own combination of arrogance and incompetent negotiating, but they just played into Brussels’ hands, they did not create the chaos.

Brussels, with its antics, has successfully cowed other nations that were restive and contemplating leaving into sitting down and shutting up.

That could change if the UK secures a trade deal with the EU that gives it greater national sovereignty without hurting its economy and Brexit comes to be seen as a success for Britain.

What the new government in the UK needs to internalize and then keep uppermost in its collective mind, though, is that the nation doesn’t need much of a trade deal with the EU, especially if that deal does not acknowledge the national sovereignty of a newly freed Great Britain.

Great Britain is in a position to cut a good trade deal with the US and to cut another one with the member nations of its global Commonwealth—either bilaterally or with the group as a whole.  The success of those deals could well revive sentiment of those currently cowed EU-skeptic nations.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

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That’s what French unions are demanding with their strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron’s and French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s plans to streamline, standardize, and otherwise reduce the cost to French taxpayers of France’s byzantine pension system.

Never mind that the pension system consists of 42 different pension plans or that French civil servants insist that they are, somehow, special and so should have special perquisites unavailable to petty private sector workers.

Trains, subways, and buses were still severely curtailed on Friday, and hundreds of domestic and regional flights were canceled. There were no demonstrations on Friday, but unions have warned the strike could last days and become one of the biggest in France in over two decades.

And

Civil servants, in particular, fear they may lose advantages they have over private-sector employees.

To hell with their fellow citizens attempting to get to and from their own work, to and from their own necessary errands, to and from their own entertainments.  The unions want theirs, and no one else matters.

All the government wants to do is to

extend the number of years needed to collect a full pension and create a universal plan that would do away with the so-called special regimes enjoyed by French civil servants, including rail workers.

Currently, full retirement occurs after 43 years of work or age 62; the latter being the youngest full-retirement age in the OECD.

“Screw you,” say the unions, exemplified by Catherine Perret, Confederal Secretary of the CGT trade union:

We won’t let go[.]

This is the naked, if strictly legal, extortion of union strikes made national.  The US has Taft-Hartley, in which the government can order the end to a strike for a significant period during which serious negotiations could occur.  France, not so much; its unions are amok.

Streamlining Negotiations

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DoJ says it wants to “streamline” negotiations over the size of penalties misbehaving white collar employees should pay.

Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, the head of the department’s criminal division—which overseas various white-collar criminal investigations—said the DOJ has sought to reduce the time it takes to negotiate resolutions by grounding proposed fines in US sentencing guidelines and other objective criteria.

Here’s a thought on how to streamline those negotiations.

Stop negotiating.  Make a plea offer (rarely, these too often get used to extort guilty pleas of any sort), and if the white collar declines—no back and forth—go to criminal trial.  Better, if DoJ thinks it has an actual case, go straight to criminal trial.

If DoJ doesn’t think it can make its case in front of a criminal court jury, then DoJ doesn’t have a case to make. Leave the white collar the hell alone.

Seller’s Remorse

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Not because they mistakenly sold, though, rather because they’re being blocked from selling. The People’s Republic of China’s telecom company Huawei is suing over an FCC ruling that prevents American rural wireless telecom companies from using Federal dollars to buy Huawei equipment.

Huawei executives have long hung their hats on this bit as their primary reason for being allowed into our national communications networks:

Huawei has long said that it is owned by its employees, operates independently of Beijing and would never spy on behalf of any government.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  PRC law requires government-run or -owned and private companies to cooperate in every respect with the PRC government—including government-demanded surveillance.  Even trusting to the sincerity of Huawei executives, they’ll spy if their government tells them to.  They have no choice.

Beyond that, it would be the height of foolishness for us to trust our national security to the good offices of foreign executives and to a foreign government that controls them.  Especially when that foreign government is, at best, a competitor of ours and, more likely, an enemy.

Especially when that foreign government has a history—long and venerable—of hacking our government and our private computers, stealing personal data of our government and military personnel, stealing our negotiation, policy, and military secrets, stealing the proprietary data of our private enterprises.

Especially when that company has been found to have multiple backdoors and other weaknesses in its software, waiting to be exploited.

A proximate example of Huawei’s sincerity is their claim, made by Song Liuping, Chief Legal Officer for Huawei, in the company’s FCC suit:

The FCC should not shut down joint efforts to connect rural communities in the US[.]

This is just straight-up dishonest. Neither the FCC, nor any other Federal entity, is blocking any joint efforts to connect our rural communities.  The only matter here is that Huawei is restricted in its efforts to join in those connections.  Indeed, the only restriction on Huawei in this case is that the company may not use Federal dollars—American citizens’ dollars—to join the connection efforts.

“The Burden of Compliance”

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Hospitals have filed their initial suit to prevent the Trump administration from promulgating a rule that would require hospitals to make public the secret rates they agree with insurers. Their argument centers on this:

The burden of compliance with the rule is enormous, and way out of line with any projected benefits associated with the rule[.]

It’s hard to understand the degree of burden in simply publishing the agreed rates. Paper and ink aren’t expensive, and electrons are even cheaper.  Beyond that, the benefits are enormous: it would allow patients and prospective patients to know which hospital charges what for a given procedure, so the patient could determine—under his own imperatives—which hospital has the most cost effective procedure.

The benefits also include each hospital knowing what its competitors charge, resulting in price competition—also the benefit of patients and prospective patients.  And to the benefit of the insurers, as price competition brings prices obtained in their direction, and seemingly paradoxically, to the benefit of those same hospitals as price competition brings prices paid in their direction, with the two pressures driving prices to an intermediate level optimal for the patients and prospective patients, for consumers.

Health and Human Services has the right of it. Here’s HHS spokesman Caitlin Oakley:

Hospitals should be ashamed that they aren’t willing to provide American patients the cost of a service before they purchase it. President Trump and Secretary [Alex] Azar are committed to providing patients the information they need to make their own informed health-care decisions and will continue to fight for transparency in America’s health-care system.