Tag Archives: economics

Supreme Court Damage

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This is why we so desperately need a Republican President and a Republican Senate from 2017 on.

The Supreme Court split 4-4 Tuesday on a challenge brought by public school teachers who objected to paying union dues, delivering a big win for the unions[.]

The Liberal block on the Court has continued to vote in lock step, rather than on what the law actually says, this time damaging—as they surely know—not only the Free Speech Clause, but the Free Assembly Clause as well, of the 1st Amendment.

This particular ruling is not “final;” the split ruling only leaves intact the 9th Circuit’s ruling.  The appellate courts remain split on the matter, and a later, full court can hear another case along these lines and strike unions’ ability to collect dues from non-members and to use the dues from members and non-members for political purposes those dues payers do not approve.

That full Court badly needs a conservative, textualist Justice to replace Antonin Scalia.  Our Republic is badly endangered by a bloc-voting Liberal Court that sees the Constitution as malleable in accordance with their own interpretation of today’s needs rather than malleable only through Article V and the folks who make up today’s society, We the People.

Climatistas, Again

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From Watts Up With That we get the latest internal inconsistency of the climate panic-mongers.

Including gas, oil and coal, they [the UN’s IPCC] estimate a total fossil fuel reserve of nine hundred to two thousand gigatonnes of carbon (GtC).  I decided to apply those numbers to both the Bern Model and the simple exponential decay model.

Willis Eschenbach, the author of the linked-to article, asked:

My interest was in finding out what would happen, according to the two CO2 models, if we burned all of the fossil fuels by 2100.

That is, if we completely exhausted all of our coal, oil, and natural gas in an orgy of consumption over the next 85 years, what would we get?

Using the two models cited, the Bern model and the simple single-time-constant exponential model, two of the IPCC’s favorite models, Eschenbach got the answer [emphasis his]:

According to the IPCC, there is not enough fossil fuel carbon (oil, gas, and coal) on the planet to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration from its current value.

Doubling the amount of atmospheric CO2 is one of the big bugaboos of the climatistas, never minding that at 800 parts per million by volume of CO2 in the air (the result of that doubling) is just about the level when life on earth was especially lush during earlier geologic eras.

Hmm….

Another Bill Did Pass

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I wrote earlier about the National Football League’s apparent attempt to extort Georgia into not enacting a bill that didn’t suit the NFL’s pleasure.

North Carolina did enact a bill in the same tenor, and now the National Basketball Association is threatening to pull its next year’s All-Star game from Charlotte in retaliation.

When can we expect the NBA to mandate an inclusive environment to all who attend our games and event[s] and safe spaces of equality and mutual respect in its clubs’ arena rest rooms and to ban Men’s and Women’s rest rooms as unacceptably discriminatory?

Hmm….

More Overregulation

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More fallout from Dodd-Frank: these regulators now are about to promulgate a rule set that requires companies to sequester bonuses paid to their executives for some period of years before those execs can collect their bonuses.

Aside from interfering with decisions that are wholly internal to a business and so none of the government’s business, there are other problems with this set.  This rule set will

govern pay to risk-taking executives who are in a position to do material damage to their companies.

In addition to extending the deferral window, regulators want to broaden the pool of bank employees subject to the new rules by expanding the definition of risk taker to include factors like the amount of money an employee handles.

Never mind that risk is part of business, and there already are Federal, and State, laws extant that deal with both fraud negligence in this area.  Never mind that shareholder suits, or the threat of them, also already exist as a market mechanism for adequately managing risk-taking.

There’s also this:

…how to balance risk with reward in compensation arrangements that will apply to a cross section of banks, investment advisers, broker dealers, credit unions and executives at mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  …

“Trying to come up with a rule that can be uniformly applied to a set of highly diverse players in the financial-services industry was always just going to be very difficult,” said Kyoko Lin, a partner at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP.

Well, NSS.  This is yet another reason government has no business meddling in the market place.

Centrally Planned Micromanagement

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Now the People’s Republic of China government is concerning itself with the names the Chinese citizenry give to their streets, businesses, and the very places where they live.  The government has

announced a new move to “stem irregularities in naming the country’s roads, bridges, buildings, and residential compounds,” according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency.

Li Liguo, China’s Minister of Civil Affairs, said that the move will target “exaggerated, foreign, bizarre and repetitive” names, as well as those that cause inconvenience to citizens….

After all, the citizens—the ones applying these names—can’t be allowed to inconvenience themselves.

Worse, such names

damage sovereignty and national dignity, are against socialist core values, deviate from public order and good morals, and raise strong concerns from the public[.]

Or at least the Government’s criteria for these things.

Because the government hasn’t intruded far enough.  Or else a surprising number of PRC bureaucrats are overpaid and underemployed.