Tag Archives: ethics

Crony Capitalism and Big Government

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California’s health insurance exchange has awarded $184 million in contracts without the competitive bidding and oversight that is standard practice across state government, including deals that sent millions of dollars to a firm whose employees have long-standing ties to the agency’s executive director.

Several of those contracts worth a total of $4.2 million went to a consulting firm, The Tori Group, whose founder has strong professional ties to agency Executive Director Peter Lee, while others were awarded to a subsidiary of a health care company he once headed.

It isn’t just state government, though, nor is this problem limited to government-run medical “care.” Think, also, Solyndra and A123, Tesla in Nevada, “green” energy subsidies, Dodd-Frank and too big to fail, farm subsidies, loan guarantees for big corporations like Boeing and GE (roughly $6 billion between them, via the Ex-Im Bank), even the Senate barbershop (!).

If our government weren’t so big, so taxing, so spending; if we turned the rascals out more often in our biennial elections, our government wouldn’t have the wherewithal with which to engage in crony capitalism, and we citizens could get back to capitalist capitalism and general prosperity.

No Travel Ban?

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In a recent Fox News op-ed, Dr Tom Frieden, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, argued against a “travel ban” covering the western African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the nations hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic.

I answered most of his objections here.

In his latest piece, though, he raised a new objection, and he sounded like he actually meant it.

When a wildfire breaks out we don’t fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.

Well, yes “we” do. These are called “fire breaks.” The fire teams fighting the wildfires, and the forest fires, do their best to isolate the fires to keep them from spreading by clearing a ring around the fire of combustible material, trying to make the ring wide enough that “random sparks” can’t jump the ring and set off “another outbreak somewhere else.” Nor is this an either-or proposition. While some fire teams are working hard to create that isolation, others are entering the area, fighting the fire directly, and extinguishing it.

So it should be here. We need medical expertise, teams, and supplies going into the three nations to help the locals deal with, bring under control, extinguish the current epidemic. And we need the quarantine—a ban on travel out of those nations, with the travel exceptions outlined in my article at the above link.

Frieden also raised two new objections.

We don’t want to isolate parts of the world, or people who aren’t sick, because that’s going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.

It could even cause these countries to stop working with the international community as they refuse to report cases because they fear the consequences of a border closing.

These also are nonsense. Many of these nations’ people already are going underground, and they’re often attacking personnel trying to deal with the dead bodies. That they’re doing both out of ignorance and lack of understanding of the situation doesn’t alter the fact that they’re already doing both. This puts a premium on quarantine, to keep those underground from leaving, anyway.

The need for a quarantine also was demonstrated by the unfortunate situation involving Thomas Edward Duncan, who died last week in Dallas after having travelled from Liberia. He was symptom-free when he arrived in the US. Only a quarantine could have prevented his travel with its potential for spreading the virus.

A quarantine would cause these three nations from cooperating with the “international community” in fighting this epidemic? They would simply be cutting off their own noses. A quarantine still would leave the epidemic isolated and greatly reduced in its ability to spread throughout the same international community.

Frieden is right about one thing.

There is no more effective way to protect the United States against additional Ebola cases than to address this outbreak at the source in West Africa. That’s what our international response…will do.

Indeed. Getting after the source, though, must include a quarantine, in order to keep the source area—already large—at a manageable size while continuing entry into the area and helping the locals.

Hong Kong and Freedom

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The backdrop is this: in the last few days in the Hong Kong district of Mong Kok, there have been violent clashes between peaceful student and other protestors on the one hand and “locals” consisting, allegedly, of older residents and small business owners mixed with members of the triads on the other hand, this mix attacking the protesters. The latter are losing income from their prostitution and drug…enterprises…and they’re upset about it.

My own view is that the residents and business owners are being provoked and the triads winked at by the PRC in the hope of getting sufficient pretext to justify the government’s coming violent crackdown. That’s a separate question, though; what interests me here are the charges being leveled by the current Hong Kong administration against those who were arrested during those weekend clashes.

Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security, Lai Tung-kwok, said that among other charges, those arrested had been charged with unlawful assembly.

How is it possible to unlawfully assemble in a free society?

Liberty, Security, and Encryption

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Moves by Apple Inc and Google Inc to put some smartphone data out of the reach of police and the courts are raising alarms inside US law-enforcement agencies, current and former officials say.

Of course the government is upset. Heaven forfend anything should interfere with its convenience in fishing for wrong-doing in our private correspondence. Privacy, though, is a necessary component of individual liberty and responsibility.

There is a trade-off, to be sure, between that and government’s ability to do the job of protecting us from others and from extra-national threats that we’ve hired it to do, but we must be very wary about how much of our liberty we surrender and how much of our responsibility we foist off, and we must be extremely chary of the trade-offs we make in that regard.

One Justice Department official said that if the new systems work as advertised, they will make it harder, if not impossible, to solve some cases. Another said the companies have promised customers “the equivalent of a house that can’t be searched, or a car trunk that could never be opened.”

“Harder to solve,” perhaps. “Impossible,” though, is a coarse exaggeration: our cops are better than that. Additionally, it’s long been American philosophy that it’s better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man gets locked up. Today’s threats aren’t enough to walk away from that bastion principle of liberty.

As to that second plaint, it’s another exaggeration. The searches might get harder, but the devices are easily controllable, and get a warrant.

And this:

Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence. Apple is “announcing to criminals, ‘use this,’ ” he said. “You could have people who are defrauded, threatened, or even at the extreme, terrorists using it.”

However. It isn’t Apple that’s being accused, or suspected, or against whom probable cause is being alleged, it’s the cell phone owner. Searching Apple’s facility because the light is better there is…faulty.

Weissman also ignores both the right of an American citizen to protect himself against a government that has shown itself increasingly intrusive, avaricious, and controlling, and the fact that a warrant must be obtained on the one hand, and on the other, once a warrant has been obtained, the government can use its own facilities to conduct the search. These facilities include both the ability to sanction the phone’s owner for not providing the password and the use of government’s IT facilities for cracking the password.

Then there’s another question. Government cannot assume our responsibilities in our place morally. If government does assume our responsibilities in our place legally, we will have lost our individual liberties and responsibilities.

Without individual liberty and responsibility not only can there be no security, there can be no hope of security.

This Needs to get Moving

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Fort McClellan, Anniston, AL, housed among other units the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Corps. This Corps was responsible for the containment and disposal of chemical weapons, and it carried out this function, primarily, at Ft McClellan, a task it had done since before WWII. The base was closed 15 years ago due to failures in containment and leaching of the toxins into the soil and local water supply.

Monsanto also had been leaking toxins into the area’s water supply and soil from its own herbicide manufactory. Locals suffering from the effects of these contaminants successfully sued Monsanto in 2003, four years after McClellan’s closure, but for reasons that aren’t particularly important to this post Army personnel and their families who had been stationed at the base were blocked from joining the suit.

In January of last year, the Fort McClellan Health Act was introduced to fill the resulting gap in these veterans’ ability to get coverage and medical treatment for the effects of their own and their families’ exposure to the toxins handled at the base. It’s been languishing in committee (first in the House’s Committee on Veterans Affairs, then the Subcommittee on Health) since then.

This is an unacceptable bureaucratic delay (because I don’t think the Congressmen themselves don’t care about our veterans’ or families’ health), and it must stop. This bill needs to be promptly debated and brought to fruition, properly paid for, and moved along to House passage, following which the Senate needs to move it to a vote and the President sign it into law.

Write your Representatives and Senators. Call them. Email them. Social media. There’s been enough delay, not just for the last 21 months, but since this problem first came to light over a decade ago.