Tag Archives: ethics

Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.

A Crock

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That’s the only term for the Biden-Harris White House stonewalling of a Fox News FOIA request for the identification of the nationalities of the illegal aliens that those two are allowing into our nation via their open-borders policy. Fox News isn’t even asking for by-name data, just aggregated. Speaking through their Customs and Border Protection manager mouthpiece, though, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris are claiming—and they’re serious about this:

Releasing data for a particular nationality, or nationalities, that reflect a small number of individuals could lead to identification, especially by organizations familiar with the individuals.

And

The privacy interests of third parties (being protected from public disclosure because they could conceivably be subject to harassment and annoyance in his/her private life) far outweigh whatever public interest, if any, exists in having their information released.

This rationalization is a crock in two ways. One is that Biden-Harris are holding up identification of all nationalities because only a few illegal aliens, they claim, are of particular nationalities.

Another crock is the beef that the illegal aliens might be identified. They need to be identified so they can be gathered up and deported for their illegal entry, for their beginning their presence here with breaking our laws.

Biden and Harris also have it precisely backward in counting those third party privacy interests as more important than the public interest. We have a right to know who and what party(s) are aiding and abetting illegal aliens and by extension—intended or not—aiding and abetting human traffickers moving these illegal aliens. These third parties, along with such traffickers as can be identified and caught, need to be hauled into court and held criminally liable for their status as accessories to these crimes.

We also have a right to know who these third parties are so we can have a chance to assess the amount of our tax monies that is being used to support these illegal aliens and those third parties.

And this bit of cynical disingenuousity:

If such an organization were to move ‘X’ number of operatives of one nationality over the relevant period, and the disclosed nationality numbers were substantially lower than X, the terrorist organization could infer a large percentage of its operatives from a particular nationality have been able to move undetected (thereby minimizing the deterrent effect of the TSDS)[.]
…
This information could allow bad actors to reverse engineer effective countermeasures to facilitate undetected movement and activity and thwart CBP interdiction efforts[.]

The terrorist organizations and the cartels operating in Mexico already know these data. They already know who they’ve moved in and who’s been caught; this tells them how successful they are in their trafficking. To the extent the administration is serious with this claim, they’re simply projecting their own inability to conduct serious intel operations regarding who or what is coming across our border and where they’re going once inside.

This is the level of cynicism, or of incompetence, or both, that is rampant in the Biden-Harris administration and in Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ border policy.

Progressive-Democratic Party Agenda

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This is what Party has in mind, should they be the winners this fall.

Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris will push for these, among others, even as during this campaign season, she ducks away from interviews even by her friendly press (she hoped a couple weeks ago to reach an interview agreement “by the end of the month.” Keep in mind that even as she runs away from the press–and from the questions of us average Americans, these are the policies and goals she has strongly pushed for during her prior campaign for President and during her current stint as Vice President.

  • retreads of her and President Joe Biden’s policies of the last nearly four years
  • ban on fracking as part of her moves to eliminate our hydrocarbon energy capability
  • Medicare for all
  • open southern border
  • voting by and welfare payments to illegal aliens

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said what Harris lacks to fortitude or the integrity to say out loud for voters to hear and evaluate:

  • eliminate the Senate filibuster
  • control the Supreme Court with term limits and packing
  • impose federal takeover of elections
  • pass enormous spending and tax-hike legislation
  • additional housing entitlements

Harris’ goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our American culture, bringing in those millions of illegal aliens with no incentive to assimilate into our culture but having access to our voting booths. Schumer’s goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our republican democracy, converting us to a popular democracy, a form that has never worked in 2,500 years of attempts.

Price Controls and Ways Around Them

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Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie, economics professor at George Mason University and emeritus economics professor at UC Irvine’s Merage Business Schoo, respectively, reflected on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ price control scheme and some ways around them.

[C]competitive market forces will encourage them to do so, even when illegal.

Competitive forces, especially, are human nature: all of us want our goodies for as little as possible, and where there are at least two suppliers of something, those suppliers will compete with each other on some form of price in order to get our business.

Thus:

  • “shrinkflation”— keep prices the same but shrink the portions of goods
  • nonprice adjustments, such as relabeling/redefining “select” grade steaks as higher-ranking “choice” grades
  • hire fewer workers
  • devote less effort to cleaning produce
  • reduce hours of operation

Another major way, for all that it’s an illegal path—that pesky human nature—is the black market. Price controls are an open door for these to thrive, even where they’re illegal. And yes, that includes here in these United States. Keep in mind, especially vis-à-vis black markets that human nature—wanting stuff for as little as possible—can be made to work strongly against black market: free markets, especially those without price controls, will always and everywhere be able to produce goods and services at less cost and so for lower prices than can any black market. The latter’s production costs always include things that are intrinsically absent in free markets: the cost of evading the lawman along with the risk premium necessarily charged against the likelihood of getting caught.

Harris Absolutely Understands

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Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly is insisting that fellow Party-member Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris absolutely understands our nation’s border issues.

Kelly is right, and that’s what makes Harris’ policies—supported in the past and pushed for today—so dangerous to our nation’s security.

Under the Harris-Biden administration’s (that’s Joe Biden’s own occasional term for the administration, remember) border policies,

apprehended illegal border crossers during the Biden-Harris administration numbered “10.5 million in July with two months left in the fiscal year, which ends September 30,” Just the News reported.
This number does not account for illegal crossers who evaded capture. Including those individuals, the figure rises to 12.5 million.

Also included in those millions are an unknown number of terrorists and terrorist organization-connected persons. We know that many are flowing in under those Harris-supported open-border policies because some are being caught in the interior after having been released on the Harris-Biden policy of granting promise-to-appear chits to just about anyone who asks.

Also included in those millions are drug mules and human traffickers, along with their cargo of drugs and abused women and children, some of whom get caught later, and their human victims freed (but way too few of the latter).

Also included in those millions are repeat offenders—both of illegally entering and with known violent criminal activities. We know, because some of those violent crime repeaters get caught after murdering Americans, raping Americans, robbing Americans, ….

Harris knows these things are happening, and that makes her clear understanding, and the actions she doesn’t take with that understanding, so disgusting as well as so dangerous.