Tag Archives: freedom

An Iron Curtain

Posted on by
1

The USSR set up an Iron Curtain around its nation and its “sphere of influence” in Europe that was designed to keep its citizens from leaving for greener pastures. The Curtain became a real, physical barrier in the form of the Berlin Wall. To a large extent, it worked: even though citizens did manage to escape, the outflow was reduced markedly, and far too many citizens died on the Berlin Wall (or under it) attempting to escape.

Now the proud Progressive and Democratic Party Presidential candidate wants to erect an Iron Curtain around the United States designed to keep American businesses from leaving.

Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the US will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.

Never mind that American business owners and managers have a fiduciary duty—embedded in our laws as well as our morality—to maximize profits for the company and its owners—partners, shareholders, Mom and Pop. Never mind that this mandate to maximize profits necessarily includes minimizing costs. Never mind that the US taxes its businesses at the highest rate in the world, and that these tax bills are significant costs.

Never mind that minimizing the tax bill is a necessary part of that fiduciary duty, and it must, then, include consideration of foreign tax environments—and tax inversions, the process of buying, or being bought by, companies in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates and then moving the company into that lower tax jurisdiction.

Mrs Clinton would…require[e] companies to pay US taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold….

The current “threshold” is current law that allows inversions so long as the American company’s shareholders will own less than 80% of the new, merged company. Clinton’s lower threshold is, carefully, not yet specified.

This is the sort of barrier to our economic freedom, the sort of increase in Big Government taxation, the sort of destruction of our individual liberties to which we can look forward if we get this Progressive Democrat for President.

This is only a precursor to additional barriers to free movement we can expect from this Progressive Democrat.

Government Interference

Posted on by
Reply

General Electric Co has pulled the plug on the agreed $3.3 billion sale of its appliance business to Sweden’s Electrolux AB, bowing to pressure from the US Justice Department which wanted to block the transaction on antitrust grounds.

DoJ’s sham beef was that the deal would likely—notice that: not definitely would—lead to

less competition, higher prices and fewer options for millions of Americans who buy major cooking appliances each year.

Let’s leave aside the fact that GE’s appliance business, like appliance businesses generally, is a low margin, slow growing enterprise and that these characteristics don’t lend themselves overmuch to monopolies or to declining competition. Indeed, competition must heat up even more for such enterprises to survive.

No, the important thing is that monopoly power, in and of itself, is not against the law, it does not violate antitrust law. Only the abuse of that power is illegal.

Might the sale have led to abuse? Sure. But that’s speculative. Under American law, speculation isn’t grounds for interference, only the actual commission of a law-breaking act can be sanctioned.

DoJ’s interference in this deal, this private enterprises’ voluntarily entered into exchange, to the point that it successfully blew up the pending agreement, is Big Government overreach. It’s prior restraint, and it stinks.

Language

Posted on by
Reply

Does Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speak the same language the rest of us Americans do? Does anyone on the Left?

Asked about the terms “radical Islamist” and “radical form of Islam,” she, like her Left constituents and supporters, says you can’t use those terms. On ABC‘s This Week Sunday, she said,

I don’t want to do that [use those terms] because, No. 1, it doesn’t do justice to the vast numbers of Muslims in our own country and around the world who are peaceful people[.]

In what way does it do anything to “vast numbers of Muslims…who are peaceful?” In the American version of English, those modifiers—by definition—limit the ones being discussed in those terms to a carefully restricted subset of Muslims. Those modifiers explicitly exclude “vast numbers of Muslims” from the characterization.

It seems part of the problem with trying to reach agreements with anyone from the Left is that they don’t even speak the same language. They appear to have napped through their grammar school lessons.

No Fly Lists and Guns

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama said in his Oval Office speech Sunday evening that it’s insane to let people on the DHS No Fly List have access to guns. Obama also said that it’s wrong to operate on the basis of suspicion and hate.

While folks on the No Fly list aren’t necessarily objects of hatred, they are targets of suspicion. But that’s all they are. They’ve done nothing, and they’ve not been convicted for anything—other than of being objects of suspicion. Stephen Hayes was on the No Fly list; he’s a target of suspicion solely because he’s an Evil Conservative and an Evil Journalist. DHS employees are on the No Fly list. They’re targets of suspicion because…? Then-Senator Ted Kennedy (D, MA) was on the No Fly list. Say, what?

What none of these suspicious persons have been through, though, is Due Process. Not being able to fly into the US does not block them from entering the US; it just inconveniences them: they have to travel via other means. Not being able to have access to firearms is more than an inconvenience, regardless of one’s view of gun control. That denial is a blanket denial of one’s access to one’s Constitutional rights, and that requires a due process proceeding first.

What’s insane is denial of due process, of violating the law, whenever that becomes inconvenient. What’s insane is operating on suspicion rather than the law. What’s insane is decrying operating on suspicion while operating on the suspicion of a government List.

Free Speech and AIs

Posted on by
4

Toni Massaro, Regents’ Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita at the University of Arizona College of Law, and Helen Norton, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, discuss whether Artificial Intelligences might ever gain free speech rights. After all, as Citizens United affirmed, lots of non-human entities have at least some aspects of a right to free speech.

Indeed, it is a question that warrants consideration: do only humans have full free speech rights, or do AIs, also; do sentient beings of any stripe have full free speech rights; and if the answer to either of the latter two is “Yes,” then what’s the threshold of intelligence beyond which such rights must be acknowledged (or granted: is our endowment of inalienable rights imbued by God in humans only, or in other beings, too?), and how do we measure that threshold?

Massaro and Norton, in their paper Siri-ously? Free Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence look into the question (absent any religious aspect) as it relates specifically to AIs. It’s a paper well worth the read, if only for the thought experiment aspect that is the authors’ purpose.

I’m interested in a particular part of their argument, though, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [emphasis in the original].

The idea becomes less preposterous, according to the scholars, when one focuses not on who or what is doing the speaking, but on who is doing the listening.

Such an approach, emphasizing “expression’s value to listeners” or the “listeners’ enlightenment,” yields “many similarities…between much computer speech and human speech that we already protect,” the professors say.

Listening is a hugely important aspect of our freedom of speech, no doubt. The right of the listener to choose for himself the speech to which he will listen or not listen—the right to assess for himself the value of the speech—is absolutely critical; without it there is no freedom of speech.

But.

The right to choose which speech to which to listen or not can only be derivative of the right to speak freely. After all, if the speech can be blocked in any way, or censored in any form, there can be nothing to which to listen, and so no choice of listening can exist. Within that, the value of the listened-to speech, and of the ignored speech, is in the mind of the speaker first and in the ear of the listener/ignorer second. There is no third. Government’s view, including court’s view, of that value never enters into it.

The authors dilute IMNSHO their argument to a large degree by basing a significant fraction of their argument on the value to a listener of that derivative aspect.