Tag Archives: government

Misallocation of Resources

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…driven by Big Government.

JP Morgan Chase & Co said Tuesday it will cut more jobs at bank branches and its mortgage unit this year than previously planned, as the largest US lender adjusts to slowing home-loan demand and customers’ growing preference to bank online.

That’s one aspect of the restructuring.  JPM says they’ll lose some 8,000 employees from its branches and its mortgage unit.  However, they’re looking to increase their “controls staff” by some 3,000.  A company’s controls staff are the folks dedicated to ensuring company compliance with government laws and regulations, as well as with its own internal rules.

Are the two related?  Not directly, although burgeoning Federal rules are hampering the housing industry and mortgage lending, generally.  Yet the fact remains,

The new figures show…a continued buildup in the bank’s staffing levels dedicated to dealing with regulators and legal issues.

An increase of 3,000 for its controls staff out of a total company employment of some 260,000 (net of those cuts) might not seem like much, but its Controls section is much smaller, and this is a significant (re)allocation of its employment emphasis.

The problem is, compliance isn’t productivity.  Compliance employees don’t increase the amount of product—or improve competition for product sales—in an economy.  All they can do is cost money to appease government.

A Progressive Government’s Free Speech

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Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Brian Schatz (D, HI) are gathering colleagues’ signatures on a letter to the networks asserting that they’re ignoring global warming.

It is beyond my comprehension that you have ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, that their Sunday shows have discussed climate change in 2012, collectively, for all of eight minutes….

And

Sunday news shows are obviously important because they talk to millions of people, but they go beyond that by helping to define what the establishment considers to be important and what is often discussed during the rest of the week.

What [the networks] are saying is, climate change is a non-important issue, it is an irrelevant issue, and yet the scientific community tells us that it is the greatest crisis facing this planet….

By God, you’ll talk about what Big Government wants you to talk about, and you’ll talk about it when we want you to.  Or you’ll rue the day….

It Doesn’t Wash

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The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

Such a national license-plate recognition database, ostensibly, would “help catch fugitive illegal immigrants.”  But once in existence, to what use would (not might) government put that database later?  Can you say NSA, boys and girls?  The danger is illustrated clearly, if unintentionally, by David Roberts, International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Technology Center Senior Program Manager:

We’d like to be able to keep the data as long as possible, because it does provide a rich and enduring data set for investigations down the line.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation understands (see the first link) the danger of Roberts’ goal:

Ultimately, you’re creating a national database of location information.  When all that data is compiled and aggregated, you can track somebody as they’re going through their life.

Such an open-ended dragnet of no one in particular, but simply of all of us, for vague, undefined future purposes in not consistent with individual liberty—or responsibility.

Even though the courts have ruled on “presumption of privacy,” they’ve gotten it wrong, basing their “assumption” on a measure of mindreading that simply doesn’t exist in our species.  The fact that the loud, vociferous, even zealous, hue and cry over evasions of privacy—real or perceived—even exists demonstrates that there is a very strong presumption of privacy held by each of us, even as we move about in public.

Indeed, the logic is flawed, also.  The fact that what we do is readily apparent to our fellow citizens as we wander the mall, walk the sidewalks, talk on our phones, drive on our streets, etc, is in no way an agreement the government can track our movements, much less create dossiers on each of us as we engage in these activities in the view of, or in concert with, our fellow citizens.

The government is not our fellow citizen; it is our political employee.  Even so, it has far too much power to be trusted with watching the things we let our fellow citizens see us do without a court’s oversight, without, for instance, a specific warrant for which a specific probable cause concerning a specific individual among us must first be demonstrated and sworn to by the government official desiring to investigate one of us.

The relationship between us—or any one of us—and government is not at all symmetrical, and there is very little reciprocity involved.  Arguments supporting such government activities as tracking of our out-of-home movements assume, erroneously, exactly that symmetry.

There’s no doubt that such a…tool…could achieve much good.  However, the good achieved is through convenience to government, not through a fundamental change in capabilities for hunting down specific bad guys.  The dangers such a tool represents to individual liberty and responsibility—to what it means to be an American—far outweigh the benefits of that convenience.

Update: Now HHS Undersecretary Jeh Johnson is saying the idea of having a private company develop a national database of our license plates has been canceled.  So, where are we?  Is the idea done?  Or is it being brought inside HHS, to be pursued sub rosa?

And why is the Undersecretary making this statement?  Where are the HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius and her boss, President Barack Obama?

Progressive Gun Rights

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…are what government says they are.  Last week, though, the 9th Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, struck down a San Diego County, California law that asserted exactly that.  This law

requir[ed] residents to show a “pressing need” in order to get a permit to carry weapons in public.

However,

The judges found that in order to receive a permit, a person need only show a desire to defend himself outside the home.

Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, writing for the court, clearly does understand the situation.  Addressing three other Appellate Court rulings upholding public carry restrictions (a fourth Appellate Court struck such restrictions), he wrote

they misapprehend both the nature of the Second Amendment right and the implications of state laws that prevent the majority of responsible, law-abiding citizens from carrying in public for lawful self-defense reasons.

Jon Lowy, Director, Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, demurred, however:

Neither history nor precedent supports this aberrant, split decision that concocts a dangerous right to carry hidden handguns in public places to people whom law enforcement has determined…have no good cause or qualifications to do so.

Rights are what a Progressive government says they are, according to this Progressive.

No, Mr Lowry.  You clearly do not understand inalienable rights, nor our Constitution.  The right to life is inalienable, and it carries with it the inalienable right to self-defense.  Neither are “concocted rights.”  These rights, moreover, carry within them the right to possess the means with which to carry out that defense.  Everywhere.  These inalienable rights are not at all limited to places convenient to government.  Full Stop.

Moreover, the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The binding document, within which our governments—at all levels—must operate, has said all there is to say on our right to keep and bear arms.  Especially in public.  Governments have very little at all to add regarding “good cause or qualifications.”  Full Stop.

Freedom of Speech

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The House Ways and Means Committee voted—on party lines—to move to the full House for debate (and passage) a bill that would delay Treasury’s proposed regulations that would “limit the political activities of so-called social welfare groups.”  These regulations are targeted at 501(c)(4) groups and written in a way that will affect conservative groups more than liberal groups.

That’s not what interests me, though.  What does interest me is a Democratic Party Congressman’s remark decrying the bill.  Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr (D, NJ), who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, said,

It is about disclosure.  Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it say you have the right to say anything you want—and also not pay any taxes.

There are a couple of things wrong in this short statement….

Actually, there is such a right, and it’s not just in the Bill of Rights, but in the Constitution as a whole.  Our Constitution is a document that explicitly limits the Federal government to a short list of permitted activities and powers with which to carry out those activities: the 18 clauses of Article I, Section 8, and the powers enumerated in Articles II and III are the sum total of what the Federal government can do.  Nowhere in there is there any tying of political speech to the payment of taxes.  An American citizen has no obligation whatsoever to pay a tax to the Federal government in order to receive permission to speak publicly.

Moreover, what rights American citizens do have under this Constitution, especially in relation to the powers of the Federal government, were clearly laid out in The Federalist [emphasis added]

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.  Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.  The former will be exercised principally on external objects…with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.  The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people….

and in the 9th and 10th articles of the Bill of Rights which Pascrell seems not to have read:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

and in the 1st article of the apparently unread Bill of Rights, which says this, in part:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….

Notice that: nowhere in there is speech tied to the payment of a tax.  Quite the opposite.  Speech cannot be abridged in any way, and taxes exist primarily to fund the government’s ability to engage in its outward looking authorizations.  In particular, taxes cannot be used to regulate—to abridge—speech.

To say to an organization, “If you want excusal from paying taxes, you must engage primarily in these kinds of activities” is entirely legitimate.  To say to that same organization, however, “If you want excusal from paying taxes, you may not speak of these things which we will identify for you,” is exactly that abridgment.  This is, nakedly, a tax on speech.

Then there’s this: “It is about disclosure.”  No, Congressman, it isn’t.  The Federal government has no legitimate interest in who says what in the political arena.  The articles in The Federalist were, every one, written by Publius, even though the authors in fact were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.  Anonymity is, in fact, a major protection for a speaker against a government that might presume to object to that speech and seek to act against the speaker—by, for instance, demanding a tax payment as a condition of being allowed to speak.

A propos this whole free speech limitation that the Democrats want to impose on us is this statement with which “Publius” opened The Federalist:

It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.

This is a typical Democrat’s lack of understanding of our Constitution.