Tag Archives: political economy

The New Pen and Phone

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) infamously bragged that he had a pen and a phone available if Congress wouldn’t do his bidding. And he proceeded to use them to reign via diktat—diktats often overruled in court (and remember, this was before former President Donald Trump (R) was able to restore textualist sanity and restrain judicial activism).

Behold, the President Joe Biden (D) version of the pen and phone tool for ruling, rather than governing: the permanent “public health emergency.”

The Biden Administration claims the declaration provides critical regulatory flexibility.

You bet it does.

Rent Control vs Market Competition

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Here’s an example of the failure of no competition in affordable housing, this one in St Paul, MN. The residents of St Paul last November voted to cap rent increases at 3% per year, forever, with no exceptions.

Mercatus Center [Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity project] Salim Furth compared St Paul building permits in the five months after passage of rent control with the average of the same months in the three years prior [i.e., immediately preceding the Wuhan Virus situation onset]. By that metric, St Paul’s multifamily permitting is…down 55%.

And

City data shows St Paul’s building permit revenue from January to May 2022 was $3.699 million, down from an average of $4.176 million from 2018 to 2021.

The claimed purpose was to protect affordable housing availability.

However.

St Paul’s rent control creates an incentive for developers to build luxury apartments to recoup their construction costs. But builders are also opting to leave St Paul. Citing rent control, investors recently paused development on the 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project. Its builders would have set aside 20% of units for affordable housing, with 10% going to those earning 30% or less of area median income.

The only ones who wouldn’t have predicted this outcome, who don’t understand its inevitability, are those who can’t stand the thought of individuals or private businesses making their own decisions, or free markets making their own aggregated decisions, independently of the limits and requirements set by Know Betters.

Scofflaw Blue States

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And guess who gets to pick up the tab. You get three, and the first two don’t count. Here are the scofflaws:

At least four Democratic-led states with budget surpluses this year have chosen not to fully repay the federal government for money borrowed to fund unemployment benefits, a move that will impose increased charges on businesses to help make up the difference.
California, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York have directed surplus funds to social programs and taxpayer rebates, among other causes, leaving unpaid debts to the federal government ranging from tens of millions of dollars to more than $15 billion.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party at the State level treating loans as grants. Of course, that’s entirely consistent with Party’s attitude toward student loans, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Ken Pokalsky, Business Council of New York State Vice President:

We’re going to be at elevated levels of taxes for a decade[.]

Yep.

Maybe Time to Start Holding them Liable

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The heads of the FBI and of Great Britain’s MI5 have a warning for American and British businesses regarding

the threats posed by Chinese espionage, especially spying aimed at stealing Western technology companies’ intellectual property.
In a rare joint appearance on Wednesday at the headquarters of MI5, Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Ken McCallum, Director-General of MI5, urged executives not to underestimate the scale and sophistication of Beijing’s campaign.
“The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market,” Mr Wray told the audience of business people. “They’re set on using every tool at their disposal to do it.”

Too much of that information aggregates to national security levels, and the lackadaisical protection of it threatens our security indirectly via the degradation of our two nations’ economic capabilities relative to the People’s Republic of China and directly through exposing our defense information to theft. That means business laxness—outright laziness in too many cases—cannot be excused with the companies involved being left simply to take their lumps.

Wray emphasized the matter as it concerns the US.

We want to send the clearest signal we can on a massive shared challenge—China…if we are to protect our economies, our institutions, and our democratic values.

To do that, business executives—particularly CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs, and their deputies—need to do their part and start taking seriously their own obligations to protect company secrets and other proprietary information, along with information of a national security kind.

It may be, then, that business executives need to start being held personally liable, civilly and criminally, for security breaches that allow hackers to steal their companies’ information. The businesses that employ them may need, as legal persons, to be held similarly liable for such breaches.

Relations with the People’s Republic of China

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Maurice Greenberg, Chairman and CEO of CV Starr & Co, an insurance and investment company with subsidiaries domiciled in the PRC and Hong Kong, said in his Wall Street Journal Wednesday op-ed that he wants the US to “rebuild relations” with the People’s Republic of China.

It is in our national interest, now more than ever, to do all we can to improve U.S.-China relations.

And

The US and China have a long history of collaboration dating to before World War II. When the People’s Republic of China reopened to the world, the US extended favorable trade terms to foster China’s economic growth….

What Greenberg ignored is that the People’s Republic of China has no relation to the pre-World War II China beyond sitting in the same geography. What he also ignored is that since the PRC “opened” and we extended favorable trade terms, the PRC has been running a campaign of stealing our intellectual property through outright theft, hacking, and coerced transfers as a condition of doing business within the PRC. That nation also has been running a parallel campaign, using the same techniques, to steal our national defense and foreign policy secrets.

Frank talks can build trust relationships with the PRC? No, the only thing we can trust of what the PRC’s government men say is their commitment to replace us on the world stage and to subordinate us to them.

We don’t to rebuild relations with the PRC. Let the PRC want to build, from the beginning, relations with us.