Tag Archives: political economy

Dominate

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Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has what should be a resounding warning of the threat to our freedom represented by the People’s Republic of China in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.

Beijing intends to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.

With particular reference to the US, dominate is a euphemism. The PRC intends political domination, also (as the example Ratcliffe supplies involving PRC pressure on an American Congressman illustrates), all of which is to say they intend to conquer the US, whether it formally occupies us or not.

The PRC already is dictating policy to nominally American entertainment and news companies, and it has gotten companies like Alphabet to refuse to do business with our Defense establishment in critical areas like artificial intelligence while enthusiastically doing business with the PRC government on…artificial intelligence.

The PRC has gotten Alphabet to censure search results in the PRC and Facebook and Twitter to censure communications in the PRC while getting Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter to enthusiastically censure American citizens’ communications here in the US.

The PRC’s Confucius Centers at our colleges and universities actively indoctrinate students into the wonders of PRC communism while threatening those institutions’ management teams with removal of significant funding if they dare interfere.

This all is prior to and supportive of Ratcliffe’s characterization of the PRC economic war against us as rob, replicate, and replace.

This is a struggle for the United States’ existence as an independent polity.

Unfortunately, dangerously, with Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s overt friendliness with the PRC and his disdain for the threat—they’re not a patch on our jeans, guys, and China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…. They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us—it’s not at all certain that Biden would take Ratcliffe’s warning at all seriously, were he to be inaugurated.

And that’s not including his son Hunter’s…cozy relationship…with members of the PRC government.

Exodus

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The California exodus, including Silicon Valley, seems to be gathering steam. Now Hewlett Packard Enterprise, one of the founding members of Silicon Valley, is decamping for another State, in its case, to Texas. It seems the going out from Silicon Valley also is gathering steam.

HPE disclosed its plan to relocate as it posted fourth-quarter earnings after a difficult year that generated a full-year loss, highlighting its need to lower costs.

And

HPE said it would see cost savings primarily because of cheaper real estate in Texas. Hiring is also generally cheaper and less competitive than in California.

Pop quiz:

Which party has been in charge of California the last several years? You get three guesses.

The first two guesses don’t count.

NASDAQ is in the Quota Business

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The stock exchange has proposed a rule—and it’s actually serious about it, if you can imagine that—regarding business governance that must be satisfied if a business is to be considered by the Know Betters of the exchange fit for listing on its exchange.

The second largest exchange in the world has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to impose a quota system on the boards of its listed companies. The new rule would mandate that corporate boards have a minimum of one woman director and one who is a minority or LGBTQ.

So: a black lesbian–a three-fer.

It would be not just an idiotic rule, it would be immoral. It also would be coarsely unfair to the board member. Did she get the job because she was qualified, or did she get it because she filled three squares? She’d always be faced with that stigma.

It’s also a naked interference in the way a business governs itself, which is far outside a stock exchange’s DOC.

Maybe it’s time for NASDAQ’s several hundred companies to take themselves off the exchange.

Alternatively…

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President Donald Trump, recall, is moving to reclassify Federal senior-level civil service employees into a new category (Schedule F for those following along) that would facilitate their hiring and firing outside the existing Federal employment rules that generally serve to keep those employees on the job regardless of their performance quality. That protection tends to obviate the hiring part by reducing the number and availability of slots into which to hire: they’re already (and still) occupied.

That last—ability to hire—is little talked about, as the focus, especially by public unions, has been on job protection rather than job performance.

I said all that to point out all this. One of the beefs about making it easier to fire senior civil servants is this:

Without the existing protections, civil servants in policy-making roles could be replaced by less experienced and knowledgeable staff who more closely subscribe to the administration’s political goals, public-employee advocates said.

What these self-serving advocates omit to say is that, alternatively, civil servants in policy-making roles could be replaced by just as experienced and just as knowledgeable, if not more so, staff. The new staff’s experience, too, would necessarily be broader, as they’d be coming in from outside instead of continuing the hot house echo room (not to mix metaphors or anything) mind set resulting from an extended career buried in the civil service. That increased breadth of experience is dispositive.

Even more dispositive, though, is that more closely subscribe to the administration’s political goals part. Federal employees exist to carry out the administration’s policies and goals, not their own. If they can’t keep up with changing administrations, or choose not to, they’re unfit for continuation.

Full stop.

Oh, and here’s a hint on the breadth of the problem that wants correction [emphasis added]:

The Office of Management and Budget, which played a lead role in crafting the [reclassification] order, submitted its own preliminary list last week, recommending that 425 positions at the office—more than 80% of the entire staff—be categorized as Schedule F[.]

Foreign Taxation

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Various nations insist on taxing corporations that provide digital services—imposing a “digital services tax”—to ensure, those nations are pleased to claim and as most clearly articulated by Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, that

everyone pays their fair share

The Canadian government has been explicit in another direction, also: Canada will act unilaterally if an international taxing regime isn’t worked out by the OECD quickly enough to suit them.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has said he’ll demand a European Union response if the US goes ahead with our impertinent objection to the French government’s decision to tax those same digital service-providing corporations.

There are three problems with this insistence.

One is—let’s be clear—those corporations providing digital services are almost exclusively American companies—Alphabet, Facebook, and so on. European nations and Canada (and Indonesia) don’t want to compete economically in the digital services industry, for all that they’re jealous of American success. Rather than repeating that success for themselves, they want, in the finest socialist tradition, to cap our success: they’re implementing mercantilist, protectionist taxes against us.

The second problem is that these nations refuse to identify what “fair share” is, and they refuse to say what their limiting principle is regarding that claimed fair share. That refusal makes clear that their position is a deliberately open-ended one: “fair share” always will be “more,” and the limit of their principle is “all of it.”

The third problem is these nations’ naked assault on American sovereignty. Using the OECD as their tool, these nations are demanding that American domestic taxing laws be submitted to international approval and control.

Each of these alone is a contemptible disguise of those nations’ refusal to compete, whether economically, politically, or morally. Any combination of them is…unacceptable.

The Biden administration will be inviting national disaster if it accedes to any of these.