Tag Archives: political economy

A Judicial Error

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The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the

setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”

And then,

To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.

That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.

With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.

The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.

An Efficient Labor Market

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A writer, published in Wall Street Journal‘s Letters, responded to the idea that emphasis on education credentials over actual experience averred that the emphasis isn’t at all misplaced.

It’s more likely that there is a limited number of high-wage jobs available and that the market has efficiently set the wage based on the supply/demand curves.

This is a remarkably ill-informed claim, assuming as it does that we actually have an efficient market in labor.

Such a market cannot exist, though, in an environment where unions have monopoly power over labor in the industries in which they operate, nor can it exist in an economy with such widespread minimum wage mandates.

Since both of those exist, we are even farther from an efficient market for labor.

Becoming Happy

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It’s what Thomas Jefferson said a while ago:

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

If the people become happy, though, they—we—would have little need for so large a government. And that would put a lot of bureaucrats, and most importantly, politicians out of business.

That is what today’s Progressive-Democrats and too many establishment Republicans fear, even above fearing failing our nation—being unnecessary.

Statehood for DC?

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That’s the House Progressive-Democrats’ plan. They voted on the thing last Friday.

One of the rationalizations for the move is this, from the District of Columbia’s “shadow senator” Paul Strauss:

DC [he’s cited as saying], created in July 1790, pays more federal taxes than any other non-voting territory and does not receive proportional services for their population, which is larger than those of Wyoming and Vermont.
“We are essentially a donor state,” he said.

That’s not an argument for statehood, though. It’s an argument for ending the transfers of citizens’ and their business’ tax monies from one State/territory/District to another other than in times of regional emergency.

What’s being carefully avoided in the discussion is the fact that this new State, were it to come to pass, would provide two Progressive-Democrat Senators to the Senate—and that’s why it’s Progressive-Democrats who are making the push. The same problem would exist were DC just as partisan, but Republican, and Republicans were making the push, and the solution would be just as invalid.

To answer James’ Madison’s Federalist 43 concerns about a State housing the Federal government, Strauss says this new State would exclude the Federal government’s facilities—just surround them entirely:

…Capitol, White House, and other federal buildings would remain in its own neutral area, with only the surrounding area being part of the new state….

Nah. If the politicians are serious about the region simply needing the benefits of statehood, that “surrounding area” should be returned to Maryland and Virginia, from which they were carved in the first place in order to form the District.

There’s no need to create a new State.

Victory for Competitive Free Market Pricing

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So far, hospitals will be required to publish the prices they negotiate with their insurers. This will facilitate the public’s ability to comparison shop for hospital procedures and services so as to drive down costs to the public through competition.

The American Hospital Association had sued in Federal court to block a new Trump administration rule that required such publication, but the judge presiding, Carl Nichols, granted the government’s motion for summary dismissal.

Aside from withstanding the inevitable sequence of appeals, a significant part of what’s left, now, is a requirement for hospitals to publish their success rates for various types of procedure and service.