Tag Archives: political economy

Government Diktat

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California style.  That state has passed a law.

The law requires a company to appoint one woman to its board of directors by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021 a five-member board would need to have two women, while boards with six or more directors would need three. The Legislature, always alert to possible micro-aggressions, defines female as “an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

(One wonders whether the law would be satisfied by a male Board member self-identifying as a woman for the purpose of Board-related activities.  [/snark])

The number of women selected for Board membership has much to do with the lack of women with actual qualifications for those positions.  Forcing quotas onto private enterprises won’t produce qualified women out of thin air.

The lack stems from two major sources (among others).  One is the way we teach our girls and young women throughout K-16.  Our “educators” generally don’t push them as hard or in the same direction as they push our boys and young men.  This is an example of the bigotry of low expectations.

The other major source is in our various corporate cultures.  Women don’t get the same support, encouragement, or kicks in the fannies to do better that men do, so they don’t develop, over the course of their careers, the qualifications needed for Board seats.

Along these lines, women employees don’t spend the same continuous time on their careers as do men: many women take significant time off from their careers to have and raise children.  As a nation, we still haven’t worked out a way around this difference in time commitment.  Paid parental leave might be a step in that direction, but even were it, it’s wholly inadequate.

This law does not address any of these.

“Trump is a symptom, not the cause”

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) said that in his Friday speech at the University of Illinois.  I agree with him, but not for the reason he might think.

President Donald Trump might have triggered our economic recovery with lower taxes and reduced regulation.  He might have begun restoring our nation’s position around the world with his firm rhetoric regarding responsibilities and his refusal to apologize—indeed, his willingness overtly to celebrate—American uniqueness and greatness.

But his election, and his performance in office, are symptoms of the malaise under which our nation labored during eight years of Obama’s economic failures, constant apologies for our nation’s historic successes around the globe, and timidity in enforcing even the most glibly offered red lines.

The Trump administration is the result of Americans’ disgruntlement with the dysfunctional policies of the prior administration.

Unitary Executive

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Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings last week on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, had an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that opened with this.

Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation.

He’s also accused of favoring a unitary Executive and thereby ceding dangerously broad power to the President.

What the accusers carefully ignore is that it’s Congress that has so broadly expanded the power of a unitary Executive, while eliding the fact that our Constitution’s Article II created the unitary Executive in the first place.  It is, after all, Congress that has created all of the Agencies and Cabinet Departments that are in the Executive Branch.  It is Congress that has delegated all the power to those facilities by ceding to them rule-making authority.  All the Executive can do is hire and fire the facilities’ management teams–the only check he has on an overreaching Congress and its abuse of power.

Nike

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Nike makes shoes, among other things.  It also has chosen to use Colin Kaepernick in its new Just Do It campaign.  You recall Kaepernick: ex-49er quarterback who’s the instigator and leader of the NFL players’ campaign of contempt for our national anthem and our flag and of insult for the generations of our veterans who’ve fought, been maimed, and died for our freedom, including these players’ right to be stupid and to engage in contemptible and insulting behavior.

But wait—aren’t the players protesting police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices?  That’s certainly their claim.  However, if their claim were accurate, they’d protest police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices instead of attacking our anthem, flag, and veterans.  They’d also go into the neighborhoods where these things are occurring and actively help the locals, as many of the players who aren’t behaving so contemptibly and insultingly are doing.

Further, even if that had been their message at the outset, it’s clear that their message has been not understood that way by much, if not most, of their audience.  They would, then, clarify by changing their message delivery in order to have their message better understood.  Instead, the players have continued their delivery unchanged in the slightest.  From that, it’s clear that either their message never was what they claimed it to be, and they’ve been attacking these symbols and defenders all along, or they’ve walked away from their message and now are simply engaged in a toddler’s ego trip of out-stubborning those who disagree with them.

The players know all of this; in particular, Kaepernick knows all of this; and Nike knows all of this.  Yet,

Nike has said it “opposes discrimination of any type and has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

Too bad that doesn’t apply to our anthem, our flag, or our veterans.

I’ve bought my last Nike product.  I’m Just Doing It.

Trust Us

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It seems that Alphabet and Mastercard have hooked up: Mastercard seems to have agreed to share its customers’ shopping habits with Alphabet’s Google in return for Google’s separately accumulated data on those same customers.  The subhead on Bloomberg‘s piece is instructive:

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

The hookup is this:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the US. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

And that Mastercard freely sold.

Who knew the deal had been done?  Almost nobody, especially including the owners (morally if not legally) of those data.

[M]ost of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Then this:

[T]he deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

Gee.  Ya think?

It also raises the broader privacy concern of how much personal that data primary collectors, like credit card companies, are busily peddling to the Googles of the world behind our backs.

A carefully anonymous Google spokeswoman offered this:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information.  We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.

Trust us.  Trust us both.

Sure.