Tag Archives: political economy

A Free Speech Ruling

Posted on by
Reply

The Federal trial judge got this one right, even though the Arkansas law had been on the books for 35 years.  The question concerned whether the State could restrict political speech by robocall with the mechanism of banning political robocalls.  The same statute did not ban other political calls, only robocalls, and the judge called them on that logical conflict.

The statute is underinclusive. Banning calls made through an automated telephone system in connection with a political campaign cannot be justified by saying that the ban is needed to residential privacy and public safety when no limit is placed on other types of political calls that also may intrude on residential privacy or seize telephone lines.

There’s a larger question here, too, though.  Once we begin limiting political speech, where does it stop?  What’s the limiting principle?  What naturally limits the thing, without relying on government forbearance?  One such limit mentioned in the ruling concerns signs containing political speech.  The signs cannot be banned, but their placement can be restricted based on safety concerns (for instance, visually blocking views of crossing traffic at intersections).  Robocalls, irritating as they are, don’t present themselves as usefully limitable, given the importance of free political speech and (incumbent) government attempts to restrict it, other than an Arkansas averred

prevent[ion of] the seizure of phone lines, which could interfere with emergency calls being placed or received.

However, as the judge noted,

The Attorney General fails to explain why automated calls other than commercial calls and those made in connection with political campaigns—for example, calls encouraging individuals to contact a member of Congress regarding a bill or to attend a townhall meeting regarding a public issue—using automated dialing systems do not trample upon the state’s interests in residential privacy and public safety.

The State’s safety claim doesn’t hold water.

And so, again I ask, when it comes to government limiting speech, particularly political speech, where does it stop?  What’s the limiting principle?  Safety certainly can be one such limit, but Arkansas’ law doesn’t—didn’t—apply it.

The judge’s opinion can be seen here.

Progress

Posted on by
Reply

James Pethokoukis, at AEIdeas, recounted part of a response by Bill Gates to economist Robert Gordon’s view that we’re in a period of economic stagnation.  Gordon sees the period from 1870-1970 as a special century during which

Economic growth really picked up after glacial advancement since pretty much forever. This had never happened before. Big thanks here to electricity, the internal combustion engine, and public sanitation. Second, things haven’t been so special since.

Indeed,

We’ve had plenty of inventions since 1970 but it’s been focused on the narrow sphere of entertainment, information, and communications technology. …Those innovations are everything that we talk about today, but in perspective they’re just a small slice of what human beings care about.

Gates’ response was, essentially, “No, it’s not.  The digital revolution is much more than that.”

My own take on the matter, posted there, is reproduced in part here.  Gates said,

How buyers and sellers find each other, how we amass information, how we can create models to simulate things before building them, how scientists collaborate across continents, how we learn new things—all of this has changed dramatically thanks to digital innovation.

All of these things, though, only represent engineering improvements, they’re not fundamentally new things, or new energy sources to help produce newly conceived things, the way the outset of the industrial and scientific revolution generated fundamentally new things and the energy sources with which to produce them in useful quantities.

Useful quantities: that brings me to my next point, introduced by Gates further to his response to Gordon.

How do you calculate the value of millions of pages of free information at your fingertips?

That’s not so hard. What’s the value of all the millions of dollars someone has in his bank account? Or the value of all the hundreds—or tens—of dollars an ordinary man has in his bank account? The answer here is that those dollars have no value at all until they’re converted into something useful by spending them. So it is that all of those millions of pages of free information have no value until they’re turned into something useful. The difference between dollars and information, though, is that our brains can only process so much information at a time—even with computers to help.

However.  Gates added to his response to Gordon:

Implicit in Gordon’s analysis is that nearly all the big problems have been solved, and any improvements over the coming decades will be at the margins.

If I understand Gates’ disagreement here, I think he’s right. We haven’t solved all the big problems, only those that we conceive as problems. A man once said that if a thing has no solution, it’s not a problem, it’s an aspect of the universe in which we live. There’s a hint there.

I think the current economic stagnation—which in this context is a productivity/technological stagnation—is not the end, but an interruption during which we consolidate the progress we’ve made before we enter another period of explosive growth and development, another special century.  And the start of that century may not be so far off.  The pace of technology and productivity development has been enormously accelerated, so too has been intervening consolidation.  Those computers, at the least, have made us faster than printing presses and…telephones.

Flip-Flop or Copycat?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on international trade.

As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton helped negotiate the yet-to-be-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership and gave some 45 public speeches for TPP [TransPacific Partnership].

Then

…to fend off the Sanders challenge, she renounced the final TPP text in October 2015….

This isn’t new.  When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA, so did Hillary Clinton, and she repeated that in her memoir.  Then in her first Presidential campaign, she vowed to “renegotiate” NAFTA.

In that campaign, she assured her hoped-for union voters that she’d not conclude the sort of trade deals then in the offing with Cambodia and the Republic of Korea.  Once safely ensconced in the State Department, though, she put all of that Cabinet’s influence to work pushing for passage of exactly those deals (and tried to delete from her official State Department business personal email server NAFTA-related emails).

Here’s her chosen nominee, Senator Time Kaine (D, VA) on international trade, with the proposed TPP as his vehicle.

I am having discussions with a lot of groups around Virginia about the treaty itself. I see much in it to like.  I think it’s an upgrade of labor standards, I think it’s an upgrade of environmental standards. I think it’s an upgrade of intellectual property protections.

That was just prior to the Democratic Party Convention.  Here he is, now that he’s running for Vice President.

Kaine said he agreed with Clinton—who had helped negotiate the trade deal as secretary of state but now opposes as the Democratic presidential nominee—that the TPP did not meet certain standards on wages and national security.

Either way, this doesn’t predict a very stable administration, rather it suggests that Clinton and Kaine would change course with the winds of convenient politics.

Do We Really Need Four More Years?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s what nearly eight years of Progressivism, accomplished by President Barack Obama (D) and his Progressive-Democrat acolytes in the Democratic Party, have done.  As The Wall Street Journal put it:

  • largest stimulus spending bill in decades
  • Obamacare
  • nationalized the student-loan industry
  • turned the banks into public utilities answerable first to government

All of these have created the slowest recession recovery since WWII.  The nominally low unemployment rate that has been achieved is measured against the backdrop of the lowest labor participation rate in 40 years—in two generations.  Banks as government-managed public utilities, no longer responsive exclusive to the banks’ owners and creditors—which includes us individual savings and checking account holders?  That’s just another means for government to collect revenue.

Progressivism has been bypassing our republican democracy form of representative government for the last several years, too.  Obama has ruled by Executive diktat Executive Order, Executive Action, Department/Agency rulemaking to achieve

  • climate change
  • organizing

Then there’s foreign affairs.

  • deals with adversaries—the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, for instance, and acceptance of Russian partitions of Georgia and Ukraine
  • distanced us from our allies—denigrating Israel over their efforts to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, for instance
  • with Progressivism’s cynical budget maneuvering there’s less ability to support military spending—to the tune of defense spending falling to 3% of GDP and less—down from 4.6% those eight years ago

All of this is Progressivism’s pell-mell retreat from our responsibilities on the global stage, and that world is far more unstable and dangerous to us and to those friends and allies than it was eight years ago.

Then there’s Progressivism’s attitude toward us plebeian Americans.  They’ve plied the politics of identity to divide us by ideology, age, race, class, gender, and any other cleverly defined separation they could create, and then they’ve played these artificial distinctions (we used to be all Americans, after all, who happened to be of one gender or the other, have one skin color or another, one ethnic heritage or another) against each other in Progressives’ cynical effort to maximize their personal power.

Do we really need—can our nation really afford—four more years of the same?

Government’s Market Interference

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote about this matter just a bit ago.  Now DoJ has gone ahead and filed its lawsuits seeking to block the mergers between Anthem Inc and Cigna Corp and between Aetna Inc and Humana Inc.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s rationale for this is this:

If these mergers were to take place, the competition among these insurers that has pushed them to provide lower premiums, higher quality care and better benefits would be eliminated[.]

And

They would leave much of the multi-trillion dollar health insurance industry in the hands of three mammoth insurance companies, and restricting companies, and restricting competition in key markets[.]

The one is mere speculation, and the other is prior restraint.  It’s certainly true that the mergers would create very large companies and leave fewer of them in the market.  But to say that this must reduce competition is just a guessing game, especially since Lynch declined to say—as her predecessors have declined to say, and as economists cannot say—what the minimum number of enterprises must be in any industry for there to be competition.  Indeed, absent collusion, which is illegal, two companies are driven to compete with each other by the economic forces extant in a free market.

Never mind, either, that as Lynch knows full well, that what’s illegal in America, what’s illegal under our antitrust laws—and all that’s necessary to be illegal—is abuse of monopoly power, not the existence of it.  As with the rest of our laws in a free country, these companies must actually commit the misbehavior before they can be sanctioned for it.

On the other hand, Government does allow protected monopolies—Ma Bell before its court-ordered breakup is one example.  A protected monopoly is a monopoly that is explicitly protected by Government: the monopoly is allowed to exist, and it is overtly protected from competition, in return for which the monopoly agrees to be heavily regulated by Government, including the prices it’ll be allowed to charge and the services it’ll be allowed to provide.  Indeed, protected monopolies are textbook examples of regulatory capture—only two-sided: the monopoly and the regulators have captured each other.

Lynch’s action, though, is an abuse of our antitrust laws; it’s nothing more than the Democrats’ campaign of lawfare.  Given the nature of Obamacare, though, maybe this protected monopoly/regulatory mutual capture is this administration’s final goal for health insurance companies.  That would be both a further effort to nationalize our private companies and an example of this administration’s view that it can control the capture.

This sort of behavior, too, emphasizes that the coming election will have consequences, not only for the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, it’ll have consequences for the nation’s Department of Justice and the other Executive Branch Cabinets and Agencies (and for our lower courts).

All of this, in the end, is motivated in part by individual Progressive-Democrats’ grasping for personal gain.

It is, though, even more strongly motivated by Progressive-Democrats’ collective contempt for their Lessers, us poor, dumb, plebeian Americans.

[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.