Tag Archives: political economy

A Two-Faced Move

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PRC President Xi Jinping is moving to revive Confucius and his philosophical tradition. Xi wants to “inoculate Chinese people against the spread of Western political ideals of individual freedom and democracy.” He’s “seeking a fresh source of legitimacy by reinventing the party as inheritor and savior of a 5,000-year-old civilization.”

Renew reverence for authority—with the Communist Party of China the authority.

And, tellingly, one of Xi Jinping’s favorite Confucius sayings is this:

No calamity greater than to be discontented with one’s lot; no fault greater than the wish to be getting.

Be content. Party will give you what you need. You don’t need any more than that.

More Big Government Intrusion Efforts

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The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement director, Andrew Ceresney, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the warrant requirement required by federal law is “impeding the ability of the SEC and other civil law enforcement agencies to investigate and uncover financial fraud.”

This, carefully, from an unelected mucky-muck of an unelected—and so unbeholden and unresponsive to us mere Americans—agency of the Federal government. The 4th Amendment’s requirement for warrants before government may conduct searches of private holdings is in the way of Big Government snooping, and so a way around that has gotta be found.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department agrees with the SEC. Elana Tyrangiel, the Office of Legal Policy, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, said this in the same hearing with an absolutely straight face:

Personal privacy is critically important to all Americans—including those of us who serve in the government. The Department remains concerned, however, about the effect a blanket warrant requirement would have on its civil operations…. Lacking warrant authority, civil investigators enforcing civil rights, environmental, antitrust, and a host of other laws would be left unable to obtain stored communications content from providers.

Never mind that if those civil investigators can’t even make a probable cause case in front of a judge known to those investigators to grant warrants easily—and there are potsful of easy judges—they don’t have a case to investigate.

Inquiring government minds want to know. That’s good enough. No government official would ever abuse that….

The EU Wants a New International Trade Court

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The proposal is described in Tom Fairless’ piece in The Wall Street Journal. I want to focus on a couple of comments in that article, though.

Campaigners [for the proposed new trade settlement court] claim that the current system constrains governments and leaves policy makers vulnerable to legal proceedings from overseas investors.

Kind of like those impertinent American companies do with the US government.

And

[O]pponents [of the existing trade settlement system] warn that large US companies could use the dispute-resolution mechanism to challenge European laws and regulations on labor, food and the environment.

As a matter of principle, what’s the downside of either of these?

Only Big Government proponents fear government being held to account by its…lessers.

The Democrat in the Socialist

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Or is it the other way around? At any rate, here’s the Bernie’s Bill for what he wants his fellow Democrats to help him do once he’s elected President.

His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American….

He wants, also, $1.2 trillion to expand Social Security and its benefit payouts, so as to increase the dependence of Americans on government for our well-being.

He wants $750 billion for tuition-free public schools and easier “refinancing” of student debt. With the cynicism typical of today’s Democrats, he knows full well the tuition won’t be free, it’ll be paid for by the rest of us in higher taxes and greater Federal debt—which is higher taxes tomorrow. What he carefully elides, too, is that his easier “refinancing” amounts to converting student debt to taxpayer-funded grants. Behind our backs.

And on, and on.

The full Bernie’s Bill runs to $18 trillion over the next 10 years, a sum for which he’ll pay over those same 10 years with tax increases of $6.5 trillion and…debt: an additional $11.5 trillion in higher taxes later on.

The bottom line, and the carefully shrunken fine print, of all this is the enormous expansion of the Federal government. This is the Democratic Party. This is the Progressive Party of Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama…and Bernie Sanders. The Party holds that the

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

We need our betters, these Democrats, these Obama/Clinton/Progressives, to tell us what we must do, what our moral and intellectual responsibilities are. And as Clinton herself put it, they’re going to take things away from us on behalf of their common good.