Tag Archives: political economy

Let’s Increase Taxes

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…and the costs all of us must bear from that. But the real story is this…proposal…Hillary Clinton has dreamed up for her Presidential campaign.

The centerpiece idea would require drug makers to devote a sufficient portion of revenue to research and development. Those that don’t would risk losing federal support, such as research grants or an R&D tax credit.

Never mind that drug companies already spend 15%-20% on R&D. This fine businesswoman, who’s never run a company in her life and who was dead broke when she left the White House, says that’s not enough. Never mind, too, that she has studiously avoided saying how much is enough.

This is just another Democrat who hasn’t met a tax she didn’t like. This is just another Democrat who thinks Big Government knows more about running a business than the businessmen, who have to operate in a competitive environment or fail.

Power Grab

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Here’s one worthy even of President Barack Obama’s legendary reach.

France’s data-protection regulator on Monday rejected Google Inc’s appeal of its order to expand Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to Google’s websites world-wide….

The French presume to extend their legal reach beyond their legal reach—beyond their borders.

France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe’s right to be forgotten to “all domain names” of the search engine, including google.com—or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Here is France saying, “Do what we tell you to do anywhere you are in the world, or we will break you.”

Rank extortion.

It’ll be interesting—and instructive—to see whether Google management has the moral courage and the integrity to say, “Non.”

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….