Tag Archives: political economy

Expanding Government

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News had a report about another move by Big Government to “guide” us for our own good.  It seems the EPA has a Green Book (called “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” commissioned in 2010 for $700 thousand, and published last August) that it wants to use sub rosa (EPA representatives were reluctant to discuss the principles espoused in this document in public) to

integrate sustainability “as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to be “providing guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.”

Or, in other words, how to use existing laws to new ends.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson insists that the EPA’s “sustainability” approach represents

“a new opportunity to show how environmentally protective and sustainable we can be,” and would affect “every aspect” of EPA’s work.

Using this approach, the EPA can become even more pre-emptive“anticipatory” in how it instructs our businesses in how they must conduct themselves.  Indeed, the study itself urges the EPA to change its already activist culture even further:

“create a new culture among all EPA employees,” and hire an array of new experts in order to bring the sustainability focus to every corner of the agency and its operations. Changes will move faster “as EPA’s intentions and goals in sustainability become clear to employees[.]”

So what’s the big deal here?  It’s in that “sustainability” bit that is the point of the study.  The Green Book says that sustainability is

gaining increasing recognition as a useful framework for addressing otherwise intractable problems. The framework can be applied at any scale of governance, in nearly any situation, and anywhere in the world.

“[A]ny scale of governance, in nearly any situation….”  This is as naked as it gets: the Green Book advises the EPA that, under the guise of sustainability, it can exercise even more control—through sustainability regulations—over our businesses.

By the way, sustainability itself remains carefully undefined.  The Green Book takes for a working definition the one carried in President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13514, “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy and Economic Performance:”

to create and maintain conditions, under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations.

This is a carefully generic definition that can be given any meaning at all, and so bent to any purpose at all.

We already see one goal of this Green Book, and of the EPA that bought it, as the EPA takes its advice in this “advance” in capability.

Environmental impact assessment tends to focus primarily on the projected environmental effects of a particular action and alternatives to that action[.]

But

[Sustainability impact assessment examines] the probable effects of a particular project or proposal on the social, environmental, and economic pillars of sustainability…[.]  The culture change being proposed here will require EPA to conduct an expanding number of assessments.

Plainly, all that’s being sustained here is Federal power.

Government “Largesse”

Posted on by
Reply

A remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher from her beginnings in British politics in the late ’40s or early ’50s comes to mind.  She said, in essence,

[I]f you do not provide [for a rainy day–or for any other purpose] you cannot be certain that anyone else will.

This truism would seem self-evident, but I’m going to expound on it a little, anyway.  In the end, “you” is not all of us, but each of us.  Government is what is all of us, acting in concert through the mechanism of representatives we elect for the purpose.

If we, individually, do not provide for our own future, but depend on government—all of us—to do so, then none of us will be capable of providing.  If none of us is providing for ourselves, then we will not have the resources to help any other who has not provided, or cannot provide.  Rely on government?  Government can’t provide for any of us without taking from at least some of us.  That taking is not different in its effect on us from our own conscious decision not to provide for ourselves: what must be taken is exactly that which we would have put by for ourselves.

There’s more to this, though, than just the pecuniary aspect, and that is the morality of relying on “anyone else” to provide.  Leaving the matter to government (for instance), rather than to “anyone else” means ultimately that we must have the government provide for us—we will have become dependent on government, rather than reliant on ourselves.   Worse, a habit of dependency will develop, and the dependents will lose their ability to provide for themselves.

This does not change when that dependency is on “anyone else” instead of on government; it remains dependency.  Of course this is different from an occasional hand up.  From the perspective of Thatcher’s “you,” each of us (but not all of us) is that “anyone else,” and it certainly is our individual duty to offer a hand up (not a handout) to “you” in an hour of need.  Just as it is the duty of “you” not to make asking for, or accepting, such hands up so habitual that they become handouts, and “you” become dependent.

More on Too Much Law

Posted on by
Reply

A quick note on how our government’s regulatory overreach is affecting even the EU’s banking system, courtesy of Spiegel On Line International.

It’s been noticed that American money is rapidly departing European banks, and one reason for this is fear for the safety of those banks and, from that, fear for our money in those banks.

There’s another reason for that concern, and the departure of American money, though.  American money is being kicked out of the European banks by those banks.  It seems that, due to stricter tax reporting requirements pushed through by the Obama administration and the Progressive Congress in 2010, EU banks are reluctant to accept or retain our business.  The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was passed in 2010, and it takes effect January 2013.  FATCA requires all foreign banks to identify and report all US citizens who have accounts greater than $50,000, all in an effort to clamp down on tax evasion.  If the banks refuse to comply, they face a punitive 30 per cent withholding tax on all payments from the US.  Never mind that under German (and many other nations’) laws, it’s illegal to give up much of the information FATCA demands.

It gets better.  FATCA also hits foreign banks that have investments in the US or that are part of an expanded affiliated group that includes e participating foreign financial institutions doing business in the US—even if those banks have no US customers.

DWPBank, which handles securities transactions for 1,600 German banks—the primary type of account that would be affected given that minimum account size—estimates the total cost of compliance in Germany alone to be as much as €10 billion ($13 billion).  A senior manager with JPMorgan Asset Management in Germany also notes that all the benefits, an estimated $8 billion in increased tax revenue over 10 years, accruing from this cost go entirely to the US.

Already, HypoVereinsbank has decided to stop many of its services for American customers as of 1 January 2012, while Duetsche Bank cancelled its accounts of its type last summer.  Commerzbank (already in trouble from the debt crisis, and at risk of being nationalized by the German government) is “considering a similar move.”  The cancellations aren’t limited to German financial institutions: HSBC, of Great Britain, will no longer service such large American accounts, and Credit Suisse, of Switzerland, has made the same decision.  The latter’s move, though, also could be related to US pressure on the Swiss government to alter Swiss banking laws to allow Swiss banks to report on US account holders.

Of course there’s another result to all this, also.  Americans in Europe may have trouble finding banks who want our business.