Tag Archives: politics

A Free Speech Ruling

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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.

Another Out of Control Agency

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…that’s overcome with its own self-importance.  I’ve written before about how the Securities and Exchange System abuses its own system of in-house judges for SEC purposes rather than for the public’s interest.

The Federal Trade Commission is another such agency that’s showing it’s outlived its usefulness and for the same reason.  In 2008, LabMD was “found” to have inadvertently exposed a file containing personally identifiable patient information.  I write “found” because the company that “found” the exposure then tried to use their discovery to peddle its data security services to LabMD.  The FTC brought a case against LabMD over the exposure, but last year an FTC in-house judge ruled against the FTC and tossed the case.

That judge, D Michael Chapell, tossed the FTC’s case last year because the commission could not identify any consumers who’d been harmed by LabMD’s allegedly weak security practices. Because no one had been harmed in the seven years since the patient file was exposed, it was unlikely that anyone would be harmed in the future, Judge Chappell concluded.

Wrong answer, Judge.

The FTC, which has the authority to review the rulings issued by its administrative court, said Friday the judge used an incorrect legal standard that was too stringent.

The ruling, being inconvenient to the FTC’s narrative, was rejected out of hand.

Here is the usefulness of an in-house system of judges.

Progress

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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.

The Beginning

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…of another whitewash?  The IRS says it wants to look into claims of “pay to play” requirements perpetrated by the Clinton Foundation.

It’s an interestingly timed investigation.  Absolution of the Clinton Foundation could easily come this fall, in time to influence the election in November.

Commissioner John Koskinen wrote in a July 22 letter to Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn [R, TN] that the issue has been “forwarded” to the IRS “Exempt Organizations Examinations” program in Dallas.

Why now, I ask again.  The IRS has known about these allegations for a long time.  Even The New York Times has been talking about this matter for some time.

Because We Just Don’t Understand

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But our Betters do.  No less a light than House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) says so, so it must be so.

I think that, so many times, white—non-college-educated white males have voted Republican. They voted against their own economic interests because of guns, because of gays, and because of God, the three G’s, God being the woman’s right to choose[.]

Because it’s not in our interest—not in the interest of any American, but hey: this Democrat is playing the race card—to insist on our right to keep and bear even as Democrats confirm the need with their constant attempts to disarm us.

Because it isn’t possible to disagree with gays on marriage while respecting—actively moving to protect—the freedoms of all individual Americans, including whatever group Democrats want to carve out and divide from other Americans with their identity politics.

Because God doesn’t want us to protect babies as well as women, but only those groups of human beings whom Democrats single out as appropriate for God’s protection.

Elections have consequences, and here’s one from the last election in California.