Tag Archives: politics

Anybody Else

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Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton thinks President Donald Trump should have been—would have been—indicted on the basis of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were he not President.

I think there’s enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted[.]

On the other hand, given the case that then-FBI Director James Comey laid out regarding Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents via her private, uncontrolled, and unprotected email server; her forwarding classified material via her unsecured emails; and her destruction of 30,000 pieces of evidence emails, she should have been indicted.

But then that was Comey, and that was Comey’s then-boss, ex-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s (D) secretive meeting with Clinton’s husband, ex-President Bill Clinton (D) on the latter’s airplane.

Anybody else who had engaged in those acts, or been fronted for in that way, would certainly have gone to trial.

Monopolies

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The FCC thinks it has a problem with the pending T-Mobile-Sprint merger, worrying that such a thing would anti-competitive and lead to rising prices for consumers.  The WSJ‘s editorial board demurs from the FCC’s attitude.

But greater economies of scale in industries with high fixed costs can create efficiencies that benefit consumers. DOJ’s position should evolve as markets and technology have.

Indeed, and the FCC’s regulators presently are illustrating another problem with government intervention in the market, whether by Republican or Progressive-Democrat regulators. The FCC’s regulators’ worries are purely speculative, not realized fact.

It’s also true that the converse—a particular merger leading to increased competition and lower prices—is just as speculative.

That’s the problem, though. Our anti-trust laws bar abuse of monopoly power, not the possession of it, and those laws have the mechanisms for enforcing and taking corrective, including punitive, action against companies that do abuse their monopoly power.

The right answer here is for government to get out of the way of a purely business decision made in a free market, even though it should watch carefully to ensure that abuse does not occur or is corrected should it occur.  Let the market do the speculation in the meantime.

Speculative intervention in the present case is solely in the mindsets of regulators.

Computers and Telephones

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Call me Luddite.  A short time ago, Samsung decided to delay the rollout of its foldable cell phone for a month.  I won’t miss it.

My beef isn’t the growing pains associated with the device; all of those are just Samsung’s hurried and botched release before the thing was ready for prime time.  My beef is with the price and capability of the thing, stipulating that Samsung will solve those rollout problems.

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold will set you back two grand for a midget tablet’s display that’s part of a pocket calculator of limited calculational capability that also runs an app for making telephone calls.  Huawei is planning a fall rollout of a slightly larger and much more expensive foldable cell—theirs will run $2,600.

Jeez.

For that kind of money, I can get a desktop or a laptop, a real computer that can do actual computing.  That real computer includes a display that’s large enough that I can see actual image details, that makes reading material much easier on the eye, and that can hold a usefully-sized spreadsheet or document that I’m reading or writing.  I had an Osborne II, back in those early days, on which I had to scroll around left-to-right and up-and-down in order to see the rest of the spreadsheet or document.  I don’t need to repeat that today.  PCs and laptops also can do the calculations associated with those sheets and docs, and do them rapidly—neither of which an expensive pocket calculator can do.

After all, my work depends on actual interaction with my computer; I’m not just consuming what passes for entertainment, or games, or…news…these days.

Feel like scrolling your social media accounts or flipping through the day’s doings while sitting on the subway or in your car?  You don’t need to drop a couple of stacks to do that; an “ordinary” cell phone will handle that just fine.  But don’t do any of that if you’re the driver in your car.

Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

Economic Performance

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…and one Progressive-Democrat’s tax proposal.  Although, the fact is that these effects aren’t unique to Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, NM): the trend of effects are the outcomes of all the Progressive-Democratic Party’s proposals, differing only in detail.

Warren’s particular proposal is to tax business profits above $100 million at 7%.  Here are some outcomes of such a thing, according to the Tax Foundation, with the FoxBusiness cited.  A tax like this would

  • reduce incentives to invest, so GDP would shrink by ~1.9% over the long-term
  • reduce a firm’s capital by 3.3%
  • reduce wages by about 1.5%
  • eliminate as many as 454,000 full-time jobs
  • reduce after-tax income across the entire economy by 0.93%, with the biggest reductions on the top 1% of taxpayers
  • considering that shrinkage of our economy, after-tax income reduction could be an even larger 2.16%

But, hey, it gets after that hated 1%, so it’s all good.

This is of a piece with all Progressive-Democrat tax ideas, based as they so much are on their belief that the money really isn’t the business’ money, anyway.  They didn’t earn that.  They had (Government) help.