Tag Archives: regulation

Personal Responsibility

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This is a core tenet of our federal republican democracy—the concept that us American citizens are the ones primarily—and most often solely—responsible for the outcomes of our decisions and our actions. This is a tenet that applies just as firmly in our fundamentally capitalist economy to our businesses. In particular, for this post, it applies to our banks, large, small, and in between.

Or, it should apply. Dangerously, our banks, particularly our small and mid-sized banks, would be relieved of that responsibility under legislation that Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, who should know better, and Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who is merely acting on her party’s big and bigger government bent, are proposing. That legislation would raise the FDIC’s deposit guarantee from $250,000 per depositor’s account to $10 million.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal have the right of it on this one.

The truth is that a higher insurance limit will increase moral hazard and make the banking system less sound, which will hurt all Americans.

Because

It would also encourage more risk-taking since banks will have to worry less about runs.

Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren as recently as 2023:

We have to do this because these banks are under-regulated, and if we lift the cap, we are requiring—or relying even more heavily on the regulators to do their jobs.

Here is the monarchist Party’s purpose revealed and now pushed by Alsobrooks: an ever more intrusive and controlling central government.

The proposed legislation is an idea whose time never will be, and the proposed legislation needs to be scotched in committee, if not before.

They Won’t Sign

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The lede has it.

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.
Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

Among the restrictions being applied by DoD internally is

military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

That should always have been the case. For far too long, there has been inconsistent, even contradictory, messaging coming out of DoD as a result of leaks, to say nothing of security failures in too many of those leaks. The journalism guild, of course, is spilling its collective ink pots over this.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

This is self-serving and disingenuous. Pressmen should go back to doing original reporting instead of repeating each other’s rumors and printing leaked “information.” Pressmen surely understand—as the rest of us do—that leaks and their leakers are unreliable sources, and pressmen should rely instead on whistleblowers and other sources with the integrity of speaking on the record.

Their disingenuousness extends: the news outlets aren’t even being required to signify their agreement with the policy limiting DoD personnel’s interactions with the press; their signatures would merely indicate their understanding of the policy and the implications for DoD personnel.

News outlets don’t have an intrinsic right to wander the halls and poke into rooms in the Pentagon, nor do they have any need to do so, accosting any DoD personnel they happen on. Not even their self-proclaimed specialness gives them that.

It’s entirely appropriate, since the outlets won’t sign, to confine their writers to the various services’ public affairs offices, and it’s entirely appropriate to require all DoD personnel, military and civilian, who are encountered by a news writer, to refer those pressmen to the PAO and to refuse further interaction with the pressmen.

There are far too many leaks from government agencies, and those from DoD can have particularly dangerous national security implications. There are, also, far too many pressmen who don’t care a fig about national security, only about their personal bylines and notoriety.

Part of the Problem

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The Department of Defense, first under the Biden administration, but continuing under the Trump administration, is having far too much trouble deploying “AI weapons,” even figuring out how to use those it has deployed. An illustration of this is this:

The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

This isn’t so much a software commonality or interoperability problem as it is a problem with bureaucrats giving too much weight to the desires of contractors and their lobbyists, each of whom insist on their own proprietary software. What’s needed here isn’t more money (although sometimes that helps), it’s an operational officer, one fresh in from a combatant command that’s facing current conflicts, being put in charge of AI development and programs. This officer, independent of the lobbyists, needs to write a better requirements document, one that specifies the standards of commonality (not merely interoperability—this is software, not hardware) that each contractor and contractor wannabe must meet in order for their AI package to be considered.

Beyond that, this AI OIC must open his Requests for Proposals far beyond the major contractors and take in RFPs from small businesses and startups—that’s where the ideas and agility exist—then push the development and acquisition pace, eliminating the layers of bureaucrats’ reviews.

Finally, this AI OIC must be willing to spend money on mistakes and dead ends rather than demanding (near) perfection at one stage before moving on to the next.

That’s just the development side. The AI OIC also must have four or five teams of operational officers—again, fresh in from combatant commands—working on tactics and strategies that make use of the four or five leading AI weapons candidates to investigate best uses for integrating these weapons into a combatant command unit’s (at all levels) existing suite of weapons. That tactics and strategies development effort should also lead to adjustments in those units’ existing tactics and those commands’ existing strategies, even their existing suites of weapons.

There’re just too much bureaucracy and too little operational consideration in the currently extant DoD. SecDef is making progress on the bureaucracy qua bureaucracy, but he’s got a long way to go. It’s time for him to zero in on lethality.

A Mistake

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DHS, according to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, is looking at so-called “ICE tracking apps,” which allow users to share locations of immigration enforcement activity in real time. Of course they should be looking at these.

However.

According to McLaughlin, while such apps might currently be legal, they are “being used by gangs, suspected terrorists, and others to evade law enforcement and even target officers.”
She said the Department of Justice might consider whether the apps and other tracking tools amount to obstruction of justice.

That’s looking at the wrong end of the apps. It’s certainly true that, as McLaughlin also says, there has been a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers.

But the way to deal with that is not to go after the apps as obstructions of justice. The proper way to deal with that is to treat the use of the apps in particular ways as obstructions of justice, backtrack those uses to their users, and then to go after the users who actually obstruct justice or who interfere with law enforcement officers in the course of their actions.

The apps themselves are merely tools. They’re agnostic in themselves; it’s the users who are…not agnostic.

Moreover, targeting the apps over their misuse also would fuel the Left’s war on our 2nd Amendment, making it easier to target our weapons over their misuse.

Tipped Wages or Not?

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McDonald’s is insisting that every restaurant—especially fast food restaurants—should be required to do away with tip-based wages and pay servers at least the Federal-level minimum wage. There are a couple of major disingenuosities in the surrounding argument.

McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski:

Right now, there’s an uneven playing field,

because casual-dining restaurants, bars, and other establishments to pay below the typical minimum wage to tip-earning workers. If he thinks so, he should push for getting his restaurant able to similarly pay his workers rather than demanding that others kowtow to his business model.

Kempczinski went on:

If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor[.]

This is an especially blatant bit of disingenuousness. The customer already is paying for the restaurant’s labor. The customer also is paying for the restaurant’s cooking, food and food preparation inputs, rent, management salaries, every cost the restaurant incurs. Those costs are included in the prices the restaurant puts on its menu. Tipping is just a customer-facing line item on the bill.

This is nothing but a regulated business manager venally and self-servingly trying to capture the regulators and impose added costs on his smaller and weaker competitors.