Tag Archives: regulation

The Entire Island

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Repair crews worked through the night trying to restore electricity to Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million people early Thursday after a fire at a power plant blacked out the entire U.S. territory.

Officials said they hoped to restore service by morning….

It turns out that they didn’t make by the morning, and the outage extended into a second day—lengthened not just by the severity of the problem, not unique in itself to Puerto Rico, but also by Puerto Rico’s lack of money with which to fund repairs or even parts and equipment to replace the damaged/failed parts and equipment.

I have to wonder about similar vulnerabilities, similar single points of failure, extant on our separated States and other separated territories and within CONUS.  I have to wonder about these vulnerabilities not only in our power distribution grids, but in our communications grids, and cascading from those, in our financial networks and our government effectivity networks.

As Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said,

The system is not designed to withstand a failure of this magnitude.

Neither are any of our systems.  Nor are they designed to any large degree to minimize, if not eliminate, single points of failure.

Because Sit Down, and Shut Up

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Apple Inc’s aggressive response to a €13 billion ($14.5 billion) tax ruling by the European Commission shows the U.S. technology company doesn’t understand the moral obligation on big companies to pay taxes, according to the leader of the eurozone’s finance ministers.

Because it’s terrible that a company which has played by all the rules should see its money confiscated—or the attempt made—anyway.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem [President of the Eurogroup, the collection of Eurozone finance ministers] said Apple had “failed to grasp” the public outcry over tax avoidance by large companies.

Perhaps Dijsselbloem has failed to grasp the public’s dismay over excessive taxation and Europe’s refusal to allow competition—especially on taxes.

And just to emphasize Dijsselbloem’s disingenuousness, there’s this comment by him:

The Apple response shows that they don’t grasp what’s going on in society and they do not grasp what’s going on in the public debate.  This is a very strong moral issue and large companies, even if they’re this large, can’t say “this is not about us, there’s no problem here.”

American companies or any company that uses all these different tax plans and at the end of the day pays no tax, that’s not fair.

No, the moral issue is the EU bureaucracy’s demanding to impose its concept of morality in place of the morals of sovereign peoples’.  What’s not fair is being punished even though all the rules, all these different tax plans, have been satisfied.  What’s not fair is demanding all these different tax plans to be normalized in accordance with an EU bureaucracy’s diktats, in complete disregard of constituent nation sovereign imperatives.

Or perhaps Dijsselbloem’s just pettily jealous of having been outgamed by a better man.  If Dijsselbloem, or his cronies in that EU bureaucracy, don’t like the gamesmanship here, they should work to eliminate the incentives associated: they should work to get the rest of the EU’s tax plans‘ tax rates reduced to competitive levels, so such gamesmanship becomes irrelevant.

But that’s inconceivable to folks like the Eurogroup, so all they have is their inchoate demand that dissenters just sit down, and shut up.

The Progressive Socialist Goal Made Manifest

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In the context of Aetna’s decision to sharply curtail its participation in ObamaMart—because such participation was costing Aetna millions of dollars—Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said openly

The provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

Because making money—the engine of economic growth and the economic welfare of all Americans—is inappropriate when it’s done outside Government control.  American businesses and Americans can’t be allowed to earn more than Government deems fit.  President Barack Obama (D) has held this before Sanders became a public fixture:

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrat Obama considered it to be Government’s role to determine the goodness of that product or service, not the private citizens choosing to buy, not to buy, that product or service.

Sanders’ disdain for private insurers’ market projections and their goal to make as much profit as possible are easily extensible to the economy as a whole.  That Progressives in the Democratic Party are demanding a government option to “compete” with private enterprise in ObamaMart is a clear demonstration of where that Party will take our economy the moment they gain control of our government.

You can bet Progressive-Democrat and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton soon will be echoing Sanders’ call for government control of our economy in her effort to retain Sanders’ supporters and to extend Obama’s policies.

This will be the Progressive Socialist economy.

SEC and Boardroom Diversity

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to reach inside corporate governance some more because it Knows Better how to run a company than do the leaders and managers of that company.  The latest travesty is a new rule requiring disclosure of the diversity—by which the SEC means ethnic and gender diversity—of a public company’s board of directors.  This would be an expansion of the SEC’s existing 2009 rule requiring companies to disclose their plans for diversity.

Berkshire Hathaway took the correct position in its SEC disclosure regarding those plans:

Berkshire does not have a policy regarding the consideration of diversity in identifying nominees for director. In identifying director nominees, the Governance Committee does not seek diversity, however defined. Instead, as previously discussed, the Governance Committee looks for individuals who have very high integrity, business savvy, an owner-oriented attitude and a deep genuine interest in the Company.

This, though, isn’t politically correct enough to suit the SEC; hence the new rule under consideration.  It isn’t enough that a company should seek actual talent and skill, it must seek the government-directed correct balance of gender and ethnicity.

This raises a question in my mind: would that be biological ethnicity and gender or self-identified ethnicity and gender?

For the record, I self-identify my ethnicity as American, and I self-identify my gender as The US Male.

What’s in Store

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…for the rest of us.  Kate Vershov Downing is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.  She is—or was until she resigned—a member of the Palo Alto, CA, Planning and Transportation Commission, the city’s central planning facility for all things a private citizen might want to do.  Here’s an excerpt from her letter of resignation from that Commission, via PJMedia‘s Tom Knighton.  (Unfortunately, she’s not completely learned the mugging lesson; she and her husband are moving to another California city.)

After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year—an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

There’s more—much more—in her letter of resignation.

It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction.

But Palo Alto’s fellow commission members, Liberal Planners all, either don’t care, don’t understand, or perhaps worst of all: they got theirs, and the rest can go hang.

Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

But the P&T Commission as a whole Knows Better and has steadfastly refused to allow private citizens, private enterprises, to do these simple things.

This Council has…charted a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development….

Because the Commission members are fortune tellers and seers; they Know what’s going to happen before it happens.

Downing closed with this bit of irony:

We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

This Know Better attitude is what we can look forward to nation-wide if the Progressive-Democrat Party wins the White House this year and with it the Senate.