Tag Archives: regulation

Federal Bailout “Prevention”

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Asset managers such as Pacific Investment Management Co look set to lose hard-fought protections against the cost of a bank failure, when the Federal Reserve on Tuesday proposes yet another rule aimed at preventing taxpayer bailouts for financial firms.

How disingenuous does this sort of administration get?  No rules are needed to prevent taxpayer bailouts for financial firms, or any other enterprise, government (Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, for instance) or private.  There’s no need for preventing what ought not exist in the first place; there’s only need for firing politicians and bureaucrats who keep trying for taxpayer bailouts.

Market Choice?

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Can’t have that.

The Obama administration is locked and loaded for a fresh push on gun control initiatives—reportedly moving to advocate for so-called “smart gun” technology….

Smart gun technology research may well be a good idea, and having smart guns—weapons that can be fired only by their legitimate owners—certainly seems like a good idea.

Even Government involvement in funding basic research—the secrets of the universe kind of thing—or doing its own basic research might be a good idea.

However, Government involvement in engineering research, which smart gun tech development surely is, and Government involvement in determining, or even merely jawboning, what products it wants in a free market most assuredly are not legitimate.

These are matters for private citizens, private enterprise, and the market place to determine.

Full stop.

Who is a Man or a Woman?

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Curt Schilling had a thought on the matter, and the Left via ESPN, its stand-in on this case, took action consistent with its policy toward those impertinent enough to disagree with its holy writ: ESPN sacked Schilling.

It’s true enough that Schilling was less than genteel in his expression of his thoughtSchilling

but still, he was right on the facts:

…DNA and those pesky X and Y chromosomes.  In short, in this fight between science and authority, Mr Schilling is in the amusing position of being the Galileo, with ESPN filling in for the Holy Office.

But wait—it’s what people think of themselves, how they identify, in’t it?  Not so much.

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, puts it this way: “Curt Schilling is of course correct with the science in saying that claiming to be a woman when you have the chromosomal and anatomical structures of a man does not make you such.  You’re still a man no matter what you think or how you dress.”

Special snowflakes are just riding the wind in the trees.

Chimera

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The Justice Department said Friday it has withdrawn a request that sought a court order forcing Apple to assist in opening a locked iPhone 5s linked to a drug case in New York.

According to a court filing, the Justice Department no longer needs Apple’s assistance in unlocking the device because an individual provided investigators with the correct passcode Thursday.

This is yet another demonstration that DoJ didn’t need to dragoon a private enterprise into blowing up its own product—here hacking its encryption algorithm, to the detriment of its product and of its private citizen customers—for government convenience.  Government had the capability to get into the iPhone with its own resources.

This cracking, in fact, demonstrates two things: the first is that DoJ was cynically using the suits here and in the San Bernardino terrorism case solely for getting a court ruling that Government can force private enterprise to participate in Government searches, to destroy its own product, whenever Government takes a notion to demand it.

The other is that Government’s need for Apple’s help, which was Government’s claimed motive for its lawsuits against Apple, was a mirage.  On the contrary, these suits were nothing more than an execution of Government’s demand for control over private citizens’ personal data.

In each of the above cases, Government hacked the Apple phones’ encryption systems, encryption applied by the phone owners, not by Apple (Apple just made the capability available).  These hacks exposed weaknesses in Apple’s encryption algorithm.  In each of the above cases, Government has refused to tell Apple the nature of the weaknesses: the weaknesses are the backdoors into privately developed encryption algorithms that DoJ’s FBI Director James Comey has been demanding.

Minimum Wage Revisited

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Kevin Williamson, at National Review, had a thought that’s only now percolating to the surface of thinking Americans and that still is avoided by the American Left.

Properly understood, raising the minimum wage—and having a minimum wage at all—is camouflage, something to talk about and fight about while we’re not talking about and fighting about the more important underlying issue.  Declaring that all American workers shall be paid at least $15 an hour is not the same as ensuring that all American workers produce $15 an hour worth of value, and, eventually, the disconnect between those two considerations must make itself felt.

That part is well understood, and that’s a part that is deliberately ignored by the Left.  But there’s this, too.

Krugman, Clinton, Sanders, et al., have a backward and primitive view of government.  For them and for their fellow Hobbesians, the Middle Ages never really ended, and the role of the sovereign is to distribute benefices and issue decrees.  Unhappy with your wages?  Petition the prince to decree that they shall be otherwise, and dare any gimlet-eyed economist to point out that the imperial tailor is skimping on the ermine.

Yeah.  Minimum wage mandates are just an excuse for governing by fiat, for substituting rule by law for rule of law.

Williamson took a more gentle position on that; he suggested that it’s a lack of understanding by minimum wage proponents of the facts of economics and of human complexity.

I don’t think the leadership of the Left is that ignorant, or that naïve.  They know full well the facts of economics and of human complexity.  That’s why they carefully elide those things enroute to their rule by (Left’s) law: minimum wage mandates are a tool, not a goal.