Tag Archives: regulation

More Interference

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The Obama administration is proposing to spend nearly $4 billion in a decade to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars on US roads and curb traffic fatalities and travel delays.

No. The Congress needs to refuse to provide the funding for this.

Leave aside whether we want driverless cars on our roads. There’s an arguably positive role for government to actively support, even help fund, basic research. However, once the theory from such basic research has been developed sufficiently (a private enterprise-defined criterion), bringing any related concepts to market is purely an engineering matter and so must be solely a free market/producer/consumer decision. The work, then, should be funded only by private enterprise.

Government has no business picking winning or losing technologies, and that’s what it does when it funds bring-it-to-market schemes. That’s unavoidable, no matter the intentions of the politicians pushing such an expense.

President Barack Obama’s proposal here is intended to facilitate the development of regulations to govern driverless cars. Leave aside here the Progressives’ idea that Americans and our businesses need a government rule for every aspect of what we do, or don’t do. This…regulation development…is nothing more than another bring-it-to-market scheme.

Progressives and Language

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Democratic Party ex-Presidential candidate and Vice President Joe Biden had this to say, this time about our Constitution:

…Second Amendment says which he [Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (D, VT)] has of late, the Second Amendment says you can limit who can own a gun.

What the words on the Constitution’s parchment say:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

However, to Progressives, words have exactly the meanings Progressives say they have. Not more, not less. And so “shall not,” of course means “shall.”

All the rest of us should just shut up. We don’t understand the words.

The Left and Gun Control

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A 23-year-old man, 5′ 11″ tall and weighing 200 lbs, stalked and tried to assault a 65-year-old woman, standing 4′ 11″ and weighing all of 105 lbs. This thug followed her from a convenience store stop she made on the way home from work to her parking spot in her apartment complex.

When he grabbed for the woman, she drew her (legally owned and carried) pistol and shot him, thereby successfully defending herself from what was, at best, a strong-arm robbery attempt, and quite possibly a follow-up murder.

Let me emphasize that: this small, older woman successfully defended herself against a man one-third her age and twice her size with the only equalizer adequate to the task, a firearm.

Let me emphasize one more item: this is the sort of thing that President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats and Progressives actively seek to prevent: a citizen defending himself—herself in this case—without benefit of Big Government’s good offices from an assault that even the police are powerless to prevent, only to react against well after the assault has run its course.

But, of course, Obama and Democrats and Progressives know full well that independent, self-reliant citizens are anathema to their policies.

Health Insurance and Regulation

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Faith-based organizations that share the costs of health care among their members are a tiny part of the health care coverage industry. They’re also not regulated by government.

[Faith-based] ministry officials say they aren’t offering insurance, don’t guarantee claims will be paid, and don’t need to be regulated.

Naturally, regulators object.

But now, some insurance commissioners are concerned that the ministries could put consumers at risk if bills aren’t paid.

This is the consumer’s choice to risk, though, not government’s authority to command not to. At least in a free society.

And more tellingly:

State regulators also say health ministries disrupt the insurance market because they tend to attract healthier consumers, siphoning them from commercial plans that can be left with sicker or older customers.

What these government regulators carefully omit to mention, though, is that the only “market” liable to disruption is their precious regulated “market.” In a free market economy, such competition is healthy, if disruptive, leading as it does to improving products and lowering costs.

Unfortunately, the number of faith-based health cost sharing entities that are exempt from Obamacare is carefully and deliberately circumscribed by Obamacare. That needs to change.