Chinese President Xi Jinping called for individual countries to have broad authority to regulate the Internet at home, outlining a digital future in which governments could set online standards and challenge the free flow of information and content across borders.
Why is the leadership of the PRC so terrified of the free flow of information, of free speech?
Oh, wait.
The USSR set up an Iron Curtain around its nation and its “sphere of influence” in Europe that was designed to keep its citizens from leaving for greener pastures. The Curtain became a real, physical barrier in the form of the Berlin Wall. To a large extent, it worked: even though citizens did manage to escape, the outflow was reduced markedly, and far too many citizens died on the Berlin Wall (or under it) attempting to escape.
Now the proud Progressive and Democratic Party Presidential candidate wants to erect an Iron Curtain around the United States designed to keep American businesses from leaving.
Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the US will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.
Never mind that American business owners and managers have a fiduciary duty—embedded in our laws as well as our morality—to maximize profits for the company and its owners—partners, shareholders, Mom and Pop. Never mind that this mandate to maximize profits necessarily includes minimizing costs. Never mind that the US taxes its businesses at the highest rate in the world, and that these tax bills are significant costs.
Never mind that minimizing the tax bill is a necessary part of that fiduciary duty, and it must, then, include consideration of foreign tax environments—and tax inversions, the process of buying, or being bought by, companies in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates and then moving the company into that lower tax jurisdiction.
Mrs Clinton would…require[e] companies to pay US taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold….
The current “threshold” is current law that allows inversions so long as the American company’s shareholders will own less than 80% of the new, merged company. Clinton’s lower threshold is, carefully, not yet specified.
This is the sort of barrier to our economic freedom, the sort of increase in Big Government taxation, the sort of destruction of our individual liberties to which we can look forward if we get this Progressive Democrat for President.
This is only a precursor to additional barriers to free movement we can expect from this Progressive Democrat.
That’s the headline question of Ari Weinberg’s piece in the Sunday Wall Street Journal.
It may be time to re-examine the entire ETF ecosystem,
said SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar. Fellow Commissioner Kara Stein echoed the scheme:
Now is the time to be asking the hard questions about ETFs[.]
The article is well worth reading in its entirety; there are a number of good points regarding what an investor should look for in considering an ETF investment.
However, these cautions are not unique to ETFs; all investment vehicles need such careful consideration and similar questions answered. Government need not get involved here, beyond enforcing transparency so that investors—us Americans—can make informed decisions. Or foolish ones: that’s our prerogative, and no government can legitimately interfere to protect us from ourselves. Government can do that much only by taking our freedoms from us, and it can do that much only by imposing its definitions of appropriate decisions on us. Which is to say, only the men in government can do that much and only by taking our freedoms from us and by imposing their own, personally beneficial definitions of appropriateness on us.
No.
We’ll make our own decisions, thank you. And, through the aggregation of us, Mr Free Market will deal with the risks and gains of ETFs.
President Barack Obama said in his Oval Office speech Sunday evening that it’s insane to let people on the DHS No Fly List have access to guns. Obama also said that it’s wrong to operate on the basis of suspicion and hate.
While folks on the No Fly list aren’t necessarily objects of hatred, they are targets of suspicion. But that’s all they are. They’ve done nothing, and they’ve not been convicted for anything—other than of being objects of suspicion. Stephen Hayes was on the No Fly list; he’s a target of suspicion solely because he’s an Evil Conservative and an Evil Journalist. DHS employees are on the No Fly list. They’re targets of suspicion because…? Then-Senator Ted Kennedy (D, MA) was on the No Fly list. Say, what?
What none of these suspicious persons have been through, though, is Due Process. Not being able to fly into the US does not block them from entering the US; it just inconveniences them: they have to travel via other means. Not being able to have access to firearms is more than an inconvenience, regardless of one’s view of gun control. That denial is a blanket denial of one’s access to one’s Constitutional rights, and that requires a due process proceeding first.
What’s insane is denial of due process, of violating the law, whenever that becomes inconvenient. What’s insane is operating on suspicion rather than the law. What’s insane is decrying operating on suspicion while operating on the suspicion of a government List.
The Left’s new obfuscatory synonym for “dumb Americans.”
US securities regulators, under pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on potential risks in the asset-management industry, are about to crack down on the use of derivatives in certain funds sold to the public, worried that some products are too precarious for retail investors.
Because us dumb Americans are just too ignorant to make our own investment decisions. We need the Progressive Know Betters to tell us how we should make some investments, and to deny us access to other investments.
[U]nder pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on potential risks in the asset-management industry: this is actually the problem. The securities regulators, themselves, have no idea of the risks of derivatives. They showed this risk all through the Panic of 2008, and they’ve done nothing substantive to correct their failure.
If these regulators were serious about the precariousness of (some) derivatives, they’d require the chaining of them and the arithmetic underlying them to be made public so that all investors—institutional and dumb Americans retail alike—could make our own assessments. Without Big Government Know Better interference.