Tag Archives: regulation

Because, Registration

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Now the Feds want to regulate register our privately owned and operated drones.

[A] task force Thursday agreed to recommend registration for recreational drones weighing more than 250 grams, or roughly nine ounces[.]

And

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx proposed the regulations last month, saying they needed to be adopted quickly because drones are endangering manned aircraft.

Yeah. There actually have been a very few well-publicized (well-hyped, say I) incidents. And so because of the misbehaviors (or mistakes) of a very few, all of us must be punished with registration (which will lead, inevitably, to regulation. See the extant efforts to regulate firearms after the requirement to register).

No, this is just another example of Big Government seeing something not yet controlled by it, needing, desperately, to fill that void with a registration requirement, just like an addict needs his fix.

Because Power Addiction

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The headline and sub-headline in the Wall Street Journal article pretty much tells the story.

China Delays Economic Liberalization

As Beijing debates how to quickly boost economy, it delays long-term plans to loosen financial grip

The men governing the PRC do not see the contradiction between their behavior and their actions.

China has taken new steps to slow plans that had been meant to loosen control over the financial system, adding to similar delaying moves since summer.

Never mind that loosening these controls, and all other government controls—all other CPC controls, all other controls maintained by President Xi Jinping and his cohorts—would produce exactly that boost. Leaving money and decision-making in the hands of the general population citizens, the hands of the folks who earned that money and who, as rational adult human beings, are fully capable of making their own decisions would let those folks allocate their money according to their imperatives, their goals, their desires and to do so far more efficiently than any government can do. These strictly voluntary exchanges between themselves and their fellow citizens are what in their aggregate strongly boosts economies.

It’s hard to believe that the leadership of the CPC and of the PRC’s government, themselves rational adult human beings, don’t understand that.

However, freeing up the economy would let the citizenry make decisions of which these government men disapprove; freeing up the economy would lessen the personal power of these government men.

These government men are too addicted to their power; that addiction prevents them from making rational decisions, just as any drug addiction prevents the addict from making rational decisions.

Democrats, Pseudo-Science, and our Economy

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President Barack Obama stopped the Keystone XL pipeline (fortunately, it’s not permanent; a better informed President can undo this damage, but that’s for another post). Obama, supported by his Democrat confreres (though, as I said, it was his decision), offered these excuses for the stoppage:

the pipeline would create few jobs

Even taking that as accurate (thousands of jobs are not “few,” though), job creation in our present economy is not a thing to be dismissed as casually as this. Further, the John Kerry State Department’s analysis that the jobs created would amount to fewer than 0.1% of “the nation’s total employment” is fatuous on its face: other than Big Government, there are vanishingly few enterprises that don’t employ fewer than 0.1% of our nation’s total employment.

would fail to lower gasoline prices

Not initially, perhaps, as the current relative slowness of gasoline prices to fall in line with falling oil prices. However, the increased supply of oil and its associated easier delivery to refineries, can only increase the supply of gasoline relative to demand, and so the pipeline would, ultimately reduce the price of gasoline. Of course there are two sources of reduced prices, only one of which is easily visible. One is an absolute drop in price at the pump. The other, though, is easily ignored by Democrats: that’s the smaller rise in price as demand continues to outrun supply, even as that latter gap shrinks from the pipeline’s influence on supply.

exacerbate[e] climate change

Umm, no. Even were man a serious player in climate warming (this was the climatista panic-mongers’ claim; they don’t get to run away from it with a name change), the pipeline’s influence can’t be seen in the noise, given the PRC’s and India’s contribution to climate warming. However, the pseudo-science of “climate warming” is being more and more debunked—not only through exposure of all the falsified data and failed models, but with actual real data contradicting pseudo-scientists’ claims. There’s nothing present for the pipeline to influence, even minisculy.

No, canceling Keystone is nothing more than a continuation of Democrats’ pushing their crony green capitalists’ welfare, a functional if not purely intentional attack on our economy.

Because There Isn’t Enough Regulation

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Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do Democrats. The vacuum Democrats abhor, though, isn’t a natural one, it’s manmade—gaps in regulation. Americans are just too stupid to manage our own lives, on our own, insist Democrats, and so Democrats demand to regulate our lives for us. For our own good, you see. And for the good of Democrats’ political power. Here are two examples.

In Houston, the Liberal city government didn’t think bathroom accommodations for those who can’t accept who they are should be a matter of negotiation between employer and employee or prospective employee.

More importantly, the Liberal city government thought religious beliefs should be a matter appropriate only to Sundays in churches and not available in the workaday world or to the men and women who operate businesses in the city.

The Liberal city government didn’t think such perks or rights should be competitive offers in free market competition among employers for labor—the way “full dental” was exactly such a competition offer in the last century. So, after having an outright city ordinance struck in court, they put the regulation to the city’s voters in full expectation of being able to ram it through, with the help of millions of dollars from outside Liberals and Democrats.

Houston’s mayor, Annise Parker, even sought to justify this regulatory overreach:

No one’s rights should be subject to a popular vote[.]

No, they shouldn’t. But the Liberal, looking to fill a regulatory vacuum, did exactly that; she put Christians’ and employees’ in general rights to a popular vote.

In San Francisco, the regulatory vacuum involved what private property owners should be allowed to do with their private property when the Liberal city government and its special interest supporters object to those uses.

In another referendum, San Frisco voters rejected the city’s efforts to limit short-term housing rental, a move made by a number of house owners to earn a few extra bucks letting a room to freely agreeing renters needing a place to stay.

[T]enants-rights organizations, a group representing landlords, a hotel workers’ union and hotel associations

all supported the limiting measure because it might compete with their interests. Freedom to compete—or even just to earn some money in an enormously expensive city—should be limited because, well, because competition must be regulated. The argument they put forward wasn’t even intended to be a serious one. Such room-letting would drive up housing costs. By reducing demand for housing, I suppose.

Both of these moves were demonstrations of how much the Left—the Progressives in government and the Democratic Party at large—abhor American citizens’ behavior being unregulated. Americans are just too dumb to handle our own affairs; every action we take has to be regulated to the last detail.

Remember these Democratic Party attempts next year.

Obamacare Revisited

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I’ve written a bit about Obamacare and its front end, ObamaMart. I thought I’d revisit this with the new enrollment period just getting under way.

My test case was a 62-yr-old husband and his 61-yr-old wife in a Dallas suburb with a combined income of $83,000, not previously enrolled in an ObamaMart plan but now looking for a PPO because they like their doctor and don’t want to risk losing access to her. I just looked at the health plans; I eschewed dental. In looking at plans, ObamaMart offered to estimate my medical costs; I accepted the offer and took the middle road of a Medium (out of Low, Medium, High) level of medical expenses for both the husband and the wife.

There were only Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans available.

There were only two Bronze plans, and they were available only through a single health plan provider—so much for increased competition. These two plans had monthly premiums of $1,500 and $1,570 and deductibles of $10,000 and $13,200—that is, our nearing retirement couple had to pay all those premiums and those deductibles before either of these plans began paying even a fraction of the couple’s medical costs. For all that, ObamaMart estimated annual medical costs above $23,000.

There were only three Silver plans, again only offered by a single provider—the same one as providing those two Bronze plans. Again, so much for increased competition. These plans had premiums ranging from $1,500-$1,800 with the lower premium associated with a $10,000 deductible, the higher two with a $5,000 deductible. Those combinations, though, work out to roughly the same annual premium plus deductible cost. ObamaMart estimated total annual medical costs under these plans ranging between $21,000 and $27,000.

Gold plans, all four of them, also were offered by the same provider, and it was the same provider that offered the Silver and Bronze plans. Competition? Perish the thought. The premiums were $2,000 or more in all cases, with deductibles ranging from $3,000 with the lowest premium to $1,000 with the highest premium. Again, the annual total from premium and deductible payments were essentially identical across the plans. ObamaMart estimated annual total medical costs between $26,000 and $28,000.

There are three takeaways I see here. One is that health plan costs have not at all gone down over the three years we’ve been afflicted with Obamacare (although ObamaMart has gotten considerably better and easier to use, as far as I went. I did not explore the ease of ordering up a plan). Another is that there is none of the promised competition. Not even a Progressive would attempt to masquerade a single provider as competition. This is, though, a step toward the Progressives’ goal of single provider nation-wide. The third takeaway is the biggie: it doesn’t matter much what plan a (two-person) family might buy, their annual total medical costs with all this health plan protection doesn’t vary much. And neither do the totals of premium and deductible.