Tag Archives: regulation

Political Experience

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As the terrorist threat becomes ever more apparent—Paris, for instance—political experience in a Presidential candidate would seem to be at a premium, according to political…pundits. I agree: given the US’ role in the world, even after President Barack Obama’s seven-year retreat, a retreat actively supported by the Democratic Party, political experience is highly important. Especially with the damage done by that retreat, political experience is highly important. So is an ability to learn policy issues and rationally to form policy and adjust it as empirical data flow in.

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is often touted as unbeatable in the Democratic primary campaign—she is—and she’s just as often touted (a few too early polls notwithstanding) as virtually unbeatable in the general election. Her political experience is the support for that unbeatability.

Let’s see, then, what are some highlights of her political experience?

  • HillaryCare
  • Bimbo Eruptions
  • For the Iraq War before she was against it (sound familiar?)
  • Successfully passed three Senate bills: created a historic site, named a post office, named a stretch of highway
  • For Keystone XL before she was against it
  • Foreign government “contributions” to her (and her husband’s and daughter’s) Clinton Foundation while sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair
  • Communications security and classified material handling while sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair
  • Libya
  • Benghazi

Clinton has remained steadfast in all of these, save for her flip-flopping on Iraq and Keystone. Especially, she has remained steadfast on Obamacare (née HillaryCare), security matters, Libya, and Benghazi.

She should run on her political experience. The Republican Presidential candidate should run on her political experience.

Free Speech

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Universities are struggling to balance the free exchange of ideas with students’ growing desire to be shielded from offensive views, a philosophical divide at the heart of recent protests that have roiled campuses around the country.

That’s the opening paragraph of Dan Frosch’s and Tamara Audi’s Friday piece in The Wall Street Journal. There’s no struggle here, though, except in the minds of school administrators and professors too timorous, too disrespectful of free speech to be fit to hold their positions.

While the tension between political correctness and open discourse has riven colleges for decades, a hunger strike and protests over racial incidents that forced out the University of Missouri’s president on Monday have supercharged the debate.

This is a coarse misunderstanding, and not only by Frosch and Audi, but by the precious little snowflakes at each of those universities and colleges. There is no such tension at all. What is politically incorrect is the attempt to control discourse in order to protect the self-proclaimed too-fragile from the vicissitudes of life.

Freedom of speech begins, of necessity, with protecting the most offensive, the most uncomfortable of speech. As soon as governments begin banning the most offensive or uncomfortable speech, the definition of “offensive” and of “uncomfortable” begins to be elevated. In very short order, indeed, today’s ordinary, inoffensive, comfortable (and comforting) speech becomes offensive and uncomfortable. Especially to the men in government who now are making the definitions.

Here’s an excerpt from a 6th Circuit en banc ruling on a free speech/free exercise case from Dearborn, MI [cites omitted]:

Diversity, in viewpoints and among cultures, is not always easy. An inability or a general unwillingness to understand new or differing points of view may breed fear, distrust, and even loathing. But it “is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” Robust discourse, including the exchanging of ideas, may lead to a better understanding (or even an appreciation) of the people whose views we once feared simply because they appeared foreign to our own exposure. But even when communication fails to bridge the gap in understanding, or when understanding fails to heal the divide between us, the First Amendment demands that we tolerate the viewpoints of others with whom we may disagree. If the Constitution were to allow for the suppression of minority or disfavored views, the democratic process would become imperiled through the corrosion of our individual freedom. Because “[t]he right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas…is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes,” dissent is an essential ingredient of our political process.
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The civil-rights era cases tell us that police cannot punish a peaceful speaker as an easy alternative to dealing with a lawless crowd that is offended by what the speaker has to say … The Supreme Court … has repeatedly affirmed the principle that “constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise.

It would do these children a great service to learn to read (a form of free speech…), and then to add this sort of thing to their literature lists. It would do the administrators and professors a great service to steel themselves to reading and understanding our Constitution. Their disdain for such responsibility is microaggression of monstrous proportion against these children.

To quote, sort of, another man, life is hard. It’s harder if you’re precious and fragile. Or if you’re in a position of responsibility that exceeds your courage.

A Look at Dodd-Frank

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Banks are having trouble peddling risky loans they’ve made in conjunction with the current (and dying down?) mergers and acquisition boom. These are loans made when one company buys another for their mutual benefit, and the buyer borrows some or most of the purchase price.

Here’s the kicker:

In past decades, banks sometimes held the loans until markets stabilized, but such warehousing became prohibitively expensive because of high capital charges required under the Dodd-Frank law that was passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

If it becomes too difficult or expensive to borrow—or to lend—to support a merger/acquisition, those deals won’t get done.

Often, the target of the deal is a company in trouble, and the deal would save some or all of the company by merging it with a stronger company that has better management and/or more efficient processes. The deal thereby also saves a large number of jobs (not all—that’ll be part of the improved efficiency in the acquiree). The deal also winds up being beneficial to the consumer as the acquiree’s products or services both continue to be available and often at a lower price.

If the deals aren’t done, those jobs won’t get saved, and the goods and services won’t continue to be available.

Will these lost mergers/acquisitions be a big deal for our struggling economy? I don’t know. But I am very certain that those who passed Dodd-Frank didn’t give an iota of thought to the possibility.

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.