Tag Archives: regulation

Even the Brits

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This is an amazing development for the authors of the Magna Carta. That charter, recall, codified for the first time in Anglo-American history, limits to government’s (king’s at the time) right to intrude into a man’s private affairs and possessions except under some severely constrained conditions: due process of law.

This is that amazement:

Registered gun owners in the United Kingdom are now subject to unannounced visits to their homes under new guidance that allows police to inspect firearms storage without a warrant.

The new policy from the British Home Office went into effect Oct 15, permitting police and constabularies to conduct surprise home visits to legitimate gun owners.

Why else, it turns out, have a gun registry, except to identify those honest citizens in the best position to resist excessive government—like the barons and others who resisted King John’s excesses? Like those later colonial Americans who resisted King George III’s excesses?

And this is where our own gun control lobby and the Progressives in our own government are headed.

Politicizing Ebola

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And right before a major election, too.

On Oct 12, the Agenda Project Action Fund released a political ad called “Republican Cuts Kill,” which according to the group, has been scheduled to air in Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, and South Dakota—all states with high-stakes Senate elections in November. The ad juxtaposes pictures of dead bodies and body bags in West Africa with Republican lawmakers like Sens Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul.

“Like rabid dogs in a butcher shop, Republicans have indiscriminately shredded everything in their path, including critical programs that could have dealt with the Ebola crisis before it reached our country,” said ad producer [Agenda Project Action Fund] Erica Payne[.]

Never mind some facts.

In both 2013 and 2014, it was Congress that boosted the funding after the administration had proposed scaled-back budgets.

[W]hen the 2014 budget was passed in January, the CDC’s budget rose to $6.9 billion, $567 million more than it received in 2013 and more than the agency anticipated, as the president only requested $6.6 billion.

…double the budget the CDC was getting in 2000 ($3.4 billion)[.]

And

With NIH, the numbers have edged up from $28.5 billion in 2006 to $30.14 billion in 2014….

And

…this administration [has been] pushing the CDC to spend time and resources on bike lanes and farmers markets instead of prioritizing national security and the health of Americans[.]

Projects like origami condoms, to the tune of $2.4 million, a part of nearly $40 million of CDC funding that The Washington Free Beacon reports could have been…better used.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine.

And not a single Democrat has corrected this distortion, not a single Democrat has distanced himself from this distortion. Their silence demonstrates their condoning this politicization.

Elections are soon.

A Tidbit

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…of a concept that’s lost on one of the main groups of central planners of the world, those of Russia.

This one comes from an article in Pravda, which plays a role for the Russian government similar to that of The New York Times for the Democratic Party’s administrations. Interestingly, in addition to being missed by the Pravda author, it’s also missed by Tom Friedman, who cited the article in his NYT article.

The context is an alleged oil war being waged by the US and Saudi Arabia against Russia and Iran, an attempt, supposedly, to destroy those two nation’s economies. (I say “alleged” and “supposedly” because of course President Barack Obama wouldn’t do such a thing. Both he prefers engagement with our enemies over contesting with them, and an oil war would be inconsistent with Obama’s promise to Vladimir of greater flexibility in this post-2012 election period. Besides, the Pravda author denies the existence of a war, so that settles it.)

The tidbit from Pravda:

The planned economy of the Soviet Union was not able to cope with falling export revenues [from collapsing oil prices]….

The planned economy was not able to cope.

Planned economies just aren’t flexible enough. More, by introducing like a dam into a river a small body of men into the information stream that is the core of a free market economy, planned economies can’t react with the speed that a freely flowing river of information produces for an unfettered market economy.

This is a fact well known to capitalist economists and empirically demonstrated all over the world, repeatedly, if most dramatically by that Soviet Union collapse.

Unfortunately, this tidbit also is lost on our own central planners, and so we get Obamacare and Dodd-Frank; an explosion of economy-governing rules from EPA, the CFPB, et al; and a burgeoning production of Executive Orders from our Democratic Party President.

The Government and Privacy

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The government is continuing to misunderstand the import of the 4th Amendment’s stricture regarding searches, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and especially Warrants…particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, and of the major purpose of our Constitution generally.

Even accepting things like Edward Snowden’s leaks and the NSA’s overbroad and non-particular descriptions of things for which to be “searched” in our cell phone metadata as being aberrations, the existence of the aberration demonstrates the fragility of government handling of that much searching capacity.

I wrote nearby about the FBI’s dangerous zeal in demanding that cell phone operating system software be made vulnerable to government-desired searches. Following is another demonstration of the government’s misunderstanding.

“This sort of encryption creates a virtual sanctuary for criminals who are very determined and smart,” warned Ron Hosko, the former head of the FBI’s criminal division….

So does the 2nd Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts. So does the 1st Amendment’s acknowledgment of a range of freedoms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts.

That’s a risk we members of our social compact have agreed to accept in order to have a government with the strength otherwise to protect and enforce those freedoms. We’ve done nothing to alter those terms of our compact—our Constitution—since then.

Our Constitution was written the way it was, in fact, to limit our government’s powers as far as we could and still leave it the necessary strength with which to effect those protections. The powers of our government are, by design, few and defined. Our Constitution was, in fact, written to restrain our government, and to carry out that restraint before our government could act, not to attempt to redress a situation after government has acted. This relationship between us compact members, us citizens, and our government, furthermore, is neither symmetrical nor reciprocal.

We restrain our government before the fact; it does not engage in prior restraint of us. Yet, this government demand for ready and broad, non-particular access to the contents of our communications—the contents of our private speech—through a third party and not through us is exactly that attempt by our government to priorly restrain us, if only through the chilling of our speech through government snooping with its implied threat of subsequent harassment. Think IRS. Think Federal whistleblower treatment.

This final thought:

“I don’t think the legislative branch or the judicial branch can sit idly by while destruction comes,” said Hosko….

Neither can We the People sit idly by while the destruction of our inalienable rights comes.

Privacy and the Government

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This time, as represented by the FBI.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Silicon Valley Thursday to reverse course on encrypting phone data, suggesting the pendulum on privacy issues “has swung too far” against the government in the wake of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

No. It hasn’t swung far enough, as too many judges’ attitudes illustrate.

FBI Director James Comey added,

We also need a legislative and regulatory fix.

Again, no. We have too many laws on the books already; the government, including the FBI, aren’t capable of enforcing those existing. And this elides the premise that the government has made illegal and has outright criminalized too many things. Beyond that, we have far too many regulations already, every one of them written by Federal agencies and Cabinet departments that are only tenuously accountable to us citizens.

And

Mr. Comey’s speech [at the Brookings Institution] was another indication of how far apart the two sides remain. He denied they wanted a back door, saying that using a warrant to gather evidence is the equivalent of walking through the front door.

Say that’s true about the current government. There’s no guarantee any future administration would be as restrained with those “legislative and regulatory” fixes. Just look at the out of control regulation writing that’s already been going on for an example of how a tool, originally restrained in its use, gets more and more abusively used over time.

Moreover, beyond individual security and privacy, there’s this national security question, raised by the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian:

…weakening the security of systems to enable law enforcement access also makes them far more vulnerable to compromise by foreign governments and hackers. If anything, we should be doing more to secure our data.