Tag Archives: regulation

Big Brother’s Nanny Sister

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President Donald Trump (R) wants to let businesses allow private equity investments be included in their 401(k) Plans so employees can invest in them with their retirement savings. After all, unions, those voting bloc and funders for the Progressive-Democratic Party do, with enthusiasm.

Nope, say those same Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. We get to do it. You others don’t. Just look at those collapsing private equity funds now. Besides, the Labor Department is only letting those 401(k)s have risky investments that could include Trump meme coins.

Labor says otherwise.

The Labor Department is proposing to clarify that employers don’t violate their fiduciary duty merely by incorporating private equity, real estate and other “alternative” investments in 401(k) fund options.

Nothing else.

I agree that private equity is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad investment. However, that’s a matter for the individual investor to decide. It should not be a matter for Nanny Statists like Party politicians to actively bar, nor should it be a matter for Republicans of any stripe to passively bar by not permitting.

Caveat emptor, and caveat collocator.

A Nanny State Pusher

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Pam Krueger, Founder & CEO of Wealthramp, wants employers offering 401(k) plans to provide access to a vetted network of independent, fee-only fiduciary registered investment advisers as a no-cost employee benefit.

This is because, dumb-asses that all of us Plan participants are, when we are confronted with conflicted advice, hidden fees, and unsuitable products, we’re wholly incapable of evaluating any of it on our own. We need safeguards, she insists, but who would do this vetting? She neglected to say.

Never mind that we already have access to such a network, vetted by independent fiduciaries: NAPFA, The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors. One impediment to employing one, though, is their fee structure, and many participants might be unwilling to pay the fee. Hence the insistence that the employer pay the advisor in our stead.

Have I mentioned, yet, that Wealthramp has its own stable of fee-only financial advisors?

Wealthramp has its own stable of fee-only financial advisors.

Hmm….

It’s a Feature, Not a Defect

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In the race for Artificial Intelligence dominance—which isn’t necessarily existential, but it comes close—the US has a slight global lead, the People’s Republic of China is close behind, and the European Union is…not participating.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.
Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight.

All this is done in the name of what the EU thinks of as safety—protect the environment, transparency for the sake of transparency, protect the consumer from…something, protect…. It’s being done, too, with careful deliberation and full knowledge of the consequences, both of being right and of being wrong.

The EU has chosen, and it has long done so in a broad reach of milieus, what it views as safety over what it views as freedom—here, to innovate. As someone once more or less noted some years ago, those who choose safety at the expense of freedom will have neither. And from that, they will lose security.

This is the EU opting out of the contest, hoping that the winner will remember the EU with fondness and a willingness to share. Which is no security at all.

Lowered Going Away Fees

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The State Department has greatly reduced the cost to an American citizen of renouncing his citizenship.

The US State Department has cut the fee all the way down to $450 from $2,350.

Even though this just restored the I Quit Fee to its 2010 level, it’s still a big deal.

It’s also not all bad. The quitters shouldn’t let the door hit them in the fanny on the way out. We won’t miss them.

Even better: our nation will get a little bit more conservative and a little bit less Precious- and Progressive-infested with each departure, since those who love our nation, Left or Right, will be staying and continuing to work to improve it.

An EV Mandate Lawsuit

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California has enacted regulations restricting automobile emissions that are far stricter than national requirements. The Federal government is suing on the theory that Federal regulations, along with Federal law, preempt State regulations. If successful, this would render California’s regulations illegal and without force. The Federal government should win this suit easily, even if California drags it out and into the Supreme Court: our Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land—is pretty dispositive.

On the other hand, no one is forcing the companies to build cars for sale in California in the first place. It’s expensive to do so, and those increased costs get spread across customers nationwide, because the car makers build all their cars to meet California’s requirements. Those car makers could both reduce their costs of production and so their prices charged the rest of their customers, if they simply built cars according to national standards and stopped selling in California. That would result in a increase in ex-California national sales that would swamp the per-car price reduction, which in turn would produce large aggregate increases in revenue, and profit.