Tag Archives: regulation

Maybe Europe Isn’t So Much our Friend

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Begin with so many of NATO’s European members welching on their financial and equipage commitments to NATO. This represents less a matter of their word being worthless, important as that is, but represents far more an utter betrayal of their fellow members. It’s these shirkers’ insistent reliance on their fellow members for protection even as they refuse to be capable of contributing to their fellows’ protection. That betrayal includes us. Europe’s nations might not be able to contribute much to our defense, but as many insist (for the most part correctly), allies are important to our national security.

But Europe’s essential lack of friendliness extends, now, to naked attempts to censor Americans’ speech within our own nation and anywhere else in the non-UK world. Europe intends to (try to) dictate to us what we are permitted to say.

The European Commission’s coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday’s hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the US.

And this, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum:

tech companies were expected to moderate content from “populist rhetoric” and “anti-elite” sentiment to “political satire” and “meme subculture.”

Globally, too—which means within the US as the arrest of the Irish comedian demonstrates—not just inside Europe.

And this, giving concreteness to Europe’s enmity toward American businesses and their leadership teams and to us American citizens in general:

Paris police…raid[ed] X‘s local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” April 20.
The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, “in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe,” the committee said Tuesday.

It’s possible to argue that President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs are the wrong tool with which to deal with Europe, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s not wrong about the need. My suggestion to Musk and Yaccarino: don’t go to France for the interviews; conduct them, instead, via video over the Internet. There’s little reason to expect that these two, were they to go to France for the interviews, would be freely and easily able to leave after the interviews.

Universalized Choices of K-12 Schools

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Our public national education system—an inchoate agglomeration of local public school systems—is badly failing our children and through that badly failing our nation both in our economy and in our national security. Parochial schools, charter schools, voucher schools, homeschooling and pod-schooling (a pooling of homeschooler resources), which I’ll term choice schools—all of these do far better at educating our children than do those public schools, whether run by teacher unions or not. The ability to choose among those options is critical to our children’s education. The competition even produces improvements in the public schools. Hence, ESAs, Education Savings Accounts.

A limitation on ESAs is their funding. Formal funding for ESAs functionally caps their availability for students, with the result that vast numbers of students can’t get into one; the ESA program for their area has expended all of its funds before the enrollment lists got to them. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors propose a solution:

To create truly universal programs, states can remove enrollment caps and fund ESAs outside of annual appropriations…. They can boost scholarship amounts….

More money isn’t necessary. More money would help, even if it is government money, provided it’s allocated and spent wisely—but it would be government money.

More money could be made available for ESAs, if only indirectly, though, not by increasing spending but by allocating existing education dollars to the student rather than to the school district. In this way, when a parent moves his child out of the public school and into a choice school, the money would follow the student to that choice school, defraying the cost of attending that alternative school.

Other mechanisms for supporting school choice also are available. These include State governments removing such barriers to choice as caps on the number of charter or voucher schools allowed to exist in a jurisdiction, forcing homeschooling parents into teacher unions, limiting use of under-used or empty public school facilities by choice schools, onerous licensing and accreditation requirements for choice schools—even caps on the number of students allowed into an ESA program.

Wrong Answer

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House and auto insurers’ profits and the rate increases they charge policy holders are coming under political scrutiny, but politicians’ proposed solutions are badly counterproductive.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) this month became the latest state lawmaker to advocate profits caps on insurers, to tackle escalating home- and “crushingly expensive” auto-insurance rates.
Her plan would require home insurers with “outsized profit margins” to lower or justify their rates, and review the profits threshold at which auto-insurers are required to refund customers.
Also this month, lawmakers in states including Oklahoma proposed profit caps targeting insurance.

No.

Government definitions of “outsized profit margins” have nothing to do with business imperatives or what happens in a free market. Those definitions serve only the personal political ambitions of the politicians doing the defining, and they’ll vary across politicians and their political parties.

Beyond that, all price caps do is limit the availability of the product being capped—whether oil and natural gas and gasoline, rental housing availability and quality…or insurance policies. The limit on supply, too, hurts those on the lower economic rungs of our economy first and hardest.

Requiring insurers to justify their rates and the profit levels at which policy holder refunds are paid is a good idea, but government is the wrong crowd that must be satisfied.

Better simply to require insurers to disclose their profit margins and the basis on which they arrive at their definitions of profit. Their policy rates already are publicly available; making both sides of that process public would let the public more effectively shop for policies that suit their individual needs.

Doing that within an increasingly deregulated (not unregulated) insurance market environment would move the industry closer to a truly competitive market within which insurers would reap fair profits and insurees would pay fair premium amounts for the policies they want. And the Critical Item: “fair” would be defined within that competitive market by those market participants, not by any government.

An Activist Judge Gets It Wrong

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DC District Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ruled that

the Trump administration is legally required to secure funding for the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and that failing to do so would violate a prior court order barring the government from dismantling or shutting down the agency[.]

However.

Leave aside the fact that the question of the Trump administration funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the question of the Trump administration dismantling or shutting down the agency are distinctly separate questions.

The fact of interest here is Jackson’s mistaken ruling that Trump must fund the CFPB. He cannot. By the statute that created the CFPB, that agency is funded solely by the penalties it exacts via its enforcement actions (pay no attention to the conflict of interest behind the curtain) and from the Federal Reserve Bank, the latter which the CFPB draws from according to CFPB-determined needs (pay no attention to the doings behind this curtain, either).

The Trump administration has no control over and no capacity to produce CFPB funding. This is the sort of shenanigan in which activist judges engage, causing increased cost and delay in cleaning up prior messes.

In the “Go Figure” Category

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New Jersey is one of several States that do not require a photo ID to vote. It’s also one of a number of States that offer reduced fare to some groups—senior citizens, military personnel, the infirm, for instance—on their mass transit systems.

Go figure:

Per Rutherford’s Shore News Network, as quoted by Fox News,

Starting January 1 [last Thursday], photo ID required for NJ Transit reduced fares but not for voting[.]

Hmm….