Tag Archives: regulation

Personal Responsibility

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Business executives lack it. Or at least those who sent a letter to members of the Senate demanding action on gun control.

The letter asks senators to pass legislation requiring background checks on gun sales and said failing to take action on the issue is unacceptable.

With no trace of irony, the letter insists

We are writing to you because we have a responsibility and obligation to stand up for the safety of our employees, customers and all Americans in the communities we serve across the country[.]

So you have to satisfy our responsibility for us.

Cue Bill the Cat.

There’s nothing stopping these executives from barring firearms from their places of business on their own responsibility. Federal—and State—laws only authorize individual carry; they do not mandate it, nor do they prevent private businesses from saying, “not in our house.”

However, it’s easier for some to demand Government do something in their name than it is for those some to act on their own responsibility.

Regulatory Capture

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America’s automotive companies want ever stricter emissions standards.  Or so says Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund.

This, of course, is nonsense.

If car companies truly want stricter emission standards, they can do so without the cover of a government mandate.  Nothing is stopping them from setting and meeting their own stricter standards.  This is, after all, a (largely) free market economy, and it’s at the heart of a (largely) free nation.  Car companies can make their own decisions without Big Brother’s instruction.

Unless, of course, they have a different agenda.  Like, for instance, writing the regulations in a way to protect them from competition from upstart (as in impudent) companies that might have better products or better consumer appeal, or both. That’s classic regulatory capture.

Or, maybe it’s a path to writing the regulations in a way that beats the EDF climatista drum but that has little or nothing to do with producing quality, efficient, cost-effective cars that consumers actually want.

Unions for Socialism

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That’s the situation in Oregon, the new front-runner for socialism in the US, surpassing even California.

[T]he Oregon AFL-CIO wants voters to limit self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores.

The State’s Attorney General still has to sign off on the union’s ballot measure, ironically titled the Grocery Store Service and Community Protection Act, but that’s a formality in a State that favors Antifa violence over law and order and actual protection of communities.

The union claims—and it’s serious—that

self-service checkouts add “to social isolation and related negative health consequences” for shoppers.

And

…contribute to retail workers feeling devalued….

Because, the union insists, Oregon’s citizens are such snowflakes, so easily triggered.  Such infantilization of grown, adult human beings ought to be insulting to the people of Oregon, consumers and workers alike.  We’ll find out whether they’re insulted, though, from how they vote in 2020 when the measure is on the ballot.

If the good citizens of Oregon do show their tenderness by voting up the measure, we can look forward to the unions demanding sackers in stores be featherbedded.  Make-work is, after all, how the socialists keep their populations (more or less) employed.  And how the Precious find comfort.

Trust

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Our individual liberty—and liberties—depend on a number of things: sovereignty of us citizens over our government; understanding that our rights and duties are inherent in us as gifts from our Creator and not grants from that government; the tools with which to enforce those rights and duties—free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, among others.  And an ability to trust one another.

Laura Ingraham addressed this peripherally.

The Second Amendment be damned. You see liberals don’t really trust regular people. They prefer a system where a small set of elites in Washington make decisions for everybody else. Including on issues of self-defense.

And

Law abiding gun owners are invariably seen as suspicious. Their motives untrustworthy.

This is yet another example of the Left’s contempt for ordinary Americans.

This is yet another example of their projection: the people of the Left don’t trust themselves. Or each other.

This lack of trust is as much a threat to our nation’s commitment to individual liberty, personal responsibility, self-reliance as is the Left’s overt attacks on our right to keep and bear Arms and the rest of our Bill of Rights.

Facebook Agonizes

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Facebook says in a public white paper that it’s confronting its commitment to protect user privacy while dealing with “giving” users the right to take their data where they choose—to a competitor social medium platform, for instance. Facebook is treating these two goals as though they conflict with each other, though.

Of course, they do not.

Facebook’s white paper on the matter has this, for instance:

We’ve heard calls—sometimes from the same stakeholder—both to enable greater data portability and to limit people’s ability to share their data with third parties….

No, Facebook has heard no such thing.  What the platform has heardis that Facebook’s ability to share people’s personal data with third parties must be strictly limited. Indeed, Facebook is increasingly enjoined from such sharing by both the US and the EU.  That, of course, has nothing to do with users sharing, or not, their personal data.

And:

For example, the paper says it is clear that people should be able to transfer data such as the photos they upload to a social network, a capability Facebook has given users since 2010. Whether friends’ contact information or their comments on posts should also be portable are separate matters—and ones that Facebook hasn’t yet taken positions on.

This isn’t that unclear.  Take emails sent by a writer to a user, for instance.  The email in the originator’s emailer is the property of the originator.  The copy of that email in the recipient’s emailer, however, is the property of the recipient.  So it is with comments and other such transmittals from non-user to user.

And this:

Whether an outside entity is a worthy recipient of user data and who should be responsible for potential misuse of Facebook data after it is in that entity’s hands aren’t clear, the paper argues.

This isn’t Facebook’s concern.  In the first place, they’re not Facebook’s data; they’re the users’ data. Users haven’t voluntarily given those data to Facebook; Facebook has forced the transfer as a condition of doing business with Facebook (sound familiar in an international trade environment?).  From that, it becomes clear that assessment of worthiness of a transfer recipient and responsibility for potential misuse of those data after transfer are strictly those of the user. They’re his data, and he’s the one moving them about.  Facebook has no legitimate role in this assessment.

Finally, this bit of disingenuosity, although this bit isn’t only Facebook’s; it’s also that of regulators:

The paper’s underlying premise is that who should own what data on a social network remains a murky matter.

Facebook’s agonizing and bodice-rending needs to stop. The virtue signaling has grown boring, and Facebook is using it only to obfuscate the fact that it is doing nothing to curb its abuse of user data.