Tag Archives: regulation

Carrie Lam and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she’ll fully and formally withdraw her/People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s extradition bill completely.  She even issued a formal statement claiming that, among other things.  Many are touting this, and the other things, as major concessions to the demonstrators that have been in the streets of Hong Kong in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, for the last several months.

Those protestors have been demanding the bill’s formal and irrevocable withdrawal, Lam’s resignation, and an independent investigation into police misbehaviors during those protest demonstrations, among others things.

Lam, of course, has made no concession at all.

She has said she will not resign.  Indeed, she has said in a carefully orchestrated leak of a “private” conversation that she has no choice but to not resign.

There’s nothing in Lam’s statement about when she will withdraw the extradition bill, only her claim that she’ll do so. Sometime. Aside from that, there is not even a syllable of enforceable commitment that she, or her successor, won’t simply introduce an identical bill at some later time.

In response to the demand for an independent investigation, Lam

claimed that a probe of police enforcement actions is “best handled by the existing and well-established Independent Police Complaints Council.”

This is especially disingenuous.  Lam ignored the plain fact that

[t]he council has authority merely to “observe, monitor, and review” internal police investigations and make recommendations, without the independent power even to summon witnesses. Council members are appointed by Ms Lam, who answers to Beijing.

The rest of Lam’s disingenuous statement is just further commitment that “her” government will investigate itself.

Lam and her fellows must resign (I’m expanding; the good people of Hong Kong have only asked for her resignation).  That’s necessary for the symbolism of the deed, even as it would be only symbolic: the citizens of Hong Kong are allowed to “elect” a government only from candidates approved by the PRC. Lam’s and her fellows’ replacements would only be more of her and her ilk.

Tactically Sound?

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Perhaps, but perhaps strategically disastrous.  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked the queen to prorogue the current parliament, and the queen agreed, in order to block it from blocking him from taking Great Britain out of the European Union on schedule 31 October without a deal in the likely event that the EU continues its intransigence in negotiating.  Prorogation is the formal end of an existing session of Parliament, and normally it’s done just prior to the beginning of the next session, to clear the decks for that session.

The current prorogation would run until 14 October, at which point the Queen’s Speech, which would reconvene Parliament, would lay out her (the PM’s) agenda for the new session. Existing bills, including those currently planned to interfere with Brexit, cease to exist with the prorogation; although, they could be reintroduced—to take their turn in the queue in those two remaining weeks.

There are a couple of reasons why Johnson’s move might be tactically sound.  Parliamentary sessions normally last for one year; however, the current Parliament has sat [sic] since June 2017, more than two years.  It’s time for this feckless band to get out of the way, go home, and contemplate their navels.

That brings up the second reason: prorogation would prevent this Parliament from blocking Johnson’s effort to bring the nation out of the EU with no further delay and associated economic uncertainty—and that uncertainty’s follow-on deleterious effects on the British weal.

The longer question that arises is whether prorogation is a strategically sound move.  It’s very likely that prorogation will result in an on-time departure from the EU, with or without a deal governing the terms of the exit.  However, it’s entirely possible that the associated hue and cry will lead to new elections (possibly triggered by a successful no-confidence vote in November) and a new, non-Tory government installed.

That government is very likely to go, hat twisting in hand, to Brussels and beg for reentry into the EU.  What then?

What would be the result on British sovereignty; British economic and political welfare; indeed, British self-respect in such an eventuality?

Even if that new government doesn’t go begging (or even if it does), what else could happen? The alternative to a Johnson-led Tory, sort-of conservative, government is a Corbyn-led Labour government.  That means the prosperity of a limited (relatively, within the constraints of present British concepts) government that Margaret Thatcher made so much progress toward and that Johnson would seek to preserve and extend would be entirely undone by the destructively socialist government that Corbyn would install.

What then of British economic and political welfare; of British self-respect?

Still, Johnson’s move is worth the risk, for the sake of British sovereignty.

In Which the City of New York Might Get One Right

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The city’s Department of Social Services, through a subordinate agency, is proposing a rule that would require those homeless residing free of charge in a city facility to save against a future in which they live in their own home.

The rule would mandate that residents deposit 30% of their earned income into a savings account that the city’s Department of Social Services would manage. Shelters residents would have access to the funds when they move into permanent housing.
“Our goal is to assist New Yorkers with saving in order to more effectively help them plan for the future and get back on their feet,” said a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services….

It’s possible to quibble over who it is that will manage those saving accounts, but the principle is eminently sound.  Beneficiaries of government welfare should earn their “benefits” and learn to stand on their own.

Of course, this is of a piece with requiring other welfare recipients to get a job, get training for a job, or provide a measure of community service, though, so expect the Left to raise a hue and cry over the unfairness of this proposal, too.

Oh, wait….

Councilman Steven T Levin, a Democrat who chairs of the council’s Committee on General Welfare, questioned the efficacy of the rule.
“It’s really looking at the wrong issue,” he said. “The idea of people having a savings account, that’s not one of the things that needs to happen in order to end the homelessness crisis in New York City.”

He added:

What’s really needed is for us to be very aggressive on our subsidized-housing options upon leaving shelter[.]

He wants more “rental assistance vouchers,” more subsidies—more entrapping handouts, instead of liberating help to escape from welfare.  He does natter on about helping residents consolidate or reduce their existing debts, which would be useful also, but he presents these as alternatives; he doesn’t want them done in addition to the savings accounts.

Red Flag Laws, Again

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Now The Wall Street Journal is beating the drum for red flag laws that would authorize seizure of weapons from anyone, and anyone associated with that one, that Government, or a Government-appointed/approved body deems a threat.

Consider one of the three cute anecdotes the WSJ cited via its drumbeat.

Police were tipped off by school officials that a 14-year-old boy had praised mass shootings. He used campus computers to search firearms and terms like “white power.” Taken to a psychiatrist, the student said he was joking.
The boy’s father owned a rifle and a pistol. A short-term red-flag order was obtained, and the two firearms were relinquished. After a hearing a one-year order was issued. [In all three anecdotes cited, the outcome was a “one-year order.”]

The WSJ right wondered whether

the father whose guns were handed over suggest[ed] that he was unable or unwilling to secure them from his 14-year-old son?

Then the Editors dismissed this trivial concern.  I ask, though, what happened to the father’s Second Amendment rights? I answer with dismay: they seem to have been trampled without a fare-thee-well. His firearms were taken for no better reason than that someone associated with him was deemed maybe a threat sometime in the future. The boy’s claim that he was joking seems to have been dismissed just as out of hand.

There are larger problems, though, than just a few carefully selected anecdotes.  What about false positives? Where will the wrongly accused—whether mistakenly or maliciously—go to get his reputation back?

What about false negatives? Now the true threat is both warned and angrified—and in the same household, perhaps, as the one who accused him.

With true due process, how can the system act quickly enough to forestall an imminent threat?

The WSJ‘s Editors closed their piece with—perhaps—a glimmer of understanding:

…red-flag laws are no panacea for mass shootings. But…if reasonably drafted, they appear to be a step forward: gun control for the dangerous and unstable.

But then they demonstrate their fatal misunderstanding.  Red flag laws cannot be reasonably drafted, not only for the reasons above but for the WSJ‘s rationalization of that step forward: the laws focus on the tools a dangerous and unstable person might use and not on the dangerous and unstable person.

No system is perfect, certainly, but no system should be put in place that threatens the liberty and fundamental rights of all of us because a tiny per centage of us are bent on mayhem, especially when that system is so badly flawed as the one proposed here.

The energy being pumped into this euphemism for an assault on our 2nd Amendment should be focused instead on finding ways to deal specifically with those tiny few dangerous and unstable persons.

Gun “Control”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s student-written Future View column turned to gun control recently, and Rasmus Haure-Peterson, a philosophy and economics major at the University of Oxford, had a thought in his letter.  He wrote, in part,

Given the spree of mass shootings, some targeted gun-control measures are needed for the sake of a safer America, even if they curb some people’s rights on the margins. But gun-rights advocates won’t make that concession unless they know that giving an inch won’t cost them a mile.

Haure-Peterson was on the right track until he got to the first part of this. It’s wrong, morally and legally, to punish—especially under the insidious guise of “restrictions,” or during the hysteria of “mass shootings”—everyone for the crimes of a few. Go after the few.

He got back on track with the last. As long as the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party flat refuse to say what their gun control limiting principle is, the only possible conclusion is that they’re after the natural limit: taking all of our weapons.