Month: April 2017

Should we renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?

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There has been quite a bit of concern about an opposition to the Trump presidency set up in Washington by Obama and his allies.

Obama used the US intelligence apparatus to spy on Trump’s presidential campaign.

June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.

October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.

Why would the FISA court approve such a thing ? Why would the Obama people continue when no evidence was found ?

The controversy has continued and Susan Rice, the Obama NSC head, seems to be at the center of it.

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Disruption – Liquor

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“Disruption” is a word usually reserved for hyped sectors of the economy like technology and “Uber” is the ubiquitous example that even a child would recognize. However, there are other components of the economy ripe for disruption, especially those that are heavily regulated, which generally causes significant distortions, monopolistic behavior, regulatory capture, high prices, and a lack of innovation.

The liquor industry is a heavily regulated industry, with layers of distributors and obscure rules which enforce local monopolies, entrench incumbents (often with inferior products), and provide many opportunities for the government to extract tax income and solicit donations from favored groups. Typically liquor uses a “three tier” system, where there is a producer, a distributor, and a retail outlet (a store or a bar). This is a system ripe for disruption.

Alongside this archaic regulated system (which works for the benefits of the government and the local monopolies), there was a multi-decade process of concentration within the liquor industry, as local beer manufacturers were bought up by massive multinationals, culminating in the InBev company which controls a huge chunk (28%) of world-wide beer sales. If it wasn’t for the craft beer counter-revolution (see below), the epic consolidation of the liquor industry would have gone on indefinitely, bringing out “innovations” like Bud Light Lime.

Some of the components of the disruption of liquor in Oregon include:
1) Craft breweries or brewpubs which brew their own beer (and cider) and can sell it onsite
2) Distilleries able to make their own spirits and sell themselves out of their facility
3) New technologies such as Growlers or Crowlers which enable customers to fill directly from a keg into a re-usable container and take the beer home to drink
4) This is all in addition to the vast wineries (seemingly everywhere) that can sell directly and even ship to many states

Craft Breweries:

Portland and Oregon have been leaders in the craft beer movement, enabled by laws (passed against the political power of the beer distributors) which allowed for the brewpubs to sell their own alcohol.
This article describes how the modern brewery was instituted in Oregon.The “beer culture” is everywhere, with 116 breweries within an hour of Portland, as evidenced by the cover of this recent magazine I picked up. Here is a link to the magazine online.

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“George Washington was the first president to stay in the real estate business”

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Eugene Kontorovich:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have an op-ed, “Did George Washington Take ‘Emoluments’ “? It examines the first president’s extensive and hands-on business affairs to get a better handle on the nature of constitutionally prohibited “foreign emoluments.”
 
Here’s an excerpt (article requires a subscription):
 

Mr. Trump is not the first president to have business dealings with foreigners. That was actually George Washington, whose conduct in office has been a model for every president.
 
By the 1790s, Washington was wealthy primarily because of real estate — renting and selling his vast holdings. As with Mr. Trump’s hotels, Washington’s renters or purchasers could include foreigners.
 
The president received constant reports from his nephew and subsequent managers and wrote to them at least monthly… This belies the notion that the Constitution limits a president’s management of, or benefit from, his existing business ventures.
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One letter written by Washington deserves great attention in the current debate. On Dec. 12, 1793, Washington wrote to Arthur Young, an officer of the U.K. Board of Agriculture, an entity newly created and funded by Parliament at the initiative of William Pitt. The president asked for Young’s help in renting out his Mount Vernon lands to secure an income for his retirement. Not finding customers in America, he wondered if Young, with his agricultural connections, could find and organize some would-be farmers in his home country and send them over.

 
The op-ed is drawn from a larger research project on Washington’s business interests and the prohibition on emoluments. Here, I’ll take the space to address possible limitations to this evidence. In particular, Washington insisted that his December 1793 letter to Young be kept private. (Prof. Seth Barrett Tillman has presented strong evidence of the allowance of business dealings from Washington’s public conduct in relation to the domestic emoluments clause.) He suggested that “in the opinion of others, there [may] be impropriety” in his solicitation but makes clear that he himself disagreed with that position.
 
[. . .]

(Via Seth.)

Still Crazy After All These Years

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German Political Thought

…although, in fairness, the trend toward suppression of political speech that challenges the Official Viewpoint is by no means limited to Germany, it appears to be a Europe-wide phenomenon.  One might have hoped, though, that Germany, given its history, would be particularly aware of the dangers of this sort of thing.

If this law really goes into force, you can bet that it will be employed largely against those who dare to criticize Islam in any of its manifestations.  (Even without the proposed law, a German satirist has been prosecuted for insulting President Ergodan of Turkey.)

Prosecutions for blasphemy and lèse-majesté…not just for the Middle Ages!

(In his memoirs, Kaiser Wilhelm II expressed admiration for the stringent British libel laws and also expressed his regret that a similar level of constraint on newspapers in German had not been possible.  If present trends continue, maybe the German democracy in 2017 will manage to actually become a less-free society than the German Empire in 1914.)