Last night, I read a business case about a handful of billionaires who’ve been trying to make lab-grown meat a viable consumer product, and I wondered something tangential. Imagine if a handful of billionaires decided they needed to have a pliable big-government progressive in the White House.
They might flood her accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars laundered through untraceable donations designed to appear grass roots.
They might use the major media outlets they own to twist reality.
They might pay people to fill up arenas so that the candidate appears to be popular.
Then they might manipulate an insecure election system, including mail ballots, to simply install their preferred candidate, while pointing at the scandals they generated in media about the other candidate and the astroturf popularity of the “winner.”
This might sound conspiratorial and crazy, but these same people are trying to grow frankenburgers — not because they think it will be profitable, but because they want to “save the environment” and trick you into a diet that they believe is healthier.
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It’s a passing thought, of course, but Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s mild lament that a State House celebration of a basketball trophy is happening during school hours bugs me. Somehow, it emphasizes the point that our government officials see the well-being of children — of all regular Rhode Islanders, for that matter — as secondary side-effects of insiders’ going about their big, important business, which seems often to focus on providing them power and enjoyment.
A local kid making it big is an inspiring story, but local officials use such things to inspire mainly themselves.
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Something more like a cookbook or plantation. I’ve heard complaints that conservatives have “no plan for you” — or “no vision for what the town should be” — repeatedly over the years, and I think it’s the most disturbing complaint progressives make.
Chris Rufo articulates my view:
Where do I see the town, state, or country going? Well, I hope it’s going toward freedom and mutual good will, but that’s about as detailed as I can get. Mostly, I’m excited to see where individual people, families, and organizations will take us with their drive and ingenuity, but terrified of where activists who abuse government power to implement their plans and vision will take us if we let them.
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Democrats’ acceptance of violence from their own partisans, especially labor unions, is a major warning sign that they’ll turn away when it happens again in the future, but it’s especially disconcerting to see Attorney General Peter Neronha celebrating violence against police officers:
If I seem to be exaggerating, it’s only because I’m not accepting as an excuse that Neronha’s only going along with the default Democrat spin on labor history. Review even the retelling of the incident provided by Rhode Island’s radical union activist Patrick Crowley:
Unlike many other local factories, the Sayles Company Mill and Bleachery in Saylesville remained open, and Crowley said the workers there seemed content. …
On Sept. 7, about 75 UTW workers from other factories stood outside the Bleachery, trying to persuade employees to join the strike. The situation escalated when neighborhood children and teenagers joined the picket line after school. Crowley said that afternoon, a picketer threw a rock at deputy sheriffs hired to guard the factory. The sheriffs’ attempts to calm the crowd backfired, leading to a brawl lasting several hours. …
Though the picketers retreated, they continued to stir up mayhem by pulling fire alarms, removing manhole covers, and opening fire hydrants, causing the street to flood. …
By the afternoon of Sept. 11, nearly 3,000 protesters gathered outside the Saylesville Bleachery. Protesters famously stopped a dump truck full of bricks meant for Pawtucket City Hall’s construction, and hurled them at law enforcement.
What Neronha characterizes as somebody “simply exercising his rights” involved agitators’ starting a riot even though the local workers were content, attacks on security and on police, and riotous vandalism of a working-class neighborhood. This led to a crisis point involving an exchange of gunfire from police and (yet more) projectiles from “protesters.”
Behind the veil of history, I wouldn’t say with certainty that officers were innocent or that the rioters were wholly guilty, but it’s extreme bad form for the state’s highest law enforcement official to do the opposite. Moreover, this isn’t merely a matter of historical dispute. Owing to the Presidential debate this week, we’ve been hearing, again, about January 6, 2021, when a Capitol police officer shot Ashli Babbit for, some would say, “simply exercising her rights.”
Perhaps it’s a naive wish, but I keep hoping for a time when people can acknowledge that human interactions get messy, and we can try to discuss them with truth and accuracy first and our interpretations and conclusions second. Instead, we get government officials whom those of the opposing faction should not trust if they find it politically expedient to prosecute us, including, apparently, Peter Neronha.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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The reason it’s terrifying isn’t only that unrealized gains are purely hypothetical. The proposal (and defenses of it) show that for many taxation has become purely a money-finding scheme requiring the scantiest of rationale. By their nature, unrealized capital gains do not actually exist; they are hypothetical.
While striving to come up with some sort of argument that they’d be nothing radical, I’ve seen supporters make two arguments: First, that people pay taxes on the increased value of their homes through the property tax, and second, that people with large assets are able to use them as collateral for loans, which means they are real.
On the first count, the property tax isn’t a tax on gains. It’s an ad valorem tax — that is, on the whole value — assessed and paid repeatedly every year. Moreover, in most cases, it’s actually a tax on the percentage the individual or entity owns of all the taxable property within that particular government’s scope. Typically, the government figures out how much tax it wants to collect, and the value of a piece of property is the proportion the taxpayer will pay. Some years it will go up, relative to other taxpayers, and some years it will go down.
The same thing partially applies to the other count. Lenders are considering the entirety of assets as collateral, not just new gains. More importantly, what they’re doing is assessing that the entire asset is sufficiently secure that it could be sold to cover an unpaid debt, and the lender accepts the risk. That the lender trusts that the value will be real at some hypothetical future date following a default does not mean that it is real right now.
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With the caveat that we have to infer what he’s trying to suggest, I think we can conclude Attorney General Peter Neronha is implying Rhode Island isn’t keeping up on electric vehicle charging ports:
Well, yeah. Rhode Island is a small state, geographically, meaning people are never very far from home, and in any event, from what I’ve seen around the state, we’ve already got more charging ports than the population is demanding.
That’s the thing about government-originated “investments.” In the private sector, somebody would see the need for something, as indicated in this case by lines for charging ports or something like that, and invest in a profitable solution. In government, activists decree a standard, and politicians lament that they haven’t met the activists’ expensive standards.
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As I understand it, RealPage offers landlords software for renting out and managing their properties. Like other such software across industries, it uses automation and analytics to help its clients conceptualize their assets and their businesses and squeeze out inefficiencies. Among those services is an algorithm that uses local real estate data, including from its other customers, to help landlords set prices.
As this activist documentary video explains, the U.S. Justice Department — increasingly a partisan, ideological activist organization itself — has filed a lawsuit against the company alleging the algorithm creates a cartel in which landlords “collude to raise rents.” Some clarity about what’s actually happening would be healthier for our country than the most-heated language the lawyers can find, because it seems to me the Justice Department has been corrupted into something like a civic autoimmune disorder, attacking the nation the federal government is supposed to serve.
Without ruling out cartel behavior by some other means, it seems to me that RealPage is simply offering a tool to more-accurately determine the actual market price of landlords’ assets. At the moment, that results in higher rents, but that’s because progressive policy has driven the market price up.
Setting high prices is not “anti-competitive.” Indeed, the opposite is one of the classic forms of genuinely anti-competitive behavior: keeping prices artificially low so that competitors cannot compete. Another form of anti-competitive behavior would be taking steps to prevent others from undercutting the high prices.
The activists, including the involved bureaucrats and attorneys general, elide the difference between price-setting and price-fixing. Businesses typically do keep details of their pricing confidential, but they don’t have to, and price-setting uses available data to figure out what to charge customers. Price-fixing, on the other hand, prevents others from charging less (or more) than the artificial price.
The video states RealPage’s recommended rent isn’t really a suggestion. The company allegedly polices its customers’ rental prices and can, under some conditions, kick them off the platform. Even so, however, landlords don’t have to join RealPage, and nothing prevents another company from offering software without the policing.
To be sure, in an environment of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and massive computing power, we must be vigilant for new ways of cheating, but the default assumption should not be that every advantage gained is a scam. Rather, in the absence of evidence that rules are being broken, technology and techniques that provide an example should be considered innovations to imitate. That’s competition.
Importantly, this does not have to go one way, and it shouldn’t be the end of the story. As landlords use data to find the highest plausible market price, another tool could help renters find the market’s floor. The more-accurately a community knows that range, the better it can balance the true cost of housing with other things and change policy.
Prices are simply an expression of value. If the price of housing is higher than the value the community wants to devote to it, using government or (as the activist video supports) obscurity of information for price-fixing that is artificially low will add distortion when clarity is needed. Too often, obscurity is the goal because the special interests involved want to hide the consequences of their own actions, such as the ill effects of housing regulation.
Addendum: For further consideration of the subject, we might ponder how RealPage’s approach differs from that of labor unions, particularly in the public sector, particularly in education. Nobody in government seems to have a problem when they collude to leapfrog each other for pay and benefits.
Featured image: original photo by Justin Katz.
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But we have to be wary of the political whipsaw. Evan Masse’s tweet was dumb and insensitive, but his practical problem was that he was caught up in what we might call a Democrat call for evidence.
It would be a very normal reaction to pause upon seeing Walz’s son at the Democrat National Convention and observe his filmed reaction was a bit outside of the range for normal behavior, but as the inverted media cliche goes, the Democrats pounced. TwiX was full of lamentations about attacks on the boy, as if there were Republicans holding mockery parties, as opposed to a few marginal comments. Democrats were quickly fundraising off their righteousness.
So of course the news media is going to get the message that they should be out there trying to find related stories, and of course local Democrats are going to be eager for the ammunition. Republicans have to expect that and act accordingly, not only for their own behavior, but also for those with whom they interacdt.
In Rhode Island, the GOP is very accepting and eager for support and help, but members of the party have to be vigilant and to coach those in their midst.
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Katherine Gregg took a look at the current state of the race for leadership of the Rhode Island GOP, and the question that comes to my mind is whether it really matters. On a surface level, the uncertain proposition is that even a functioning GOP could make a difference, which I’m not sure the Rhode Island system would allow anymore.
More deeply, to the extent the RIGOP could make a difference, I’m not sure any of the candidates or commentators — in or out of Gregg’s piece — say anything that indicates they understand the problem. There’s a lot about messaging. Some maligning of Donald Trump as the heart of the problem, and (most usefully) encouragement of the basics of electoral mechanics, such as recruiting and training candidates.
But none of that is adequate. Even great candidates with the right message will be rolled by aggression and deliberately fostered chaos. Those who oppose the establishment in Rhode Island need coherence and the mutual support it fosters. What we need is social, advancing cultural change. The RIGOP can help or hurt in that project, but the real fix isn’t, strictly speaking, political.
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Not long ago, the ladies of The View displayed the number of associates of Donald Trump who have recently* gone to prison as evidence that “the system is working.” We’d be in better condition as a country if more people realized that the very same visual leads to opposite conclusions for different people, creating a dangerous conundrum for building a civic system. My reaction, for instance, is that “the system is working” as a corrupt totalitarian state looking for pretense to jail its opposition, often for actions that are entirely ignored when done by people who are not its opposition.
In the absence of mutual trust in the other side’s fidelity to the fairness of the system, everything has two broad explanations. Either The View’s villains are being prosecuted because they constitute a gang of criminals, or the government is persecuting them because it represents a gang of criminals. The exact same action can be either the rule of law or a crime depending on the perpetrator and the circumstances, and the two tiers are excused in the name of protecting the system.
The difficult question for anybody who wants to step outside the tribes and understand what’s really going on is: How do you tell which is which? It’s not easy, because so many of the measuring sticks are subjective and applied in an environment of necessarily incomplete information. Meanwhile, the partisans rush out to turn the wheel to spin in their preferred direction.
I have my own thoughts on which side is more-fundamentally to blame, but allotting blame shouldn’t be the primary goal. The only solution to renew shared trust is to shrink government as part of a broader effort to disperse power. If we must form different tribes along separate axes, we be both allies and adversaries to everybody else. I might be your ally in local government, but your adversary in private business. I might be an obstacle to your achieving your preferred policy on Y, but an important support for policy Z. The purpose of a charity that you support might promote a cause that is mutually exclusive to the purpose of a charity that I support.
Whether the big-government types are the side responsible for our current distrust, big-government per se definitely is. When “the system” decides everything, fairness and justice become unreasonable restraints on its execution of power.
* Note the relevance of “recently” for analysis. The story would be quite different if these were people sent to prison over decades and under different administrations.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40 and Photoshop AI.
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