Monthly Archives: May 2010

Please Don’t Wake the Sleeping Bureaucrat

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Proving that the elves of Washington never sleep, the FCC moved to defy the DC Court of Appeals, which last month ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to impose ‘net neutrality’ on internet providers like Comcast. Whoever thinks Washington bureaucrats are lazy does not know how to motivate them: simply try to impose legal and constitutional boundaries to their authority. The FCC took less than a month from the time the DC Circuit struck down its authority over the internet to formulate a sleazy workaround, publish the sleazy workaround, and trumpet the sleazy workaround in the press. This from an organization that took years to shut off old fashioned TV and then delayed it several more months out of an abundance of caution. The important lesson is that Washington’s sleeping bureaucrats are best not disturbed.

As Shout Bits discussed regarding the EPA, the FCC is an expert agency. Expert agencies are created by Congress and then take on lives of their own. The FCC is generally empowered to interfere with all aspects of the telephone business. The FCC’s stranglehold on innovation is such that a 90 year old telephone must still work when connected to today’s network. Ever wonder why long distance calls are free on a cell phone, but not a home phone? The FCC’s rules effectively outlaw the kind of innovation found in wireless and VOIP services. Of course, the FCC wants to do for the internet what it has done to the plain old telephone.

For those who think the internet works OK as is, a little background on Washington regulation. As Shout Bits reported, in 2007, Comcast was caught secretly slowing down the traffic of its customers who were sharing very large files – bit torrent traffic. Internet content companies like Google manufactured outrage; while Comcast claimed that it was trying to prevent a small number of its customers from slowing down access for everyone else. Over a nearly two year (not 30 day) period, the FCC issued regulations to control the likes of Comcast, and along the way regulate internet content.

Fortunately Comcast sued the FCC and won. It is quite a mystery why companies sue regulatory agencies, for the outcome is invariably enough to make Pyrrhus shrug and go home. Washington bureaucrats never lose. Every time, when faced with court defeats they rewrite the rules to have the same impact without running afoul of the courts. The FCC has played this game over and over, rewriting the same rules, having them struck down, and rewriting them again. When ordered to rewrite an illegal rule, the FCC can delay compliance for years, tempting sanctions normally reserved for organized criminals. While Washington bureaucrats are indeed corrupt, Comcast seems foolish to challenge them.

Still Comcast did challenge the FCC, and won. The court found that the FCC could not regulate net-neutrality because Congress forbade them from doing so. The FCC’s response? The internet is no longer the internet. The FCC, rather than simply move on to other power grabs, simply reclassified the internet into a brand new category of regulation beyond the law’s reach. Even though nobody noticed, the internet was reborn this week into a third variety of service that the FCC hopes it can control.

What gives the FCC the right, on 30 days’ notice, to declare a whole new field of regulation? The true culprit is Congress that routinely abdicates is responsibilities and punts them over to the hidden gnomes of Washington. The result is a rule of man, not law. The FCC does not answer to the courts. The EPA can regulate carbon against the will of the People or Congress. This week’s FCC ruling on net-neutrality reveals more than the government’s desire to regulate internet content. The FCC bared its fangs and showed how much Washington bureaucrats covet their shadowy powers. If the FCC would make such a bald faced power grab over internet traffic, what might the new legions of Obama Care regulators do to control medicines? Congress must restrain these rogue regulators that limit prosperity and insult liberty with their arrogance.

Immigration Echo Chamber

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In the wake of Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, people of all parties are up in arms. The law has been called fascist, racist, misguided, and so on. Democrats are making political hay over the law despite the fact that based on its high approval in Arizona, many Democrats must be in favor of it. Republicans are being forced by their base to hammer this issue, drawing attention away from Pres. Obama’s socialist agenda. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of the US to protest the law. So what is all the fuss?

The’ close the border’ crowd states that the US’s closed immigration laws are the law and therefore must be enforced. It is also illegal to spit on the sidewalk or jaywalk. What is so special about the immigration law among the thousands of laws people ignore every day? It must be more than illegals simply being illegal.

Is it the harm and expense immigrants cause the economy? A prior Shout Bits debunked that myth. Immigrants most often pay taxes by using fake Social Security Numbers. They engage in illegalities less frequently than natives, and live in stable traditional families. Additionally, the vast majority of illegals work for more than the minimum wage, so they are not driving down wages or stealing jobs. Indeed, because immigrants tend to be young, they are delaying the collapse of Social Security and Medicare.

Some TV pundits like to say they aren’t anti-immigrant, but they are anti-illegal-immigration. This is a false argument because there is effectively no legal immigration for the vast majority of people. It takes well over a decade of waiting for an ordinary alien to gain permission to work in the US. The rate of immigrants allowed by the current law is statistically equivalent to zero compared to the demand for their labor. The only practical way to live a better life for many people is to break the immigration laws.

Is the ruckus due to the violence along the border? Again, it is not the fault of the honest immigrants that drug cartels take advantage of the US border. With over 10 million illegals in the US, separating them from the few thousand criminals is impossible. On the other hand, if the US had a more open legal immigration system for the honest immigrants, identifying and isolating the criminal illegals would be far more practical. Ending the completely failed and hopeless war on drugs would also go a long way to reducing border violence. Any plan to secure the border must include an open legal immigration process or else law enforcement will be overwhelmed.

The troubles associated with illegal immigrants are the fault of laws and policies that cannot be enforced and would do no good for the US even if they were enforced. Honest immigrants who want to work, pay taxes, and raise families are an asset to the US. Isolating and subjugating them is the cause of the problem.

Another sign that the ‘enforce the law’ body is off base is that they have absolutely no practical plan on how to enforce the law. Millions of existing illegal immigrants already in the US have US Citizen children, own homes and businesses, and are established in their communities. It is impossible to round up these people and deport them without a devastating humanitarian crisis. The ‘enforce the law’ people gloss over this critical fact. Any practical immigration reform must include something like the dreaded amnesty. Anything else is simply impossible.

The anti-immigrant forces really have no practical, factual, or logical argument. Why the angst? Shout Bits’s guess is that in these troubled times, some people are fearful of the competition and change immigration brings. Opportunistic politicians and pundits are stoking these fears, but everyone in the US is better off because of immigration. Rather than perpetuate a broken and unworkable system, serious people should work toward open and legal immigration for the benefit of both immigrants and the US as a whole.