The better angels of our nature

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

-- James Madison (1788), The Federalist No. 51

Why is this of any particular relevance?

Privacy experts fear Donald Trump accessing global surveillance network

Concerns raised that current US and UK surveillance system is ‘ripe for further abuse under an autocratic, power-obsessed president’

Privacy activists, human rights campaigners and former US security officials have expressed fears over the prospect of Donald Trump gaining access to the vast global US and UK surveillance network.(...) “There have been some people who were complacent about things like drone killing of US civilians and mass surveillance under Obama, because they trusted him. That wilful neglect on their part is about to come back and possibly bite all of us in the ass,” said Nick Merrill, the executive director of the Calyx Institute, a technology focused research group that promotes encryption tools.

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s lawyer who works for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “The danger of the aggregation of executive power we have seen over the last decade is that we might have an executive who is not worthy of that trust. This has been a trend in the US but there has been a weakening of constitutional oversight during the growth of the national security state. “I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful.”

Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who predated Snowden, offered an equally bleak assessment. He said: “The electronic infrastructure is fully in place – and ex post facto legalised by Congress and executive orders – and ripe for further abuse under an autocratic, power-obsessed president. History is just not kind here. Trump leans quite autocratic. The temptations to use secret NSA surveillance powers, some still not fully revealed, will present themselves to him as sirens.”

The US have been excessively complacent about the lack of proper balance between individual freedom and security for far too long, and now it's probably too late to go back.

Edit 13/11: Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them

No shit

Edit 13/11: Web Summit não vai fazer acontecer nada em Lisboa

The New York Times and the Holocaust

That's some really shitty press you got there, America:

It turns out the prediction Hitler made in his Obersalzberg speech was correct:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?

"Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos"

A dupla Chávez/Maduro alcançou o extraordinário feito de tornar a Venezuela num país sub-saariano no espaço de 15 anos:

land of opportunity no more (2)

U.S. Raises Fee To Expatriate By 422% A Second Time

When the news broke a year ago that the U.S. was hiking the fee to renounce U.S. citizenship by 422% there was a backlash. If anything, the uptick in American expatriations grew rather than declined. The U.S. State Department said raising the fee for renunciation of U.S. citizenship is about demand and paperwork. Perhaps, but a hike from $450 to $2,350 is still steep. That is more than twenty times the average level in other high-income countries. The State Department complains about demand on their services and all the extra workload they have to process people who are on their way out.

Even worse, for the second time in a year, the State Department just did another hike. You can view it as yet another 422%. In fairness, the State Department presumably believes it is just bringing the fees into parity. Up until now, there was the enhanced $2,350 fee for renouncing, and a smaller $450 fee for relinquishment. It may be a distinction without a difference. As the State Department put it, it was just harmonizing the two, which are similar in any case. In short, it the fee is now the same $2,350 whether you are renouncing or relinquishing.

land of opportunity no more

Sources: 

(1) More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S. (Pew Research)

(2) Record Number of U.S. Citizens, Green-Card Holders Cut Ties With U.S. in 2015 (Wall Street Journal)

high taxation and cartels

A Primer on Tax Havens (Dan Mitchell)

What we’re seeing throughout the world today are international bureaucracies and politicians from high-tax nations launching a very coordinated attack against these jurisdictions. In effect, what’s happening is that the high-tax nations of the world want to set up something equivalent to OPEC. But instead of a cartel to keep energy prices high on behalf of oil producing countries, it’s an effort by politicians in high-tax nations to create a cartel that will keep taxes high.

Most economists recognize that cartels are a bad idea. And if it’s a bad idea for there to be cartels in the private sector, it’s a horrible idea to have cartels among governments; and yet that’s what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Commission, and various politicians from high-tax nations are trying to do.

The problem is, politicians for the most part don’t like low-tax policies. How do politicians win elections, how do they reward contributors, how do they steer money to their supporters? They do it by imposing high tax rates and then using the money to divvy up among those that are on their side. So why are they trying to attack tax havens? Because tax havens are the most powerful instrument of tax competition. (...)

Today, labor and capital are a lot more mobile, which means that taxpayers around the world have options to move either themselves or their money across borders if governments are trying to impose high tax rates. (...)

The number-one thing on the OECD’s list is no or nominal taxes. So if you are a free-market, laissez-faire jurisdiction with a low tax burden, the OECD wants to punish you. There is no blacklist from the OECD of high-tax countries—the countries that are actually punishing growth and impoverishing people with bad policy. No, there’s only a blacklist of jurisdictions that are doing the right thing. But it’s not just the OECD. The European Commission has all sorts of various anti-tax competition, pro-tax harmonization schemes.

By the way, I can’t resist pointing out the irony of something. If you work for the OECD, you get a very generous salary, and you work in an elaborate chateau over in Paris. And guess what? By international treaty, you pay no tax. So we have these well-fed bureaucrats working at the OECD in the nice chateau—with its own private wine cellar—and they fly around the world in business class telling jurisdictions with low taxes that they’re doing something wrong and should be blacklisted, and yet these bureaucrats pay zero tax. (...)

When you listen to the politicians, what do they always say? “We’re trying to stamp out tax evasion.” Well, all the academic evidence out there says one thing: tax evasion is linked to one variable—tax rates. You can shut down all the low-tax jurisdictions, but it’s not going to affect tax compliance so long as tax rates are high.

Security paper tigers (2)

Time to close the TSA

When the Transportation Security Administration dispatched undercover investigators last spring to test the effectiveness of airport checkpoints, the results were deplorable. Agents posing as passengers were able to smuggle weapons and mock explosives through 67 out of 70 TSA checkpoints — a failure rate of 95 percent. Following that debacle, the TSA’s acting administrator was given the boot, and the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had “immediately directed TSA to implement a series of actions, several of which are now in place, to address the issues raised in the report.”

That was in June. In July, a new TSA chief pledged to lawmakers that within 60 days “we will have trained the failure out of the front line” of airport screening personnel. So how do things stand four months later? The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on that question last week, with Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth as the key witness. Roth reported the final results of the the undercover testing at US airports, and he didn’t beat about the bush. “The test results were disappointing and troubling,” he said. “The results were consistent across every airport. . . . The failures included failures in the technology, failures in TSA procedures, and human error. We found layers of security simply missing.’’ (...)

Fourteen years after the creation of the TSA, there is still no indication that the agency has ever caught a terrorist, or foiled a 9/11-type plot in the offing. Conversely, there are reams of reports documenting the inability of TSA screeners to spot hidden guns, knives, bomb components, and other dangerous contraband as they pass through airport checkpoints. It’s doubtful that anyone is still capable of being surprised by a fresh confirmation of the TSA’s incompetence — even if members of Congress do sometimes feign alarm for the sake of the folks back home.