December 2019

The Fed Overreaches With Real-Time Payment Systems

The Daily Caller

By Bob Barr

December 16, 20197:00 AM ET

As a former member of Congress who served eight years on the Financial Services Committee, I have long been concerned with the lack of transparency and unchecked authority enjoyed by the Federal Reserve System, when it comes to the manner by which it “manages” our nation’s financial system. The “Fed” was created by statute more than a century ago and has become the de facto “Central Bank of the United States,” largely immune from the checks and balances that to a large degree keep Congress and presidents accountable to voters.

This never has been a healthy state of affairs, and if anything, may be worsening.

In what is an admission both startling and frightening in its implications, in recent congressional testimony the Fed as much as admitted its decisions have in fact damaged our economy. Earlier this month, the Fed testified before Congress that its poor oversight and supervisory practices over the banking industry were a likely reason the Fed found it necessary to provide market liquidity for the first time since the financial crisis a decade ago.

Fed Vice Chair Randal Quarles, appearing before the House Financial Services Committee said, “We have identified some areas where our existing supervision of the regulatory framework … may have created some incentives that were contributors.” He admitted to lawmakers that decisions by the Fed, “were probably not the decisive contributors, but they were contributors, and I think we need to examine them.” If history is any guide, the rest of us should best not hold our breath waiting for the Fed to actually do something.

The concern here is not one that should be viewed through the partisan lens by which virtually every issue coming before today’s Congress is considered.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office recently concluded that some of the Fed’s self-styled “guidance” actually is “designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy.” Stripped of its veneer of bureaucratese, the GAO has put its finger on a serious problem – the Federal Reserve is inventing its own rules. And in so doing, extending even further its power over the financial sector.

A perfect example of this type of power grab is a plan by the Fed to create a national “real-time payment system.” In financial parlance, “real-time payments” refers to banking actions that allow for financial transactions to be processed immediately, rather than the next business day as has been the practice for decades. The private banking sector – actually following earlier Fed directive – has been busy over the past biennium implementing an RTP system, which is anticipated to connect 100 percent of banking transactions by the end of this year.

Rather than simply let the private banking sector continue to implement a workable, market-based real-time payment system, the Fed, on its own and contrary to federal law, is inserting itself arrogantly into this process – moving not to compete with, but to override private sector initiatives.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute has pointed out, the 1980 Monetary Control Act provides that the Fed may launch its own payment services only if “the service is one that other providers alone cannot be expected to provide with reasonable effectiveness, scope, and equity.”

Clearly, the private banking sector is providing an effective, fair and comprehensive real-time payment system. Yet, despite being explicitly prohibited from overriding that process, the Fed continues moving forward with its own RTP initiative. When Congress questioned this action, the Fed simply has refused to answer whether it will ensure its RTP system will be fully interoperable with that of the private sector.

Here again, when the fog is waved away, this is yet another ploy by the Fed to bulldoze the private sector and create a monopoly for itself. It can do this thanks to the power it wields to “manage” the nation’s economy and finances by forcing private sector financial institutions to play only by its rules.

Efficiency and innovation – characteristics of the private sector but rarely the government – will be the victims if the Fed is permitted to force its own, one-size-fits-all real-time payment system onto all federally-regulated financial institutions. It is important that the Congress step up and do what it rarely does – engage the Fed in meaningful oversight and follow up. This should be something on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, even if for different reasons.

Bob Barr represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the https://laweef.org/.

Trump’s Labor Department Should Let Big Tech Off The Hook For Obama-Era Offenses

The Daily Caller

By Bob Barr

December 09, 20199:45 AM ET

The Trump administration has performed admirably in reducing the regulatory red tape that has strangled American businesses and limited our country’s competitiveness. But for reasons not entirely clear, the Department of Labor has lagged behind other agencies in this regard.

One clear example is the way the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has continued unnecessary and counterproductive Obama-era litigation against tech companies for alleged discriminatory wage and hiring practices.

To some extent, the Labor Department’s hesitancy to retreat from a series of lawsuits against Google, Oracle, and other tech giants initiated by the prior administration can be explained by President Trump’s first Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s cozy relationship with the Washington establishment. Thankfully, Acosta’s replacement, Eugene Scalia, son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who took over the reins at the sprawling bureaucracy at the end of September, is no friend of the nanny state.

OFCCP is the Great Society-era agency established to ensure private companies that contract with Uncle Sam do so without discriminatory hiring, employment or wage practices. Over the decades, this agency has taken steps to reform federal contracting policies in this regard. But its overall record has been mixed, especially in recent years.

In a 2017 study, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed that the OFCCP’s mission to ensure discriminatory-free practices by corporate partners was “worthy.” At the same time, however, the report set forth in extensive detail that the OFCCP in recent years had become enamored of faulty, statistics-based challenges to companies engaged in federal contracts and had repeatedly abused its powerful remedy of threatening to debar companies alleged to engage in statistical discrimination.

A number of lawsuits reflecting this abusive approach to regulatory enforcement were filed against large tech companies in the waning months of the Obama administration. Palantir Technologies was hit with a federal lawsuit in September 2016; alleging it had engaged in unlawful hiring practices. This was followed three months later, in early January 2017, when the Department of Labor sued Google and then, just two days before President Trump was sworn in, Oracle.

In these cases, and others, the Labor Department’s contract compliance arm appears to have relied on raw statistical evidence that the companies discriminated in hiring and wage policies. This is a flawed legal strategy that fails to consider the myriad other relevant and legitimate factors employed by companies — especially those as large as Google or Oracle — in evaluating applicants and employees for jobs and wages.

Additionally, the OFCCP has a habit of hitting targeted companies with unreasonable and hugely expensive document requests, and consistently refusing to engage in good-faith efforts to resolve disagreements short of protracted litigation.

Despite risking regulatory retaliation by the government, one company being challenged by OFCCP — Oracle — has gone on the offense. Just last month, for example, the company sued the Labor Department in federal court; alleging the OFCCP was engaged in long-running abuse of its powers, to such a degree that the company’s constitutional rights had been violated.

That a company would be forced into taking such a drastic and potentially costly measure, demonstrates how far OFCCP and its parent Department have strayed from the declared goal of working with private companies doing business with the federal government to ensure non-discrimination in corporate practices. Its litigation-based strategy illustrates that the Labor Department instead has become — like many federal agencies — a regulatory bully searching for ways to punish companies.

The agency’s new director, Craig Leen, who has ties to former Acosta, has sent the corporate world mixed signals in this regard. In congressional testimony just three months ago, on Sept. 19, Leen indicated in broad terms support for transparent and cooperative enforcement policies. At the same time, however, he praised the use of “statistical analyses” as a legal tool to establish “proof of a pattern or practice of discrimination.”

Hopefully, Leen’s two bosses — Donald Trump and Eugene Scalia — will step in and make sure that the small but powerful agency he heads gets on board the administration’s drive to actually reduce federal regulatory burdens, and ensure compliance with the law and our Constitution in a manner far more fair and productive than has been the case in recent years.

Bob Barr represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the LEEF.

DECEMBER 11, 2019
A Snowflake’s Christmas Story
Bob Barr
12/11/2019 12:01:00 AM – Bob Barr

In the 36-years since Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story first appeared on the big screen, the movie has become as much a part of the Christmas season as Santa himself. More than just a charming holiday movie, A Christmas Story captures a time in America where kids could be kids; free to roam, daydream, tussle, and yes, even nearly lose an eye, without them (or their parents) being thrown into handcuffs or hauled in front of a family court magistrate. But no longer.

Today’s child-rearing environment, dominated by a combination of helicopter parents and overzealous nanny staters, allows no such freedom or independence for kids. From the earliest ages, today’s children are thrust into government-run schools where they’re put through horrific “school shooting drills.” They are told global warming will render the planet unhabitable by the time they reach adulthood. And, as for burning off this nervous energy? Not a chance. Recess, if not already eliminated, has dwindled in many school districts to just 15 minutes of rigidly structured time, with traditional games like tag and dodgeball banned for being “too mean.”

Of course, today’s snowflake culture does not get any easier for kids outside the school walls. Killjoy government officials have literally made trick-or-treating a crime for kids over a certain age, and similarly have outlawed throwing snowballs. Even make believe is potentially a criminal act in public. Recently, one Minnesota child was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for his fantasy adventures in a park, when busybody citizens caused a stir online with irrational panic about a “masked predator.” The adult idiocy prompted police to investigate; and instead of dismissing the charges as a patently absurd reaction of adults to the imagination of a shy child, the judge gave him 10 hours of chores.

One must ask to what end this snowflake culture serves? Who are they protecting when playing in the woods results in an expensive and traumatizing legal mishap, or a snowball fight among friends can land kids in jail? The helicopter parents’ and nanny staters’ obsession with a one-size-fits-all prototype for how all children should act, is breaking children in order to fit them into this mold, and punishing them with adult-size penalties when they rebel.

Children today are suspended from school for making finger guns on the playground. In this environment, little Ralphie Parker’s boyhood fascination with the Red Ryder air rifle would not only have him expelled, but also pumped full of Adderall and enrolled in mandated counseling to work out his violent, “toxic masculinity.”

There is some small relief in seeing that some adults are raising the alarm about the extreme emotional trauma caused by this asinine behavior; questioning the long-term harm of mass shooting drills or telling kids the world is going to end if they don’t skip school to protest Republicans. But what about the rest of the rules, regulations, and processes designed to inhibit the natural behaviors of adolescence? Do these people really think there won’t be long-term consequences to this artificial, and largely politically motivated behavior manipulation? Or is that precisely their goal?

Confounding in stupidity as these examples may be, it is frightening to think they represent only those events actually making the news; meaning, they barely scratch the surface of a much broader and deeper social trend. And, while some of us may guffaw at the failures of parents, police and government officials in the anecdotal stories at hand, connecting the dots among them creates a disturbing picture of an American society losing its quintessential grit in favor of some warped utopia of adolescence in America. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World seems to have arrived at last, 87 years after its publication.

Is it any wonder millennial adults today are utterly incapable of surviving in a workplace that does not offer them constant validation and safe spaces? In freeing them of any supposed emotional or physical “danger” during early adulthood and adolescence, they fail to develop natural defenses to challenges and unpleasantness that life presents to all of us. They are destined to go through life like Ralphie’s little brother, Randy; bundled from head to toe, and barely able to move with the layers of protection wrapped around them.

In today’s society, snowflakes would never allow the Parkers to survive. They would rather see Ralphie dragged to Drag Queen Story Hour than allowed to spend his time playfighting Black Bart in the back yard. Ralphie’s dad – whose prized possession was a ridiculous, schlocky lamp in the shape of a stocking-covered female leg – would find himself vilified by the #metoo movement and run out of town.

If produced according to today’s insipid snowflake criteria, A Christmas Story would be a complete bore; robbed of all the magic and joy that made it a timeless holiday staple. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what snowflakes are doing with real childhood.