President Obama held a much-publicized White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford last Friday, culminating with his signing onstage a new executive order calling for “collaboration” between government and technology companies to fight cyber crime.

Tech executives from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook to their credit declined invitations to attend, while Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to advocate for privacy rights.

A far cry from days past when President Obama used Silicon Valley as an ATM machine to refill his campaign coffers. Regardless of how much Obama’s now being a lame duck may account for the change, we can but hope this shift in sentiment in the Valley remains permanent.

The audience attending the summit apparently saw no irony in Mr. Obama’s declaration that:

When people go online, they shouldn’t have to forfeit the basic privacy we’re assured as Americans.

A noble sentiment, agreed, but Mr. Obama bears much of the responsibility for this forfeiture himself, having authorized the government programs under which these basic rights are violated—not once, but repeatedly, including annual re-authorizations of the NDAA, and multiple other programs that result in the wholesale capture and indefinite storage of every detail of every innocent American’s life. Every email, phone call, everyone’s location at any given time, every internet transaction, online search, etc.: you name it, Mr. Obama’s administration is purposely depriving every American of privacy rights every minute of every day—with tech and telecom companies duly “collaborating.”

The further irony apparently lost on the president is that these increasing vulnerabilities to hacking about which he professes to care so much are a direct result of government programs carried out under his authority.

As I had earlier detailed:

“for the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” and “vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.” Decryption, it turns out, works retroactively — once a system is broken, the agencies can look back in time in their databases and read stuff they could not read before.

In short, NSA actively and purposely sets out to weaken encryption standards by “every means available:”

The fact that large amounts of the cryptographic systems that underpin the entire Internet have been intentionally weakened or broken by the NSA and its allies poses a grave threat to the security of everyone who relies on the Internet—from individuals looking for privacy to institutions and companies relying on cloud computing. Many of these weaknesses can be exploited by anyone who knows about them—not just the NSA.

Mr. Obama’s now disingenuously traveling to the heart of Silicon Valley to pose as a champion for online security and privacy thus deserves nothing but for him to be publicly ridiculed.

Further, his call for technology companies to “collaborate” with government ought only call to mind the experience of victims of previous collaborations:

The call should thus be for competition, not collaboration: Individuals’ privacy will be far more likely and better secured by tech companies competing to provide services and devices that protect our privacy—from government as well as hackers.

[The following is from “Freedom’s Presidents,” a symposium for Presidents’ Day 2015, published by The Freeman. Reprinted with permission.]

John Tyler was generally in favor of limiting government — both domestically and internationally — much to the chagrin of his own Whig Party. It advocated a revival of the national bank and high tariffs, both of which would fund federal canals and roads. As an unelected president who had taken over after William Henry Harrison had died only a month into his term, Tyler exhibited amazing political courage in vetoing his own party’s platform. In the process, his cabinet resigned. His party expelled him and then unsuccessfully tried to impeach him. Tyler, like many of the best American presidents who stuck by their principles, was not asked back for a second term.

Grave threats over there

President’s words will save us

He says, bombs away!

***

Copies of Kuran

Body parts of boys and girls

Blood of one and all

***

Do unto others . . .

But this is a special case

Shoot first, sleep soundly

As tech CEOs gather with President Obama and other government officials at today’s White House Cyber Summit at Stanford University, it is important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind who they are breaking bread with.

A case in point: Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), wrote a letter recently to Larry Page, CEO of Google, to complain about the Waze app’s ability to track the location of police officers.

Waze is a wildly popular mobile app, owned by Google, that lets users type in their destination address, and, while driving with the app open on their phone, passively contribute real-time traffic data. Users can also actively report accidents, traffic jams, police locations, or any road hazard by tapping buttons, giving other users in the area a heads-up.

It’s the police-location feature that Beck opposes.

Earlier today I was looking through some old records, and I came across a flyer for a symposium in which I participated at Seattle University early in 1990. The flyer announced the symposium topic by asking: “A $3 Trillion National Debt: Does It Matter? What Can We Do About It?” The topic seemed timely enough, given that the gross federal debt had just passed the $3 trillion mark for the first time and was rising at a brisk pace. Back then, $3 trillion seemed like “real money,” so some people were rightly concerned about the consequences of such large and growing public indebtedness.

At the time, I occupied the Thomas F. Gleed Chair in the university’s Albers School of Business and Economics. The symposium was sponsored by the Political Science Department and featured three speakers: besides me, there was my friend and colleague Richard Young, a professor of political science, and a political hack by the name of Mike Lowry, who had a loose attachment to the university under the aegis of its Institute of Public Service. Lowry had previously served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and had twice failed in his attempts to gain election to the U.S. Senate. Being a man who almost visibly lusted after high office, however, he did not give up his attempts to get elected to some political position, and in 1992 he managed to get himself elected governor of the state, a position he held for a four-year term (1993-97). A sexual-harassment scandal derailed his desire for reelection as governor. (In Washington state, allegations of sexual harassment go further to ruin a man than such run-of-the-mill offenses as conviction for robbery or murder.)

Imagine that there are two providers of the same service. Their quality and timeliness are comparable. However, one provider charges significantly more than the other. In a normally functioning market, you would expect that the more expensive provider would have to significantly change its cost structure to stay in business.

What if the more expensive provider argued that it had higher overhead, and therefore needed and deserved to be paid more? He would be laughed out of the marketplace. Yet, this is exactly what happens in Medicare. Because of different fee schedules, doctors in independent practice are paid less for the same procedure than hospital-based outpatient facilities. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in hospitals buying up physician practices, in order to profit from this arbitrage:

“The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.” —Julian Simon

February 12 marks the birthday of the late economist Julian Simon (1932–1998). On this special occasion, I wish to bring attention to this thinker whose work I feel has not been fully appreciated. The implications of his controversial but time-tested ideas certainly deserve greater attention in academia and society at large.

Simon is perhaps best known for his famous wager against ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the notorious best-seller The Population Bomb.

The minimum wage is an economic nightmare.

Let’s say it one more time, with feeling.

The minimum wage is an economic nightmare.

In the recent elections, voters throughout the U.S. took to the polls to elect their political leaders. Winners and losers were decided, the Republicans took control of the Senate, and pundits eagerly anticipate how the new political landscape will impact the U.S.

Voters also voiced their opinions on several specific issues. Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. voted to legalize recreational marijuana. Voters in four states, Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota voted to raise the minimum wage. Over the coming months, these states will raise workers’ required pay to as much as $9.75 an hour. The city of San Francisco voted to raise their minimum wage to a whopping $15 an hour.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) publishes statistics on police-involved homicides, while on duty, of civilians. Its system relies on voluntary self-reporting by the nation’s more than 18,000 local and state police agencies.

Self-reporting works well when there is an incentive to report and an incentive to report accurately. But police departments have no incentive to report this emotionally charged information with possible political ramifications. As a result, some groups have alleged that official FBI numbers undercount the true number of police-related homicides. Thanks to a group of tech entrepreneurs, there is now evidence suggesting government numbers are flawed.

A handful of independent crowd-sourced websites aggregate user-submitted local reports of police-involved homicides. Matthew Green, editor of the blog “The Lowdown: Decoding the News,” part of San Francisco’s NPR affiliate KQED, examined information on one of these crowdsourcing websites, Killed By Police (a Facebook site).

For as long as political and ideological movements have sought to engage large followings, they have embraced slogans and catch phrases that give pithy expression to their views, aversions, and objectives. Slogans are dangerous in that they substitute rote declarations for serious thought, yet they may sometimes serve a purpose even for thoughtful people as rhetorical hammers with which one hits potential listeners in the head to get their attention. In any event, it seems that slogans and politicking are inseparable under both democratic and revolutionary conditions. So, one must pick and choose. The following are two short lists of slogans and other such utterances that repel or attract me.