A Stitch in Haste

Computer Hacker #1: "Hey look, this vice president makes twice as much as that vice president. I bet they don't know that!"

Computer Hacker #2: "They do now -- I just emailed the entire company!"

--An old IBM commercial

Certain noisy socialists love to remind us that the Scandinavian nations supposedly have a "higher standard of living" than the U.S.

Of course, such calculations do not include factors like this:

Care to find out what your neighbor earned last year, or how much your partner really has stashed in the bank? In Finland you can -- and a lot of people did Wednesday.

Every November when the Nordic nation's tax records of the previous year become public, Finns indulge on a massive scale in satisfying their curiosity about each other's finances.

Newspapers were crammed with lists of the wealthiest and highest-earning men and women in 2004.

Veroporssi, a private firm which offers income details on everyone in Finland via mobile text message, said it was its busiest day of the year and had no time to comment.

Words escape me.

Of course, the next logical question, to the extent logic plays any role here, is why should tax records be public information but not library records, or medical records, or report cards, or credit card statements, or grocery lists, or Netflix queues, etc.

If this is what a nation with a "higher standard of living" considers an appropriate privacy policy, then I'd prefer poverty.


(Click to enlarge.)

A few days ago I noted an obnoxious proposal to rescind the right of voluntary homeowner associations and condominium boards to restrict flag displays on resident property.

Not to be outdone, hack New York State politicians want to abolish not just freedom of contract but also privacy of contract:

The prices paid for co-op apartments in New York City could be made public for the first time under a bill passed last week by the Legislature in Albany. The bill proposes to lift the veil on what has long been a central secret of real estate in the city: how much your neighbor paid.
...
The bill was drafted at the request of the city's Finance Department. It allows the city to make public the information provided on transfer tax forms, including the sales price, bringing co-op sales in line with other real estate transactions, including those involving condominiums and single-family homes.

If the bill becomes law, the information would be available on an online database, and would also include addresses, and the names of the buyers and sellers. In 2003, a similar law went into effect allowing the city to make public the sales prices of all other real estate transactions.

Do words simply not have meaning anymore? How is a private sale of private property between private parties in any way a matter of "public" concern? How is this anything other than "financial voyeurism"?

Or look at it this way: how can anyone assert that transfer tax forms should be made public but that, say, income tax returns should not? (Warning: Don't ask that question in Finland.)

And why should a seller -- who may no longer be a resident of the state (or even alive, for that matter) -- have his name and address made available, to anyone and everyone, years after the transaction? I ask again: exactly what "public interest" is being served here?

There's a difference between running a city and running it into the ground. Only hack politicians could possibly believe that giving people yet another reason not to live here and not to invest here could be a sound policy.

Can you spot the logical flaw in this reasoning?

This year, each of the eight associate justices of the Supreme Court will earn $203,000. The only woman and the only African-American on the court are paid the same as their six white male colleagues. Only Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. earns more than everyone else, $212,100. Their pay is set by Congress, and it is a matter of public record.

Congress should pass legislation mandating that all workplaces create this kind of transparency by requiring companies to post salaries.

One would think it isn't very difficult: You pay a part of John Roberts' salary; you do not pay part of mine. Stated differently: Mind your own damn business!

What kind of dysfunctional thought process would underlie the conclusion that the best way to guarantee the right of non-discrimination (the victims from denial of which are few) is by obliterating the right of privacy (the enjoyers of which are many)? Add to the calculus that "non-discrimination" is strictly a statutory right and that "privacy" is a constitutional right, and the proposal becomes even more absurd.

Agree or disagree all you want with the Supreme Court's recent holding in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire regarding when the statute of limitations for pay discrimination claims should commence. The fundamental jurisprudential premise remains: It is up to the plaintiff to prove her case. The government has no business conscripting innocent bystanders and their private matters in order to prove it for her.

As was my point in this post — it is one thing to drag a defendant kicking and screaming into a courthouse. Should the government really be in the business of pushing plaintiffs into court too?

It is not a proper function of government to ride roughshod over the privacy rights of parties who are both disinterested and uninterested in who makes what. Be disgruntled all you want. Quit if you're unhappy; sue if you've believe you've be wronged.

But leave me and my pay stub out of it.