The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Financial Times reports, “is proposing to cap overdraft fees at as low as $3, potentially saving consumers billions of dollars a year and stepping up US President Joe Biden’s war on so-called junk fees ahead of the 2024 election.”

The simple version, for those unfamiliar with overdraft fees:

You have $100 in your bank account. You write a check or swipe your debit card for a purchase coming to $101. Instead of bouncing the check or declining the debit transaction, the bank covers the overage (bringing your account balance to $-1) and charges you an additional fee (putting your account even more into negative territory). Later, when you deposit your $500 paycheck, your account balance goes up not by $500, but by $500 minus that dollar overdraft and the fee.

The “problem” of overdraft fees (which can indeed be onerous — the Indiana Business Journal says they averaged $26.61, and could go as high as $39, last year) has always had two simple, easy, and long-used solutions.

The first such solution is for customers to not attempt to spend more  money than they have in their accounts.

The second is for banks to decline overdraft transactions.

In fact, many if not most banks already offer “no overdraft checking accounts” which inform the customer up front that overdraft transactions WILL be declined.

An even simpler explanation of overdrafts: They’re instant loans from your bank, and the fees are service and interest charges on those loans.

Don’t want to pay those service and interest charges? Don’t borrow the money. If you don’t trust yourself to not borrow the money, open an account that won’t LET you borrow the money. “Problem” solved.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the CFPB’s mission is to actively and intentionally make life harder for poor people (as with its war on “payday loan” operations), or whether that’s just a side effect of good-hearted but idiotic and unnecessary ideas. Even though I oppose giving the CFPB any power whatsoever or even allowing it to exist at all, I’m going to generously start from the latter premise here.

Some people occasionally see a need to overdraft their accounts. Maybe rent comes due on the first of the month, but a paycheck isn’t going to hit until the third of the month, and an unexpected emergency room bill put the customer in a cash crunch situation.

Capping overdraft fees may seem helpful, but will actually result in more banks simply not allowing overdrafts at all — in the rent hypothetical described above, likely costing the customer more  due to late fees owed the landlord.

The cap proposal won’t “protect consumers.” It’s about pretending to protect them for political gain, but working to their actual detriment.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In January of 2022, Lulu Cheng-Meservey — at the time, Vice President of Communication for Substack, though she’s since moved on to a similar role at Activision Blizzard — wrote on Twitter (now known as “X”):

“At Substack, we don’t make moderation decisions based on public pressure or PR considerations. An important principle for us is defending free expression, even for stuff we personally dislike or disagree with. … We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That can’t happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong.”

Not quite a year later, Substack finds itself losing writers, and likely bleeding revenue, in a “can’t win for losing” scenario.

In November, The Atlantic alleged the existence of “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters” on the Substack platform.

Since then, Substack has gone from defending Ms. Cheng-Meservey’s position to taking action against such content based on the “hate speech” prohibitions in its terms of service, in the process pleasing virtually no one.

Some content creators are leaving because they don’t want to share a platform with content they deem offensive. After all, they might find themselves tarrred with guilt by association.

Others are leaving because they don’t trust a platform that lets public pressure determine its content policies. After all, they might eventually turn up on the list of targets themselves.

Of course, the word “censorship” keeps popping up to describe any and all refusals by platforms (including Substack) to let users publish whatever they damn well please.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: It’s not “censorship.” Censorship involves government force, intimidation, etc.

If I tell you you can’t sing “Auld Lang Syne,” period, I’m trying to censor you.

If I tell you you can’t sing “Auld Lang Syne” at 3am in my living room, I’m just setting terms for use of my living room, and you’re free to go sing it on the nearest streetcorner or at your local tavern’s karaoke night event.

While I’m completely OK with the latter (in fact, I have a side gig moderating comments at a popular web site based on guidelines that forbid, among other things, “hate speech”), I don’t like the idea of platforms setting guidelines, but enforcing or not enforcing them based on public outcry.

Yes, Substack has a financial bottom line to guard. And yes, that may mean making hard decisions. But operating in obedience to a “Heckler’s Veto” is probably a bad business decision in the long term, and it’s damaging to public discourse — in the same way as real, i.e. government, censorship —  in the short term.

Substack needs to decide whether it’s an open platform or an activist-curated walled garden. It can’t be both.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“It’s the opening of a Pandora’s Box,” Donald Trump said on January 9, musing on the possibility of a court rejecting his claim that, as a former president, he must enjoy life-long immunity from criminal prosecution for pretty much anything and everything he did while in office.

“[I]f I wasn’t given immunity, then other presidents that we talked about today, President Obama with the drone strikes, which were really bad. They were mistakes, they were terrible mistakes. You really can’t put a president in that position. … A president has to have immunity.”

Personally, I’d like to see that Pandora’s Box opened in precisely the way Trump mentions.

In 2011, then-president Barack Obama ordered the murder of an American citizen — Anwar al-Awlaki — in Yemen. Whatever his alleged crimes might have been, he hadn’t been charged with, arrested for (or taken in resistance of arrest for), tried for, or convicted of those crimes in the United States. The basis for the murder was a Justice Department memo that wasn’t publicly released until 2014.

Later that year al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman — also an American citizen — died in another Obama-authorized drone strike. When questioned on the matter, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blamed the victim for having the wrong father.

In 2017,  US Navy SEALs murdered yet a third al-Awlaki — eight-year-old American citizen Nawar, Anwar’s daughter and Abdulrahman’s half-sister — in a raid approved by … hmm … then president Donald Trump.

What’s so outrageous about suggesting that a president who orders American citizens murdered should be held to answer in the same way, and face the same penalties, as a Mafia don who orders a competitor killed, or a regular American who hires a hit-man to murder a spouse?

Over time, American presidents have come to enjoy nearly unlimited power with little likelihood of being held accountable for how they exercise that power, and minimal penalties when they are.

Trump argues that that small likelihood and those minimal penalties should both be reduced to zero.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that former presidents accused of crimes are entitled to the due process of law they denied Anwar, Abdulrhman, and Nawar al-Awlaki.

But broad  immunity for real crimes isn’t due process of law.  In fact, it DENIES due process of law, and justice in general, to the victims of presidential crimes.

Presidents should be held to a higher, not lower, standard of conduct than those they presume to rule.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY