December 16, 2009
More info on the RAF cuts
Lewis Page finds the MoD’s recently announced cuts to — shock, horror — make good military and economic sense:
It doesn’t happen often, but just for once there’s good news out of the Ministry of Defence — good news for British troops in combat overseas, and good news for British taxpayers too. But it’s bad news for the UK arms biz, and bad news for certain regional communities who rely on the MoD to bring them government money they wouldn’t otherwise receive — and don’t particularly deserve.
So what’s the government done?
In essence, they have cut down massively on military things which we don’t — and almost certainly won’t — need, and ordered a lot of things which we are desperately short of.
Other than the reduction of the RAF’s Harrier force by one squadron, the government also indicated they may cut the Tornado force by one or two squadrons. This is sensible because the Tornado was designed to do a job that no longer needs to be done — or, rather, no longer needs to be done by manned bombers. Another big change is that the RAF will be losing their Nimrod aircraft, which has both military and political aspects:
Quite apart from all that, the Nimrod MR2 — being a flying antique — is horribly expensive to run, both in money and in lives. The MR2’s extensive use above Afghanistan in recent times as a flying spyeye and to relay radio messages between ground units in no way justified its continued, very expensive existence; far less could such unimportant work possibly have justified the known risks of refuelling these aged birds in mid-air.
So getting rid of the MR2s loses us nothing important, and will make our service people noticeably safer — the Nimrod has actually killed one of our people for every 15 killed by the Taliban. Better still, this will permit another pricey airbase here in the UK to largely close, saving money to be spent at the front line. As a fringe benefit, the base in question — RAF Kinloss — is in a Scottish National Party constituency, giving people there a taste of the independence from the UK that they have voted for. (Strangely the local SNP member of parliament still isn’t happy**.)
How do you deal with unwanted automated calls?
The phone rang a minute ago, with the long-distance ring. When I picked it up, I got a pre-recorded message starting with “This is an important message about your credit card account. We have attempted to contact you . . .” I’m sure most of you in the GTA get similar calls on a regular basis.
I just hung up, but I wonder if there’s a better way of dealing with this sort of harassment (it’s never a company you already have dealings with). If I just left the phone off the hook and let the recorded message play out, would I tie up more of their resources? Might I even get a human waiting on the other end after I didn’t hang up on the automated portion of the call?
Is the petty revenge (however theoretical it might be) worthwhile? After all, they used misleading information (“my” credit card) to try to get my attention. Is it fair play to reverse the gambit and pretend they’ve got a chance of getting my business?
QotD: The importance of markets
America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted “roll back” — dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted détente — which is French for “surrender.” The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise. America had but to be patient.
Kennan may have been the first to realize that a society based on Communism would not survive politically, but it was Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 work Socialism, who demonstrated that any such society could not survive economically.
When a collection of free individuals — the market — is willing to pay a price for a product that creates “excess” profits, it signals producers to provide more of that product. If the market does not support a given price, producers are forced to redeploy their assets for more pressing social needs. Similarly, if a factor of production, such as labor or capital, changes in price, producers instantly react, sending signals — through the prices of intermediate goods — down to the consumer. Prices effortlessly allocate society’s assets to reflect consumer preference and adjust to accommodate the ever-changing availability of scarce resources.
Mises argued that governmental interference in prices, through taxation, subsidies, and regulation, complicates this process — affecting not only the consumption of final goods, but also the economic calculations that are necessary to provide intermediate goods and services. Higher-order division of labor fails. Poverty results. For example, while Chinese and Russian central planners were busy setting quotas for steel mills, there was no method for consumers to signal that they preferred food — and millions starved to death.
Dan Oliver Jr., “Socialism in Stages: Even soft, incremental expansions of government produce poverty”, National Review, 2009-12-15
Hiding . . . everything
David Harsanyi explains why federally funded researchers don’t have the same expectation of privacy that privately funded workers do:
In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government.
Or at least he should.
When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics, and other evil-doers, had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context.
To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help contextualize what they’ve been talking about.
Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on innocuous Trenberth comments like “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” or “we are [nowhere] close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.”
So, of course, the federally funded organization snapped right to getting the information they were legally required to provide, right? Perhaps in some other parallel universe, but not in this one:
Well, soon after the request was fired off, I was informed by NCAR’s counsel that the organization was, in fact, not a federal agency — since its budget is laundered through the National Science Foundation — thus it is under no obligation to provide information to the public.
“Why don’t you put all your emails online for everyone to see,” Trenberth helpfully suggested to me. “My email is none of your business.”
Indie Wednesday
Here’s a brief performance by (two-thirds of) Texting Mackenzie from last month at the “Indie Attic” in Ottawa:
H/T to Sam Mallett for the link.
