Quotulatiousness

May 27, 2010

The absurdity of spending $1 Billion for G20 meeting security

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

Hard to disagree with anything Rex Murphy says here:

Summits are useless, expensive and potentially dangerous anachronisms.

Let’s take the G20 summit, which will be held June 26-27 in Toronto. No one from the general public will be meeting with the world leaders — summits are not for mingling. So why are the leaders gathering in the middle of Canada’s most populous city when the very idea of interacting with any of the city’s population is absolutely impossible?

Once inside the summit venue the leaders — and their insanely bloated retinues — will be almost antiseptically sealed off from every other bit of Toronto. It’s all fortified meeting rooms and security-proofed hotels for them. Effectively, they will come to Toronto, stay behind a shield of impassable security and talk to leaders they’ve already met. It makes zero sense.

If you’re of a Toronto-centric, anti-Stephen Harper mindset (that would be most Toronto voters), you might attribute it to Harper recreating the famous pacification policy of Henry II: imposing the costs of supporting the royal court by visiting the powerful nobles (that is, the victim can’t refuse the honour of hosting the King, and then has no money or time to plot or scheme against same).

Update: Kelly McParland makes another good point:

Hard as it is to fathom, the Conservatives appear to have successfully created a bigger waste of money than the Liberal gun registry. It took a long time — they’ve had 15 years to study how the Liberals went about wasting so much money on an agency that costs a lot and doesn’t work — but they’ve managed.

In doing so, they’ve disqualified themselves from ever complaining again about money-wasting Liberal schemes, or the gun registry itself for that matter. If Tories can blow a billion forcing everyone in Toronto to find somewhere else to spend the weekend of June 26-27, Liberals can force farmers to get shotgun licences.

Canada’s positive experience of US Prohibition

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

I knew that individual Canadians did well out of supplying booze to thirsty Americans during the period of Prohibition, but I didn’t realize how well:

. . . Prohibition — perhaps the maddest of mad American dreams [NR: in a dead heat with the current War on Drugs, I think] — did pretty well by our nation from 1920 to 1933. As American writer Daniel Okrent points out in his fine social history of the era, Last Call, the rivers of Canadian booze that flowed south enriched not only the Bronfman liquor empire, but our federal government. Canadians did make and smuggle illegal liquor, evading both Canadian taxes and American law, but we also made millions of litres of the legal, taxed stuff, the ultimate destination of which was of no concern to Ottawa. The amount of alcohol subject to excise tax — most of which went south one way or another — went from 36,000 litres in 1920 to five million 10 years later, and the excise tax on it rose to a fifth of federal revenue, twice as much as income tax.

Few in Canada had the slightest inclination to aid the American government in cracking down on alcohol use. When a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in pursuit of a Lake Erie rum-runner ran aground near Port Colborne, Ont., locals looted the vessel, then filled its engines with sand. About the only Canadians Okrent could unearth who thought the Dominion should help Uncle Sam seal his border were those making a fortune selling alcohol to American visitors. One way or another, most Canadians agreed with the smug satisfaction of CNR president Sir Henry Thornton, whose railway was growing fat off liquor tourism: “The dryer the U.S. is,” opined Sir Henry, “the better it will be for us.”

If there was an upside to what was known — at first, without a trace of irony — as “The Noble Experiment” in the U.S. itself, Okrent is hard-pressed to find it. America had always been awash in alcohol. (Johnny Appleseed’s fruit was inedible, but Americans still embraced his trees — virtually every homestead kept a barrel of hard cider by the door for visitors.) During the sodden 19th century, adult Americans downed 27 litres of pure alcohol each annually. That kind of demand wasn’t going to disappear no matter what the law said.

And yet the lesson has been forgotten. When drug prohibition finally comes to an end, historians will have a field day drawing the obvious comparison between the War on Drugs and the “Noble Experiment”. The theses practically write themselves . . .

QotD: This isn’t what we mean by “the invisible hand”

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Another Example of Your LCBO Hard at Work, Screwing You . . . If you’re feeling a pained sensation in your rear end, like a sandpaper wrapped glove entering your rectum, don’t worry fellow wine drinkers, that’s just the hand of the LCBO doing what they do best — sticking it to you. The LCBO has decided to take advantage of yet another potential money saving opportunity and has turned it into a money grab at your wallet. A recent article in the Toronto Star (“HST will lower tax on booze, but the price is going up ” – May 13, 2010) uncovered that the LCBO, instead of passing the HST savings on to you, which would have lowered the tax on booze from 12% to 8%, has decided to raise the price all in the name of “social responsibility”. Oh happy day, thank you LCBO for keeping me on the straight and narrow while lighting my pockets and lining yours in the process. Oh thank you — thank you.

Michael Pinkus, Ontario Wine Review, 2010-05-27

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