Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2010

Follow up: burning the free market for government failure

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:06

The story about the fire department letting the house burn down has been used to “prove” that it’s a case of market failure and that free markets can’t provide public goods. Given that it wasn’t actually a “free market” entity, that argument doesn’t hold much promise:

National Review’s Daniel Foster jumps in to say that this is why conservatives need to curb their enthusiasm for the market economy. A colleague in the “anarcho-capitalist” camp stuck his head into Daniel’s office to explain that fire protection is not a human right, so it makes sense that the house was allowed to burn. Paul Krugman (he never goes away) adds that this is a case against the market in general. “Do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?”

I don’t get this debate at all. It is not even a real debate. The fire-protection services were government services. The fee in question was a government-mandated fee. The county lines in which the fee was applicable is a government-drawn line that is completely arbitrary. The policy of not putting out the fire was a government policy enforced by the mayor. As he said, in the words of a good bureaucrat, “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t.”

So why is the market being criticized here? This was not a real market. Instead, this is precisely what we would expect from government. In a real market, there is no way that a free-enterprise fire service would have refused to provide the homeowner service. They would be in business to provide that service. The fire would have been put out and he would have been charged for the service. It is as simple as that. It is the same as lawn-mowing services or plumbing services or any other type of service. Can we know for sure that the market would provide such services? Well, if insurance companies have anything to say about it, such services would certainly be everywhere.

As it was, the fire burned down as a result of government policy, a refusal of service because the homeowners did not pay what amounted to a tax! The poor homeowner begged for help and offered to pay. He had paid the year before and the year before, so his credit was good. Even so, the bureaucracy refused!

Montessori school raided by New Mexico drug cops

Filed under: Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

You can rest easy, knowing that a potentially dangerous grow op has been investigated by New Mexico Schutzstaffel drug cops:

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.”

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative.

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

Ms. Pantano must have nerves of steel . . . most schools would have gone into emergency lock-down at the sight of all those paramilitary types deploying in the driveway.

The comments on BoingBoing were good, and this one was great:

The War on Organic Produce continues to go well. Each of those tomatoes cost the taxpayer $75.00 US! WE WILL NOT BE SATISFIED UNTIL THE DRUG CZAR IS RUMOURED TO CURE GOUT BY WASHING THE FEET OF THE AFFLICTED.
—
Seriously: What the fucking fuck fuck happened to Probable Cause in this day and age? “We’re spending $20,000 on this operation because we herd thai leik mudkips, so we kipped in thair mud so thai can mud whail thai kip.” In the immortal words of Plato, NON FUCKING SEQUITUR is NOT a RIVER in EGYPT!

“What else floats the same as a Cannabis Sativa plant??? – er, WOOD! – Good, what else? – well, tiny rocks. – OH! A DUCK! – Right! So if the suspects are raising ducks — THEN THEY’RE RAISING POT! – WELL /DONE/!”

Law Enforcement by Superstition is horse-shit.

Gun hobbyist’s dream

Filed under: Liberty, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

L. Neil Smith, in an ideal world (that is, after the Libertarian revolution), would like to do some serious gunsmithing:

I have some interest in reclaiming good technology that has been abandoned by our civilization, usually for the most stupid of reasons. Living in a free country would mean that I could return to a dream I’ve had for years, of becoming a weapons-manufacturer. For example, as a gunsmith, I don’t believe that history and humanity are quite through with the design known as the “Broomhandle Mauser”, the first commercially successful semiautomtic pistol. The Broomhandle is so different in conception and execution from the Browning-invented weapons we’re all used to, as to seem like the product of an alien mind.

If you’re not familiar with the Broomhandle Mauser, here’s a picture from http://www.g6csy.net/c96/database.html:

Some folks don’t like the Mauser’s grip, which I find perfectly comfortable, and seem to forget that we almost never shoot a revolver today with handles shaped like its frame. I love neoprene grips like the Pachmayr “Presentation” model, myself. They make shooting magnums pleasant. Others don’t like magazines situated in front of the trigger, rather than inside the handle, but they’re happy with sport-utility rifles like the AR-15 and the AK-47 built exactly the same way.

What killed the “Broomie” was the inadequate cartridge, 7.63x25mm, it was made for. By the time a more effective offerng was available — 9mm Mauser Export, which rivaled the .357 Magnum — it was too late. Browning designs and their imitators had taken the field over. But with modern steels and production techniques, in effective calibers — like .40 S&W, 10mm, or .45 ACP — there is still a place for the Mauser design. I’d even like to make a miniature that shoots .22 Long Rifle.

Make no mistake, I absolutely venerate St. John Moses Browning’s 1911, and his P35 Browning High Power is also “of the best” — or at least it would be if it could be made for a worthwhile cartridge without messing up its marvelous handling qualities, as I find the .40 caliber version does. I have some fresh ideas in this area, beginning with a 145-grain .375 bullet loaded into a modified 8mm Nambu parent case.

The Browning 9mm was first handgun I ever fired, and is still one of my favourites:

At the same time, however, I would bring the Dardick pistol back, an absolutely revolutionary design that combines the best qualities of automatics and revolvers, without any of the drawbacks of either. Critics at the time of its introduction said it looked too weird — rather like an oldtime Weller soldering gun — but how do you suppose the Broomhandle, the Luger, and the 1911 looked to generations of revolver-shooters? Aesthetics are arbitrary, and shooters would get used to the Dardick as they did to other weapons, if it served them well.

The Dardick was indeed an odd-looking weapon:

The Dardick used special plastic-cased cartridges with a roundly triangular, or trochoidal, cross-section, loaded with a .38 caliber bullet. It was pretty clearly aimed at the police market, where the standard at the time (the late 1950s) was the wildly-successful Smith & Wesson Model 10, of which it is said more than six million were produced.

There’s no reason that the Dardick concept couldn’t be mated with much better calibers than it was offered in. With its double-action works, and an astonishing magazine capacity (in 1958) of fifteen “trounds”, it might well have nudged the Model 10. But it fell victim, not to the market, but to a corporate boardroom dispute, and history lost one of the most effective devices for personal defense ever invented.

As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)

It’s probably a good thing that I live in Canada, where owning handguns is a legal marathon, otherwise I’d probably have another expensive collecting hobby . . .

British forces facing imminent cuts

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

Lewis Page makes what I think is the correct call for the British government’s National Security Council to keep the Royal Navy’s carrier program and gut the RAF deep bomber fleet and the army’s heavy combat arm:

Thus it is a good bet that the first of the two new carriers for the Royal Navy will go ahead. The second may be downgraded to serve as an amphibious-warfare ship full of troops and helicopters rather than combat aircraft, or it might be cancelled altogether — which means British shipbuilding would be kept alive by bringing forward plans for a new generation of navy frigates.

The RAF and even the Army will be offering up massive cuts of their own — it is expected that the entire Tornado deep-bomber fleet will be retired years early, and the current Cold War style armoured-warfare juggernaut of tanks, mobile artillery and infantry fighting vehicles is set for a major trim back — so there is only one way that the government can preserve a two-carrier navy.

A navy with pretensions to independent action requires aircraft carriers. Plural. A single carrier isn’t enough, and places too much of your naval “capital” in a single hull. Two is the minimum (and three would be even better): you can, with care, always have at least one carrier fully worked-up and ready to deploy.

Even if the RN gets both carriers through the NSC flensing mill, they still face other cuts:

That one way is to finally cut the Royal Navy’s force of frigates and destroyers — collectively known as “escorts”, as their primary role is to protect and defend major warships — down to numbers suitable for actually escorting our biggest ships. For the past many decades, for reasons of history and jobs for the boys, the RN has actually maintained far more escorts than it needs to escort major units such as carriers and amphibious task groups.

Realistically, a combat carrier can actually protect herself using aircraft far more effectively than her escorts can: but it is reasonable to say that sending a carrier out to a major war alone, when just one bomb or missile or torpedo could eliminate Britain’s reach into a given theatre — perhaps cutting off air cover, supplies, even the chance of evacuation for our troops ashore — is a gutsy call.

Reducing the number of frigates and destroyers would make a lot of sense (except if you’ve “spent your whole life in an effort to be a frigate captain”). A bigger-ticket item than the carriers themselves is the required aircraft to equip the ships. Current plans are for the role to be given to the ultra-expensive F-35B. Politics aside, it would make brilliant economic and military sense to replace those techno-wonders with slightly less capable F-18s:

Really we need a maximum total escort fleet of say 10, as compared to the Navy’s current lineup of 23. Savings just in running costs over the next decade would add up to at least £11bn. Then we can save at least another billion-odd in acquisition costs by not buying the last two Type 45s and their dubious missile systems. All this is far and away more than enough to ensure that the second carrier is built, and to give the two ships catapult launch. This in turn would permit the purchase of much cheaper and more powerful aircraft for them, easing the problems caused for the MoD budget by the rising costs and delays facing the F-35B supersonic stealth jumpjet (currently grounded following the discovery of technical snags during flight testing).

And why would I, a former ground-pounder, be so enthusiastic about aircraft carriers? Because the British experience has been that the RN has been there for the army when needed:

It hasn’t been often that British troops have needed fighter cover since World War II, but when they’ve needed it they’ve really, really needed it. Just ask the Welsh Guards, chopped to pieces by Argentine jets at Bluff Cove. When there has actually been any fighter cover for British troops in combat since World War II, it has come from the navy, not the RAF. Every time a British fighter has shot down an enemy aircraft since 1945, it took off from a ship to do so. Even back during WWII, lack of carrier air killed a lot of sailors and soldiers — and the presence of it saved many more.

Patriots trading Randy Moss?

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

An interesting development, indeed: NFL.com is reporting that a deal to send wide receiver Randy Moss back to Minnesota is “99 percent complete”:

The Patriots would receive a 2011 third-round draft pick in exchange for the seven-time Pro Bowl wide receiver, who started his NFL career with the Vikings in 1998. Had New England allowed Moss to leave in free agency next offseason, it would have received a third-round selection in the 2012 draft as compensation.

Moss, who’s in the final year of his current contract, is scheduled to make $6.4 million in base salary this season. He wants a new deal, but he wouldn’t receive one from the Vikings as part of the trade, Lombardi reported.

[. . .]

What could change is the uniform that Moss wears, although he knows it well.

A first-round draft pick out of Marshall, Moss played in Minnesota from 1998 to 2004 and posted six 1,000-yard seasons. He was traded to the Oakland Raiders and had two mediocre seasons before being dealt to New England, where he enjoyed a resurgence. He caught an NFL-record 23 touchdown passes in 2007, his first season with the Patriots, and hasn’t had fewer than 1,000 receiving yards in a full season with the team.

If so, great! I was very sorry to see Randy leave the team, and it’s been an open secret for years that Brett Favre wanted to play with Moss. The Vikings are desperate for a number one receiver while Sidney Rice recovers from surgery, so this would be a no-brainer. I really hope this isn’t just empty rumours . . .

Update: It’s supposedly a done deal.

More than 38 years after quarterback Fran Tarkenton returned to the Vikings after once being traded away, receiver Randy Moss has gone home, too.

With the chances of the deal hovering in the high 90th percentile only an hour ago, the deal has been completed, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN.

The Vikings get Moss, and the Patriots get a third-round pick in the 2011 draft.

The looming deal was first reported by Jay Glazer of FOX, who also reports that the deal is done. Glazer reports that the Vikings hope to get Moss to Minnesota ASAP in order to commence preparations for the Monday night game against the Jets. Practices begin on Thursday.

We haven’t done the research, but we’re assuming that Moss is the first player in NFL history to appear in back-to-back Monday Night Football games.

The parallels between Moss and Tarkenton are eerie. Both players started their careers with the Vikings and spent six years with the team. Both players were gone for five years. Both players eventually returned.

Let’s hope that the Tarkenton parallels continue . . . Tark was a key component of the dominant Viking teams that went to three Superbowls.

Update, the second: Randy Moss jerseys already on sale at the Vikings store:

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