As Eugene McCarthy, of all people, observed: “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.”
Luckily the United States is blessed with one of the most incompetent governments in the developed world. It isn’t simply that the Americans have a bloated government, it’s that they have a bloated government that accomplishes far less dollar for dollar than the bloated governments of other leading nations.
This is why Americans should have no fear of Canadian style socialized health care being imposed on them, their government isn’t smart enough to run it. That said Obamacare is turning out to be something that makes Canadian Medicare look like the Swiss Army. I grimly await the flood of American health care refugees trickling north of the 49th. That’s bad news for them and worse news for us. What kept the Canadian system semi-functional was the American escape hatch. If upper middle class Canadians can no longer sneak across to Buffalo, Burlington or Seattle for treatment, that puts more pressure on our system.
From time to time I’m asked why government is so incompetent. It’s such a truism among conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals that it’s rarely reflected upon. February is cold in Winnipeg, governments are generally incompetent. We accept these things perhaps too readily. The truism is true, but in assuming it so blithely we fail to communicate its importance to reasonable people who are uncommitted.
Richard Anderson, “The Incompetence of Evil Government”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2014-02-20
February 21, 2014
Delingpole’s “love” letter to Scotland
He spends just about as much time trying to persuade Scots to stay as he does in winding them up:
Anyway, here are my ten reasons why I think Scotland and England are much better together than apart.
[…]
3. Deep Fried Mars Bars.
As every Englishman knows, these are the staple diet of inner city Scotland*, usually served with a side order of deep fried pizza, washed down with Irn Bru, and followed with a heroin chaser, which makes them vomit it all up again, as seen in Irvine Welsh’s hard-hitting documentary Trainspotting. (*Although we of course are aware that outside the cities, you subsist on haggis and whisky)
Some Scots like to claim that this a grotesque caricature which is typical of the contempt in which they are held by the snide, ignorant, condescending English. But then, the feeling’s mutual, isn’t it? In any international sporting event, the Scots will always support whichever foreign team is playing England.
And isn’t that exactly what’s so wonderful about our relationship? All the best marriages are based on partial loathing: look at Anthony & Cleo; Taylor and Burton; Petruchio and Katherina. It’s the spark that keeps it all alive.
4. The Pound.
As Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has made perfectly clear, an independent Scotland is not going to keep the pound. Why not? Well look at what Greece did when — with a little book-balancing sleight of hand from its friends at Goldman Sachs — it snuck into membership of the Euro.
So if you want a future where you travel abroad, my Scottish friends, or indeed where you want to be able to be able to import anything at all, it’s very much in your interests to maintain the Union. Otherwise you’ll have to find a currency more in keeping with your new global status: the Albanian Lek, perhaps, or the West African CFA franc, as used by your economic soul-mate Burkina Faso.
5. The economy.
Let’s be blunt: apart from the whisky industry, and what’s left of the tourist industry that hasn’t been wiped out by Alex Salmond’s wind-farm building programme, Scotland doesn’t really have one. It is a welfare-dependent basket case, with near Soviet levels of government spending and a workforce who’d mostly be out of jobs if they weren’t sucking on the teat of state employment.
For various historical and emotional reasons, the English taxpayers who bankroll most of this welfarism — e.g. through the iniquitous Barnett Formula, whereby around £1000 more per annum is spent by the government on Scottish citizens than English ones — have decided generally to be cool about this.
But when we hear about Scotland’s plans to go it alone economically, we’re about as convinced as the parents of stroppy teenage kids are when they threaten to leave home right this minute. The difference is that when in ten minutes’ time we get the phone call “D-a-a-d. Will you come and pick me up? I’ve run out of pizza money” we’re not going to come running.
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Escape from Lion’s Arch content update was released this week, and it’s a doozy. Lion’s Arch is … was … the central city in Guild Wars 2, but now after a devastating attack destroyed much of the city, players are tasked with extracting survivors from the ruins. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
Michael Sam and the NFL combine in Indianapolis
In USA Today, Tom Pelissero says that former Missouri defensive end Michael Sam will have to convince team representatives that he has the skills to play in the NFL, rather than how he might fit in as the only openly gay player in the locker room:
One of the largest crowds ever for a media session at the NFL scouting combine peppered Manti Te’o with 36 questions last year, almost all about a hoax involving the death of a girlfriend who didn’t exist.
The crowd for Missouri defensive end Michael Sam’s session Saturday may be even bigger. But behind closed doors, it’s unlikely NFL teams will show near the same interest in Sam’s announcement that he’s gay.
As Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman put it Thursday: “What are you going to ask him? He just came out and stated his position.”
[…]
With Sam, who earned All-America honors after coming out to teammates before last season, his answer already became public record Feb. 9 — he’s gay.
“If my area scout’s any good, he already knew that anyway,” an NFL personnel director said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
All the other questions — Will Sam be accepted in an NFL locker room? Will the media horde chronicling the NFL’s first openly gay player create resentment? — will be answered once he lands with a team.
The dynamic is different when entering a transient NFL locker room than in college, where players grow up together over four or five years. But Missouri’s excellent 2013 season suggests such questions are overblown anyway.
“One of the key differences between this and the Manti Te’o story is Manti Te’o wasn’t really in control of that situation,” said former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, a gay rights advocate who was at Sam’s coming out party the night before his announcement. “Mike is very much: ‘Yeah, this is who I am. Deal with it.'”
Online bounty hunting
BBC News on a bounty being offered to track down and prosecute those involved in the DDoS attack on the game Wurm:
A bounty of 10,000 euros (£8,200) is being offered to catch the people who took the online multiplayer game Wurm offline.
The game’s servers were victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack this week and the game remains offline.
A DDoS attack forces a website offline by overloading the site’s servers with more data than it can process.
The bounty is being offered for any “tips leading to a conviction”.
Wurm is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is played on personal computers.
The game takes place in virtual realms and everything in it is created by the players who are taking part. They can compete against each other or combine forces to defend a realm.
The attack happened just after an update to the game.
Writing on Wurm‘s website, one of its creators said it would be back online as soon as possible.
“We were the target of a DDoS attack and our hosting provider had to pull us off the grid for now.
“We will be back as soon as possible, but things are out of our hands since their other customers are affected.
“We can offer 10,000 euros for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack,” he wrote.
H/T to Hunter for the link.
