Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2024

Britain’s Tories – “It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby considers a few of the early lessons that can be drawn from the British general election results:

I dislike the term “the deep state”. It mystifies what is much more straightforward, even bland: how metastasising bureaucracy is undermining the resilience of Western societies and their political systems.

The British Labour Party has won a massive Parliamentary majority in the House of Commons even though its total votes fell: from 10,269,051 in 2019 — 32.1% of total votes — to 9,704,655 in 2024 — 33.7% of total votes. Labour’s massive Parliamentary majority is not a product of enthusiasm for Labour, but the fracturing of the votes of its opponents.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) vote fell dramatically — from 1,242,380 votes in 2019 to 724,758 in 2024. This was largely a casualty of the SNP embracing the genderwoo of Transactivism. Outside some narrow urban enclaves, no one votes for “woke” but, given a genuine opportunity, folk will vote against it. As Scots have.

The Liberal Democrats did very well, as they have a regionally concentrated vote — which, this time, they targeted properly — and disgruntled (posh) Shire Tories will protest vote Lib-Dem. Clearly, lots did.

The Tories did so badly because their already low vote was further reduced by the Reform vote surge. The Reform vote represented voters punishing the Tories for their failure to do anything they had promised. As political scientist Matt Goodwin puts it:

    They failed to control our borders.

    They failed to lower legal immigration.

    They failed to cut taxes and the size of the state.

    They failed to take on woke, exposing our children to ideas with no basis in science.

    And they failed to level-up the left behind regions.

It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate.

So, an angry, unhappy electorate (rightfully) punished two governing Parties (Tories and SNP) and has given Labour a massive majority, with little enthusiasm — almost two-thirds of voters voted for someone else — on a relatively low turnout.

There is, however, a deeper institutional issue underlying these results. Why are voters so disgruntled? Why did the Tories fail so spectacularly?

The answer to these questions is a mixture of how institutions have evolved, the development of media culture, the Anywhere-Somewhere divide and technocratic delusions.

Technocratic delusion

The technocratic delusion is multi-layered. It holds that governing is a managerial input-output problem, government bureaucracy simply implements policy, and that politics is not a motivation and coordination problem.

None of these presumptions are true, so technocratic politics fails. It does not connect to voters and does not understand, or grapple with, the actual institutional landscape.

The technocratic delusion is a way for clever people to be spectacularly clueless. Not the only such mechanism in the modern world.

QotD: Corruption and crony capitalism

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When leftists look at the private sector, they see tips of icebergs – for every businessperson caught gouging the consumer, they insist there are a thousand under the surface waiting to trap the unwary. Whereas a libertarian like myself sees the mirror image – the odd bad civil servant caught is not a rotten apple as they claim, but the tip of another large iceberg.

Surely we have seen enough to know that large organisations like the government and their crony capitalists in the corporate sector are deeply resistant to independent investigations, whistleblowers and all other genuine threats to their status?

Whereas those that battle away in the competitive private sector don’t even get the chance to be that corrupt – they either treat their customers and employees well, or they crumble into dust like the costumed retards in the entertainment industry are doing so reliably these days, those beloved of progressive dunces the world over.

There are few cover-ups in the world of dogwalking and fishmongering – these people do a good job or they get told to piss off by their customers. But in the public sector and the corporate world that depend upon it …?

When we catch a corrupt civil servant or corporate lackey, we are seeing the Tip of An Iceberg. But when we catch a corrupt landscape gardener or carpenter, we are finding a Rotten Apple.

My claim is that terrible government officials and corrupt crony capitalists are the both the tips of icebergs, so the cries from Left and Right about rotten applies need to go away. Those that work in the public sector or depend upon their relationship with it, are routinely terrible and usually without consequence.

Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.

July 2, 2024

The Chevron decision

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his substack, Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds discusses the recent US Supreme Court decision on “Chevron deference” and how it is going to impact the administrative state (and their business victims) going forward:

Goodbye, Chevron deference. Larry Tribe is already mourning the Supreme Court’s overturning of NRDC v. Chevron, in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases, as a national catastrophe:

Oh, the humanity!

Well, speaking as a professor of Administrative Law, I think I’ll bear up just fine. I’ve spent the last several years telling my students that Chevron was likely to be reversed soon, and I’m capable of revising my syllabus without too much trauma. It’s on a word processor, you know. As for those academics who have built their careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference, well, now they’ll be able to write about what comes next. And if they’re not up to that task, then it was a bad idea to build a career around a single Supreme Court doctrine.

And that wasn’t the only important Supreme Court decision targeting the administrative state, a situation that has pundit Norm Ornstein, predictable voice of the ruling class’s least thoughtful and most reflexive cohort, making Larry Tribe sound calm.

Sure, Norm, whatever you say.

But how about let’s look at what the Court actually did in Chevron, and in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases that overturned it, and in SEC v Jarkesy, where the Court held that agencies can’t replace trial by jury with their own administrative procedures, and in Garland. v. Cargill, where the Court held that agencies can’t rewrite statutes via their own regulations. I don’t think you’ll find the sort of Russian style power grab that Ornstein describes, but rather a return to constitutional government of the sort that he ought to favor.

At root, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is about deference. Deference is a partial abdication of decisionmaking in favor of someone else. So, for example, when we go out to dinner, I often order what my son-in-law orders, even if something else on the menu sounds appealing. I’ve learned that somehow he always seems to pick the best thing.

Deference doesn’t mean “I’ve heard your argument and I’m persuaded by it”, (though something like that is misleadingly called “Skidmore deference”, but isn’t actually deference at all). Deference means “even if I would have decided this question differently, I’m going to go with your judgment instead”.

Under Chevron deference, when an agency interprets a statute it administers (e.g., the EPA and the Clean Air Act), a court will uphold its interpretation so long as it is (generously assessed) a reasonable one, even if it is not the interpretation the court would have come up with on its own. As you might imagine, this, at least potentially, gives agencies a lot more leeway, particularly when, as is often the case, Congress has drafted the statute ambiguously.

With Chevron overturned, courts will now apply their own judgment instead of deferring to agencies. Of course, this isn’t as big a deal as Larry and Norm seem to think, because Chevron has been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a while. Under the “major questions doctrine”, courts already decline to defer to agency interpretations where the issue has major social or economic ramifications.

June 24, 2024

Raise a glass of your favourite microbrew to … Jimmy Carter?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn “The Instapundit” Reynolds visits a local brewing festival in Knoxville and remembers what it was like before — of all people — Jimmy Carter began the process of deregulating the beer industry by legalizing homebrewed beer in 1978:

The Instapundit models his Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt at a recent Knoxville beer festival.

This weekend I want to the Knox Brewfest at the Knoxville World’s Fair Grounds. As the name suggests, it was a collection of most of the local micro-breweries, each with a booth offering samples. (There were also a few bigger operations, like Sierra Nevada, Abita, and Paulaner). I wore my Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt, which was a surprisingly big hit.

And there were some lessons, about which more later.

Hamm’s doesn’t really exist anymore except as a sometimes-produced minor product of Coors, which bought the trademark after it passed through the hands of numerous other companies. But it’s not forgotten!

The beer was good and the crowd was cheerful.

Mostly me, and my friend Jim (who I’ve known since junior high) were reflecting on the vast improvement in the world of beer in America, and particularly in Knoxville. As late as, oh, 1990 or so, you could go into almost any bar in Knoxville and if you asked what kind of beer they had you’d get an answer like this: “We’ve got everything! Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors, Coors Light – anything you want!”

It’s easy to take the craft-brewing revolution for granted, but it brought about huge changes and for the better. Nowadays, the beer scene in America tends to be better than that in Europe. No, really. In fact, one of my former research assistants, who practices law in Belgium now, brought over a couple of Belgian friends who wanted to see Tennessee. I met them for lunch at Barley’s in the Old City, to hear a bluegrass show and eat pizza and drink beer. They were very impressed with the fifty or so taps that Barley’s offers.

Back home they said, the bars are usually owned by the breweries and only sell their own brews, so you might have only three or four varieties, all from the same label. Nothing like this.

[…]

This deregulatory story started (like airlines and trucking deregulation) with Jimmy Carter of all people. Despite his (often true) reputation as a bossy micro-manager, he was an engineer and a rationalist. That worked out poorly in foreign policy, but led him to undo a number of irrational regulatory structures, one of which was the limit on home beer production. Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing in 1978, and those homebrewers were the nucleus of the craft beer movement a decade or so later.

June 23, 2024

The amazing range of things Britain’s Ofcom gets its tentacles into

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this week, Mark Steyn discussed the British government’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the way it rigs regulates who can say what during British election campaigns:

Why do I think the UK state censor Ofcom should be put out of business? Because there are very few areas of British life that this strange, secretive body does not “regulate”. Take, for example, this current UK election campaign, which the media are keen to keep as a torpid Potemkin struggle between TweedleLeft and TweedleRight. So, on Thursday night, BBC bigshot Fiona Bruce will host a debate between the four party leaders – that’s to say, the head honchos of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Wait a minute: what about Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party? Since the beginning of the year, Reform has been third-placed in the polls, ahead of the LibDems and Greens, and last week they rose to second place ahead of the unlovely Tories.

So why wouldn’t the second-place party get a spot in the leaders’ telly debate?

Ah, well, you’re looking at it all wrong, you hick. Here’s how the Beeb explain it:

    The Ofcom guidance gives “greater weight on the actual performance of a political party in elections over opinion poll data” taking into account the “greater uncertainty associated with support in opinion polls”.

The “actual performance of a political party” refers to their results in the two previous elections — 2019 and 2015 — when Reform didn’t exist. A lot of other things didn’t exist in 2015: Brexit, Covid, lockdown, the Ukraine war, legions of vaccine victims, the massed ranks of Albanian males occupying English country-house hotels …

But, per “Ofcom guidance”, Campaign 2024 has to be conducted on the basis of how things stood a decade ago.
You know who would also be ineligible to participate under Ofcom’s rules? Everyone’s favourite Lana Turner sweater-girl in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyy. He only formed his Servant of the People party in late 2017, so no election debates for you, sweater-girl. And don’t try blaming it on Putin, because it’s “Ofcom guidance” so we all know it’s on the up-and-up.

Because, as their barrister assured the High Court, Ofcom are “expert regulators”. Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes probably did a module in regulation at Rotherham Polytechnic or whatever.

I can see why the likes of Naomi Wolf’s creepy stalker-boy Matthew Sweet like this system: it’s a club and they get to decide who’s admitted. It’s less obvious why the generality of the citizenry put up with it. At any rate, get set for another thrilling BBC election debate in which all four “opponents” agree on Covid, climate, Ukraine, the joys of mass Muslim immigration and the inviolability of the NHS … but ever more furiously denounce each other for not tossing enough money that doesn’t exist into the sinkhole.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like that pixie Green leader who describes herself as a “pansexual vegan”, and I certainly don’t have the personal baggage with her that I have with Nige. But under what rational conception of media “regulation” does the six per cent basement-dweller get guaranteed a seat at the table but not Reform?

And you wonder why nothing changes?

June 17, 2024

For want of a security clearance, the (potential) traitors escaped scot-free

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates section of this week’s Dispatch from The Line, we get a summary of the state of brain-freeze in Parliament over the NSICOP (National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians) report, that in a functioning state would have triggered much more action than it has in the dysfunctional Dominion:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

The lead story this week, clearly, was the continuing fallout from the NSICOP report last week. Because of this report, even though there is much that we do not know, there are absolutely some things that are clearly established. Let’s run through some of the key points that are uncontested and draw some very modest and safe conclusions from them.

Here are facts.

  • There are multiple parliamentarians, meaning members of the House of Commons and the Senate, who have been deemed by eight of their colleagues to be engaged in activities with hostile foreign powers on either a witting or semi-witting basis.
  • The prime minister and the PMO have been aware of who these individuals are for at least a month, if not longer. That is when NSICOP filed its unredacted report to them for review, as required.

The above facts are unchallenged. Now let’s draw a few conclusions.

The phrasing of the NSICOP report, as well as both Elizabeth May’s and Jagmeet Singh’s press conferences this week, led us to believe some of these individuals are still sitting in both the House of Commons and the Senate. We acknowledge that Elizabeth May and Jagmeet Singh differ considerably on the severity of what these individuals are alleged to have done, but both seem to agree that the relevant parties, in at least some cases, remain in Parliament.

The prime minister, as the person responsible for the administrative and legal apparatus of government, could call the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Director of CSIS, the minister of public safety and others as necessary into his office today, and inform them that he would be making the names public, and that it would be the responsibility of those individuals to figure out how that could be accomplished while protecting intelligence sources and methods. At this time, there is no indication that he has done so, or has any interest in doing so.

So we got the grotesque theatre that was the House of Commons this week. The government has spent the last week and change challenging various opposition leaders to obtain security clearances so that they could view information that the prime minister has had for at least a month, and perhaps longer, even though both the Security of Information Act and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act (depending on the auspices under which their security clearances were issued) prevents them from disclosing what they read.

And, therefore, doing anything about it. Because to remove a caucus member would be to reveal it, and if a leader has no caucus members that are implicated, there is no urgency to their reading the report.

Protecting the national security of Canada, and the democratic institution of parliament itself, is the prime minister’s job before it is anyone else’s. And the prime minister has had this information for at least a month.

It’s worth repeating that because we want you to envision something. Imagine there are three U.S. Senators accused of aiding and abetting a foreign power, and Joe Biden knew about it for a month.

When do you think impeachment proceedings would start?

Boris Johnson was unceremoniously dumped by his party for lying about throwing a party during COVID lockdowns (and we have no problem with that). Our prime minister has known that there are people currently sitting in parliament that have turned themselves into intelligence assets for hostile foreign powers for a month, and …

… the government would like you to know that it thinks Pierre Poilievre should get a security clearance so that he can read the documents.

We think Poilievre should, too. Because here’s the thing. The Security of Information Act says right there in Section 24 “No prosecution shall be commenced for an offence against this Act without the consent of the Attorney General”.

That reads to us like so: Pierre Poilievre can read those documents, release the names, and then dare Justin Trudeau to prosecute him. Indeed, anyone with the names could.

Your Line editors have raised this before on the podcast, but it bears repeating. Canada’s international reputation has taken a lot of hits lately. So imagine if you would, gentle reader, a situation where Justin Trudeau’s Attorney General signs off on having his political opponent arrested for revealing that hostile foreign powers have coerced sitting MPs into becoming intelligence assets … especially if one or more of those MPs is revealed to be a Liberal.

That’s a front page international news story. We’d look like a banana republic. Our international reputation would take decades to recover.

Spoiler: we already do look like a banana republic and our international reputation is lower than it has ever been. Trudeau isn’t a dummy: he figures that our reputation literally can’t get much worse no matter what he does, so he’s choosing to protect … someone … and what’s Poilievre going to do? He proved during the lockdowns that he’s not willing to get arrested on a matter of principle (unlike Maxime Bernier), so he’s likely to just posture endlessly until something new pops up in the silly season news rotation.

June 15, 2024

W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:

The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …

    This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.

That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.

Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.

Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.

Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.

This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

I have written about this for The Critic …

    If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.

    Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.

Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.

June 10, 2024

The FDA has a jaundiced view of psychotherapy involving the use of MDMA (aka “Ecstasy”)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh indulges in a minor “I told you so” after the FDA’s expert panel recommended against the agency permitting any medical use of MDMA, despite some experiments indicating it does have therapeutic value:

Ball-and-stick model of the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine molecule, also known as MDMA, or ecstasy, a well-known psychoactive drug. Based on the crystal structure of MDMA hydrochloride, as determined by X-ray diffraction.
Color code: Carbon, C: black, Hydrogen, H: white, Oxygen, O: red, Nitrogen, N: blue.
Image by Jynto via Wikimedia Commons.

Hopes for research into therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs received a setback last week, one that your correspondent saw tripping (geddit?) up the road in advance. An expert panel published its official advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on permitting medical use of MDMA, the synthetic nightclub enhancer that we’re afraid the kids probably still aren’t calling “ecstasy” or “molly”.

There is long-recognized potential for MDMA to be combined with classical psychotherapy in treating emotional disorders, notably post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and now there are some small, limited studies showing evidence of positive effects.

But the FDA’s scientists weren’t very impressed with this evidence, and they voted almost unanimously against creating a therapeutic exception to the illegality of ecstasy, which the U.S. Controlled Substances Act classifies as a “Schedule 1” drug, right next to heroin. The panel’s advice isn’t binding on the agency, which is crawling in somewhat good faith toward recognizing the understudied medical potential of psychedelics. But the vote emphasizes the inherent problems that drugs face, once they are defined in law as “recreational”, in winning over skeptical scientists.

Reason magazine’s great drug-war correspondent Jacob Sullum has a thorough discussion of the issues. The existing research, despite some impressive headline results, has garden-variety issues with dropout rates, follow-ups and occasional researcher shenanigans. But the big problem, which defies easy technical solution, is with scientific blinding of the research subjects.

Scientific trials of the modern kind are predicated upon separating illusory placebo effects from genuine treatment effects. Researchers expect that a high-quality study will have a control group that receives sham treatment or none at all, and good practice requires that experimenters and their guinea pigs are both blind to who is in what group.

News flash: most people can tell whether they’ve been really given a psychedelic drug. Indeed, most doctors can tell whether they’ve given a patient a genuine psychedelic drug, and how much of it. Many placebo-controlled trials on psychoactive drugs, perhaps most of them, thus suffer from an alleged problem of broken blinding. (Have a glance, for example, at Table 2 in this review of blinding procedures in psychedelic studies.)

June 8, 2024

El Loco, Argentina’s “skunk at the garden party”

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss talks to Argentinian President Javier Milei (through a translator) about his first six months in office:

At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America”.

A lot can happen in a hundred years.

Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago, it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent — one of the highest in the world.

Why? What happened?

Argentina’s new president says it’s simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state. During his campaign, he made his views clear: “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it”. In case the chainsaw he wielded on the campaign trail left any question about his intentions, during his victory speech last year, he reiterated his vision: “Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures.”

There is nothing gradual about what Milei is now doing.

He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out-of-control inflation.

This is why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving for the country — even if it meant short-term economic pain.

But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: He says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesn’t appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children“, and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic, but studies the Torah. (He even quoted a Midrash during our conversation.) He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But that’s all the superficial stuff. What really makes Milei unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he doesn’t represent either side. He is ultra-liberal on economics, but right-wing and populist on rhetoric. He is anti-abortion, but favors the legalization of prostitution. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize the organ trade.

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes”. Essentially, he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. Or at least, not theoretically.

In January, Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is traditionally a place where people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrived, flying commercial, and blew up that comfortable consensus: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”

All of this is why I was eager to talk to Milei and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to improve in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: He loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists”, “liars”, “imbeciles”, “freeloaders”, and “donkeys”, for some reason, he agreed to sit down with me.

June 7, 2024

Redeployment! – Millions of men from Europe to Asia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2024

Now that Japan is the only Axis power still in the fight, Allied forces — especially American ones — must redeploy to prepare for the final invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. But how do you move millions of men halfway around the globe? And which ones go — veterans, new recruits, or some combination? Who decides? Where exactly do you send them to prepare too, with some many eastern ports like Manila a shambles? Let’s take a look.
(more…)

June 4, 2024

J.K. Rowling’s most convincing and true-to-life villain in the Harry Potter stories

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m with Jon Miltimore on this — J.K. Rowling’s most disturbing and best-written villain isn’t “He Who Must Not Be Named” or any of the other (frankly cardboard-y) magical villains … it’s Dolores Umbridge, a career bureaucrat who could have been drawn from any western civil service senior management position:

Umbridge, portrayed in the films by English actress Imelda Staunton, isn’t some apparition of the underworld or a creature of the Dark Forest. She’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, the man who runs the government (the Ministry of Magic) in Rowling’s fictional world.

Umbridge wears pink, preaches about “decorum” in a saccharine voice, smiles constantly, and resembles a sweet but stern grandmother. Her intense, unblinking eyes, however, suggest something malevolent lurks beneath. And boy, does it.

“The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” horror author Stephen King wrote in a review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Umbridge is introduced.

Umbridge’s “Desire to Control, to Punish”

What makes Umbridge so evil that King would compare her to Hannibal Lecter, the man widely considered the greatest villain of all time?

I asked myself this question, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that Dolores Umbridge is so real — and in more ways than one.

First, it’s noteworthy that Rowling based Umbridge on an actual person from her past, a teacher she once had “whom I disliked intensely on sight”.

In a blog post written years ago, Rowling explained that her dislike of the woman was almost irrational (and apparently mutual). Though the woman had a “pronounced taste for twee accessories” — including “a tiny little plastic bow slide” and a fondness for “pale lemon” colors which Rowling said was more “appropriate to a girl of three” — Rowling said “a lack of real warmth or charity” lurked below her sugary exterior.

The description reminded me of another detestable literary villain: Nurse Ratched, the despicable antagonist of Randle Murphy in Ken Kesey’s magnificent 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kesey’s description of Nurse Ratched conjures to mind a character much like Umbridge.

“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils — everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails …”

While there are similarities in the appearances of Dolores Umbridge and Nurse Ratched, their true commonality is what’s underneath their saccharine exteriors.

May 24, 2024

“Great Britain is not yet a basket case. But we do a rather good impression of a failing state.”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage considers the plight of modern day Britain in the context of Rishi Sunak’s political suicide note election call:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The ambition for things to get better is a bar so low it’s a carpet. A favoured genre of meme here centres on the dysfunction and general farce of a country with “Great” in its name. That lofty adjective edges perilously close to hilarity, akin to those countries prefixed by “People’s Democratic Republic”. The excitable kind with an AK-47 printed on its flag.

Call the doctor’s surgery at 8 a.m. An automated voice will reveal you are number 49 in the queue. When you eventually wade through, a soft-centred receptionist assures you in therapeutic tones that there’re no appointments left today. Sorry.

Book a same-day train ticket from London to Newcastle. Without a hint of contrition, the train company demands £786.80. That’s a week or two in warmer, healthier, saner Sevilla or three hours and eleven minutes on a train in Great Britain.

House prices and rents are akin to the board game Monopoly, in which your coked-up crypto-addled mate has lined up hotels on Mayfair.

Go to the supermarket. Olive oil, a civilising elixir which once threatened to heave the primitive British palate out of the Mesolithic era, is prohibitively expensive. If modern Britain were a film scene, it would be that of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: Fuck you. Pay me.

This all-encompassing one-footed waltz feels like the finale of a political satire. Since the 1980s, we’ve parodied America. We’ve nailed the social pathology but not the prosperity. Essentially, Great Britain is an advertising agency with a nuclear submarine.

This election pits two tribes against each other. One tribe pines for 1997. The other yearns for 1979.

For a sizeable swathe of the population, everything is awful, and nothing will ever change. And thank God for that.

Here, a natural law dictates that anyone under 45 who dares suggest things could be better is to be consumed by a radioactive flood of sadistic nostalgia. The mere whiff of dissent conjures through the pavement a battalion of nostalgians who lament the end of Polio.

“You don’t remember the Seventies!” warn those who yearn for the Seventies. ‘Bodies uncollected! Rubbish piled up in the streets!’. In that fateful decade, striking union workers allowed garbage to pile up in the streets. To this hazy memory, the rest of us are serfs to economic juju.

Whenever I point out that a first-time buyer in London must save for 31 years just for a house deposit, a familiar chorus of denial debunks the theory of free will. “You waste your money on flat whites and trips to Rome!” goes the wearisome riposte.

During the 1970s, that prelapsarian idyll when rubbish piled in the streets, when adults caned children at random, and when Bullseye was on the telly, the average house cost four times the average wage. Today, it’s twelve to one.

To point out mathematical reality invokes spasms of uniquely British nostalgia. It’s a negative nostalgia which glories in just how bad everything was.

Churchill was right. The British people are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Memory-mongers paint postcards of perfect penury. Back then, children didn’t talk back. There were no phones or elbows on the table. Back then, that famed sense of community slapped any ribbon of dissent out of those who dared dream bigger than the suffocating confines of community life. The past is a foreign country in which children could count their ribs but they was happy.

Such nostalgia serves two purposes. The first indulges one’s triumph over wistfully disfigured adversity. The other bleaches the parlous state of modern Britain with a mop soaked in a very British version of nostalgie de la boue. Nostalgia, truth be told, is a polite form of dementia.

May 22, 2024

QotD: Are western democracies moving uniformly in the direction of “surface democracy”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I joked before about refusing to tolerate speculation about the US being a surface democracy like Japan, but joking aside I think even the staunchest defender of the reality of popular rule would concede that things have moved in that direction on the margin. Compare the power of agency rulemaking, federal law enforcement, spy agencies, or ostensibly independent NGOs now to where they were even 10 years ago. It would be a stretch to say that the electorate didn’t have influence over the American state, but can they really be said to rule it? Regardless of exactly where you come down on that question, it’s probably safe to say that you’d give a different answer today than you would have twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. Moreover, the movement has been fairly monotonic in the direction of less direct popular control over the government. And in fact this phenomenon is not unique to the United States, but reappears in country after country.

Is there something deeper at work here? There’s a theory, popular among the sorts of people who staff the technocracy, that this is all a perfectly innocent outgrowth of modern states being more complex and demanding to run. The thinking goes that it was fine to leave the government in the hands of yeoman farmers and urban proles a century ago, when the government didn’t do very much, but today the technical details of governance are beyond any but the most specialized professionals, so we need to leave it all to them.

I think this explanation has something going for it, I admire the structure of its argument, but it also can’t be the whole story. For starters, it treats the scope and nature of the state’s responsibilities as a fixed law of nature. Another way to frame this objection is that you can easily take the story I just told and reverse the causality — the common people used to rule, and so they created a government simple enough for them to understand and command; whereas today unelected legions of technocrats rule, and so they’ve created a government that plays to their strengths. There’s no a priori reason to prefer one of these explanations over the other. There needs to be a higher principle, a superseding reason that results in selecting one compatible ruler-state dyad over another. I think there is such a principle, we just have to get darker and more cynical.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.

May 15, 2024

Disintermediation Now! “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia on the trend for even people at the top of the distribution chain trying to find ways to get around the distribution chain they inhabit:

The Emoji Movie premiere at the Fox Theatre, Westwood Village, 23 July 2017.
Photo by Kristofer Gonzalez-DeWhitt via Wikimedia Commons.

A few weeks ago, 35 of the biggest names in Hollywood collaborated on a business venture. Can you guess what it is?

I’ll help by providing a list of the participants. Here they are in alphabetical order, to avoid wounding any of the huge egos involved:

    J.J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Damien Chazelle, Chris Columbus, Ryan Coogler, Bradley Cooper, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Dayton, Guillermo del Toro, Valerie Faris, Hannah Fidell, Alejandro González Iñárritu, James Gunn, Sian Heder, Rian Johnson, Gil Kenan, Karyn Kusama, Justin Lin, Phil Lord, David Lowery, Christopher McQuarrie, Chris Miller, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Todd Phillips, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Jason Reitman, Jay Roach, Seth Rogen, Emma Seligman, Brad Silberling, Steven Spielberg, Emma Thomas, Denis Villeneuve, Lulu Wang and Chloé Zhao.

What are these movie titans up to?

Maybe they want to make a film together? Or perhaps they’re thinking bigger — planning to launch their own production company or even a movie studio?

Nope. They weren’t thinking big. They were thinking small — very small.

These heavy hitters got together to buy a 93-year-old building.

They now own the Westwood Village theater at 945 Boxton near the UCLA campus. I went there to see films when I was in high school and it was old even back then. At some point it stopped being old, and became historic and vintage. (Maybe if I live long enough this will happen to me too.)

But these 35 investors aren’t just interested in preserving a quaint old building. They want to own a place where they can show quality movies to a flesh-and-blood audience without anybody getting in their way.

We’ve reached a point where even the people in power at the top of the industry want to bypass the system. Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers.

That’s how bad it’s gotten.

April 26, 2024

QotD: The secret rulers of Japan

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Okay, but how well does that version of history line up with the reality of Japanese government in the second half of the 20th century? Johnson brings a lot of evidence to back up his claim that Japan is still secretly ruled by the bureaucracies, chief among them MITI. He points out, for example, that hardly any bills proposed by individual legislators and representatives go anywhere, while bills proposed by MITI itself are almost always instantly approved by the parliament. But MITI’s authority isn’t limited to the government, it’s pretty clear that they control the entire private sector too. That might seem tautological — if MITI’s will always becomes law, then they can unilaterally impose new regulations or mandates that can destroy any company, with zero recourse, so everybody will naturally do what MITI says. But it’s subtler than that — the real mechanism is tangled up in MITI’s dynastic and succession customs.

Remember, this may look like an economic planning bureaucracy, but it’s actually a secret samurai clan. So they’re constantly doing the kinds of stuff that any good feudal nobility does. For instance, the economic planning bureaucrats frequently cement their treaties by marrying off their sister/daughter/niece to a mentor or to a protegé. They also sometimes legally adopt each other, ancient Roman-style. Naturally they also have an extremely complicated set of rules governing their internal hierarchy, rights of deference, etc. But remember, this isn’t just a secret samurai clan, it’s also a government agency! Agencies have rules too — explicit rules written down in binders, rules governing promotion and succession and all the rest. Sometimes, the official rules and the secret rules conflict, butt against each other, and out of that friction something beautiful emerges.

The highest rank in MITI is “Vice-Minister” (the “Minister” is one of those elected political guys who don’t actually matter). But it’s also the case that somebody who’s been at MITI longer or who’s older than you (these are actually the same thing, because everybody joins at the same age) is strictly superior to you in seniority. But that can create a paradox! What happens if a young guy becomes Vice-Minister? He would then be more senior than his older colleagues by virtue of office, but they would be more senior by virtue of tenure, and that would mean either an official rule or a secret rule being broken. To resolve this impossible conflict, the instant a new Vice-Minister is selected, everybody who’s been in the bureaucracy longer than him resigns immediately, so that his absolute seniority is unambiguous and unquestionable. And then … the first act of the new Vice-Minister is to give everybody who fell on their swords powerful jobs as executives and board members of the biggest Japanese corporations. The entire process is called amakudari, which means “descent from heaven”.

Amakudari is really a win-win-win-win: the new Vice-Minister has unchallenged power within the agency and a whole host of new friends in the private sector, the guys who resigned all have cushy new jobs that come with better pay and perks, the companies that are descended upon now have an employee with great connections to the agency that controls their fates, and MITI as a gestalt entity can spread its tentacles throughout the economy, aided by cadres of alumni who think its way and help translate policy into reality.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.

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