Quotulatiousness

June 25, 2018

Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:

There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.

In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.

Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.

Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.

June 16, 2018

Who will think of the children Australian civil servants???

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Government, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A tale from Catallaxy Files that’s sure to tug on your heartstrings:

In Canberra today, the Australian Greens announced a new tax fairness policy to remedy a design fault in the current system.

According to the Greens, it seems that it is only Australian public servants (local, state and Federal) who have been able to negotiate salary increases. As a consequence, because of their increased salaries, public servants are constantly pushed into higher tax brackets with the result that impost of bracket creep disproportionately falls on them.

Independent economic research has confirmed this phenomena. The Australia Institute economists have models showing that up to 80% of Commonwealth bracket creep tax receipts are paid by Australian public servants.

The Australian Greens believe that just because public servants earn more than private sector workers, they should not be required to pay more tax. Australian Greens’ Treasury spokesperson Adam Bandt said:

    Australian public servants should not be forced to carry the brunt of government spending, including spending on other public sector salaries. This is a role for the private sector. It is manifestly unfair that just because public servants have been able to extract additional salaries that they should be forced into higher tax brackets.

In response, the Australia Greens have announced the Tax Equalisation and Redistribution Designation (TERD). Under the TERD, full-time, part-time and casual public sector workers will be subject to a separate tax schedule with a flat 15% rate for income above $500,000. Public servant income below $500,000 will be tax free.

Of course, it would be even simpler for accounting purposes just to exempt the civil service from paying tax at all — we might expect that to be a Green Party policy plank in a year or two (or even our own NDP, who have a lot of support from our unionized civil service).

Reminder: Catallaxy Files is not a parody site … although this particular story is a parody. Not following Australian politics closely, I only twigged when they got to the acronym for the program…

June 12, 2018

Conformity

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

May 28, 2018

QotD: Correcting mistakes in private and public enterprises

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

… government cannot do just one thing, and some of the repercussions of what it chooses to do will be, as it were, mistakes in the perspective of the public even if the initial action were not. But the public’s dissatisfaction with these adverse outcomes can make itself known only via the politically charged process of complaint to authorities, petition for redress of grievance, lobbying, payoffs to public officials, and all the rest of the endlessly complex apparatus for the operation of the government’s political and bureaucratic setup. One is lucky to get any constructive response at all from the government, whose effective control is apt to be in the hands of entrenched politicians, bureaucrats, and private-sector cronies in the various iron triangles that pervade the state at large. If one does succeed in getting a constructive response, it is likely to come forth only after years of expensive and time-consuming delays.

This lack of an effective feedback-incentive mechanism is among the greatest flaws of all government activities. Markets, in contrast, are certainly not perfect relative to the model criteria economists have devised to evaluate them, but they are undoubtedly superior in the operation of their feedback information and response to mistakes. To remove an activity from the market and place in under government control is to ensure that henceforth mistakes, whether they arise from bad judgement, corruption, or ignorance, will not elicit a proper or timely response. In the government realm, mistakes and the slow, counter-productive responses, like doomed lovers, sink together slowly in the quicksand of bad actions being made ever worse by ill-fated reactions.

Robert Higgs, “Dealing with Mistakes: Government Action versus Private Action”, The Beacon, 2016-08-17.

May 26, 2018

Remy: The Longest Time (TSA Version)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 25 May 2018

Remy prepares summer travelers for groping season.

“The Longest Time” parody written and performed by Remy. Background vocals and Mastering by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
—–
LYRICS:
Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time
If you book a ticket for a flight
Stow your baggage and some of your rights
Travel, you’re hoping
But first you’ll get a groping
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

My last job? I guess it paid the bills
This pays more for using the same skills
At first we hound you
Then we put our arms around you
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

Supervisors try to sneak bombs by
Of 100, 80 make it by
I like those chances
I forgot how nice your pants is
I haven’t touched them for the longest time

I had other jobs at the start
I said to myself “just follow your heart”
Now I know the woman that you are
I’ll swab your Magic cards
And you’ll miss your connection…

Who could guess what consequence this brings
We have issues keeping nicer things
Our record’s so bad I think you ought to know this summer
you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

May 21, 2018

QotD: The key difference between private and public enterprise is effective feedback

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

State bureaucracies are notoriously inept in reacting constructively to their own mistakes. For example, they continuously seek to increase their budgets, staffs, and authority, even when their projects have proven counter-productive or disastrous. It’s almost as if they promote their institutional objectives best by fouling up their programs, then coming back to their funding sources to explain that they cannot succeed unless they receive more resources to do so. Thus do public agencies pour money and effort down the rat hole for years on end, wasting the public’s money every step of the way. The feedback system in this case is obviously perverse so far as serving the public interest is concerned.

Such perversity is practically guaranteed in government operations because government operates outside the realm of private property rights, the price system, and the profit-and-loss accounting that constitute a feedback system in the market realm. In the market, money-losing projects do not persist indefinitely. Their owners and managers eventually decide against throwing good money after bad and close the unprofitable operations. Owners who refuse to read and respond correctly to the clear message transmitted by profits and losses suffer reductions of their own wealth, which serves as a powerful incentive to act correctly and to rectify the mistakes they have made before even more wealth goes down the drain.

Robert Higgs, “Dealing with Mistakes: Government Action versus Private Action”, The Beacon, 2016-08-17.

May 20, 2018

QotD: Robert Conquest’s Laws of Politics

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

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

May 10, 2018

QotD: Langue de bois

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

The attendees [of a medical leadership conference] would learn about something called “lean management,” one feebly-attempted definition of which is as follows:

    If someone tells you that “lean management is this” and not something else, if someone puts it in a box and ties a bow around it and presents it in a neat package with four walls around it, then that someone knows not of what they speak. Why? Because it is in motion and not a framed picture hanging on the wall. It is a melody, a rhythm, and not a single note.

This is the mysticism of apparatchiks, the romanticism of bureaucrats, the poetry of clerks. From my limited observations of management in public hospitals and other parts of the public health care system, it seeks to be not lean, in the commonly used sense of the word, but fat, indeed as fat as possible; nor are large private institutions very much different.

It seems, then, that we have entered, gradually and without any central direction or decree, a golden age of langue de bois or even of Newspeak. Langue de bois is the pompous, vague, and abstract words that have some kind of connotation but no real denotation used by those who have to hide their real motives and activities by a smokescreen of scientific- or benevolent-sounding verbiage. Newspeak is the language in Nineteen Eighty-Four whose object is to limit human minds to a few simple politically permissible thoughts, excluding all others, and making doublethink — the frictionless assent to incompatible propositions — part of everyday mentation.

Langue de bois and Newspeak are no longer languages into which normal thought must be translated; rather they have become the languages in which thought itself, or rather cerebral activity, takes place, at least in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy that rules us. If you ask someone who speaks either of them to translate what he has said or written into normal language, it is more than likely he will be unable to do so: His translation will be indistinguishable from the words translated. It is therefore clear that, where culture is concerned, the Soviet Union scored a decisive and probably irreversible victory in the Cold War.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Life de Bois”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-09-10.

May 8, 2018

QotD: Pay inequality

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

It probably doesn’t come as news that airline companies pay pilots more than cabin crew — but according to the dogma of the gender wage gap, we’re supposed to find this fact troubling. The British government now requires companies to report their raw gender gap — that is, the difference in the median hourly wages earned by their male and female employees. Ignoring occupational differences, seniority, employment history, hours worked, or any of the countless other factors affecting salaries, these data are misleading at best. Nevertheless, when budget airline EasyJet reported a 51 percent pay gap between its male and female employees, the company knew that its reputation perched on the edge of a PR abyss.

And that’s the whole point of the exercise: simplify statistics to shock people at the seeming injustice done to women and shame companies into action; refuse to compare similar job functions; ignore the fact that, like every other airline, EasyJet’s pilots are disproportionately male, while their cabin crews skew female; forget that almost all carriers compete for the same 4 percent of the world’s female pilots; and whatever you do, don’t mention that the EasyJet CEO, who was in charge of this bigoted organization and also its highest-paid employee until retiring earlier this year, was a woman. The company should be branded with a scarlet “51 percent” until it … does what? Cuts pilots’ pay? Hikes the salaries of female cabin crew? Hires male attendants instead of female? Goes bankrupt?

Kay S. Hymowitz, “Equal Pay Myths: Activists for wage parity ignore stubborn truths”, City Journal, 2018-04-09.

May 4, 2018

QotD: The EU and democracy

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

The EU is quite clear however that it stands as the champion of democracy, just not the kind of democracy that involves people voting. No, for the EU democracy means compliance with the EU’s standards and rules – any departure indicates a drift towards un-democracy that must be checked by sanctions and punishments, even if people voted for it. The EU’s democratic principles, you understand, trump stuff like elections and voting; they are a purer form of democracy, crafted by unelected officials and demagogues free from popular approval. And yes, there are many in Brussels who actually believe all that.

Raedwald, “Sorry Herr Juncker your woes are just starting”, Raedwald, 2018-04-09.

April 24, 2018

The Windrush scandal in Britain

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

Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:

The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.

For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.

It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.

The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.

April 22, 2018

How to begin solving the common problems of big cities

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Vladimir “Zeev” Vinokurov is writing about Australian cities in particular, but the same general analysis applies to many Canadian, American, and British urban areas as well:

… our economy and population are growing, and the resulting congestion is costing us thousands of dollars per year individually, and billions to the economy. It isolates us from family, friends and work. But cities can still grow without getting us stuck in traffic, missing increasingly overcrowded and delayed trains, or left unable to afford property. All this is happening because workplaces are too far from residents living in the suburbs, which effectively funnels residents into the inner city for work. It must change.

First, we must unwind planning laws that prevent offices, homes and apartments from being constructed alongside each other and throughout the city. These laws also raise housing prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, instead of banning cars, charge commuters for using congested roads and trains. Third, stop supporting taxpayer funded ‘road to nowhere’ infrastructure projects. These reforms will cut congestion, grow the economy, cut living costs and reconnect us to family, friends and local communities.

Planning laws cause congestion and social isolation by preventing people from building apartments and commercial offices throughout our city. As a result, rents and property prices become dearer because not enough housing is built to accommodate demand from population growth. Indeed, Reserve Bank economists estimate that planning laws increase average property prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This drives residents into the outer suburbs to look for cheaper housing, even as they commute into the inner city for work. If more people lived close-by to their workplaces, commutes would be shorter.

We need multiple CBDs, not just one. Unwinding planning laws that prevent commercial growth outside the CBD will cut housing costs and rents, cut congestion and promote tightly knit, thriving urban communities.

Congestion also occurs because we pay for using roads and public transport with thousands of dollars of time every year, rather than money. Congested public roads or trains cost us no more money to use in peak times, and busier routes cost no more to use than empty ones. As a result, the Grattan Institute think tank estimates that the average Melbournian’s commute to the city is twice as long in peak time. By contrast, Sydney’s trains are less congested, but are used more widely compared to Melbourne’s because its tickets are dearer in rush hour. Congestion charges that reflect market demand for infrastructure will also encourage businesses to open in commercial districts outside the CBD. Reconnecting local commuters with local workplaces will save us time and money overall.

Congestion charges are also a fairer and cheaper way of funding infrastructure projects compared to taxes like fuel tax or stamp duty. Scrapping these two taxes could save property purchasers tens of thousands of dollars or more, and reduce petrol bills by at least a third. If we pay for congested roads and trains with money rather than time and taxes, we may end up paying less.

April 18, 2018

QotD: The United Nations

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Bureaucracy, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.

And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don’t worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits — in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.

Mark Steyn, “UN forces — just a bunch of thugs?”, Telegraph Online 2005-02-15

April 8, 2018

Brexit: Why Britain Left the European Union

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PragerU
Published on 12 Mar 2018

Is the European Union good for Europe? Or would Europeans be better off without it? Nigel Farage, a leader of the United Kingdom’s Brexit movement, shares his view.

Script:

If one big government is bad, imagine how much worse two big governments would be. But that’s what people living in Europe have had to deal with: their own nation’s bloated government and the super-national government of Europe, now known as the European Union. Bureaucracy times two! How’s that for a horror show?

Well, actually, you’ve no idea. It’s worse than you think. Believe me — I know, because for seventeen years, I’ve represented South East England as a member of the European Parliament, the EU’s legislative body. I was also leader of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, where I lead Britain’s efforts to leave the European Union. To their everlasting credit, that’s just what happened on June the 23rd, 2016: The United Kingdom left the European Union. The world knows it as “Brexit.”

Brexit is a statement of national sovereignty. Don’t misunderstand me: I like nations. I like borders. I like the people that live within those borders making their own laws. But I don’t like it when faceless bureaucrats make laws for nations they don’t even live in.

But that’s what they do in the European Union.

Imagine a Belgian telling a Brit how much he can charge his customers — or the reverse. The EU bureaucrats do this in a myriad of different ways, all day, every day. It is a conspiracy of the elites.

Who are those elites? Well, they’re a bunch of self-important, overpaid, social engineers with useless college degrees who have never done a proper day’s work in their lives and have no connection with ordinary, decent people. I’ll take the good sense of an Italian farmer or a French baker over the arid intellectualism of an EU bureaucrat any day.

And I say these things not as an anti-European; I love Europe! It’s a fantastic, exciting, great continent: different peoples, languages, and cultures. But these peoples, with their languages and cultures, have effectively been hijacked by a giant, ever-expanding bureaucracy: the European Union.

People will say, “but isn’t there a parliament, a European parliament, that represents the people of Europe?” Well, yes, but this body has got no real power; it can’t make its own laws. Rather, the power resides with the European Commission. They’re unelected and they can’t be removed, and that’s how absurd the whole thing is.

The European Parliament meets in Brussels. At least, that’s what I thought when I was elected there. But once a month, do you know what happens? They load the contents of our offices and papers into big, plastic trunks, and they put those trunks on lorries, and they drive them nearly 400 miles down Europe’s motorways to a French city called Strasbourg where, for four days, the contents of our offices, and our papers, are put into a new office, and the parliament then sits there. Twelve times a year this back-and-forth happens, and this from an organization who say they want to reduce their level of carbon footprint! This, from an organization whose accounts have not been given a clean bill of health by the auditors for the last twenty years!

This…a parliament? It’s more like a traveling circus.

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/brexit-why-britain-left-european-union

April 6, 2018

QotD: Bordertown, USA

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

Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.

Tim Cushing, “Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones”, Techdirt, 2016-07-22.

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