Quotulatiousness

October 16, 2025

The hereditary aristocrats of the People’s Republic of China

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

To many western liberals, an aristocratic system is a disparaged and vestigial remnant of the distant past. An echo of the “bad old days” of anti-meritocratic wealth and privilege enjoyed by the lucky descendants of ancient conquerors and oppressors. Yet among the most well-connected and powerful people in China can only be described as “princelings”, as they are literally the children and grandchildren of the leaders of the Communist Party, especially those who took part in the “Long March”:

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1926, five years after becoming one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao Zedong listed China’s enemies as “the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class [businessmen dealing with foreign interests] and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them”. It is ironic that Mao would eventually create a new aristocracy, often referred to as the “princelings” (taizidang), every bit as hierarchical as that against which he had previously railed.

Perversely, when Mao Zedong came to power in China in 1949, there were not many structures of authority left to destroy. In the period of warlordism that succeeded the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by Sun Yat-sen in 2011 and ended with the consolidation of nationalist (Kuomintang) power by Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, the aristocracy of imperial China had been swept away. So too the Mandarin class, the Chinese bureaucrats selected by civil service examination, a system that started with the Sui dynasty in AD 581. As for the Chinese aristocracy, its last vestiges ended with the abolition in 1935 of the Dukedom of Yansheng which belonged to the descendants of Confucius.

So, in terms of social hierarchies, Mao inherited a clean sheet when he established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The CCP leadership soon proved that, in the immortal words of George Orwell in his novel Animal Farm, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. In Beijing, Mao and China’s CCP leaders took residence in the palatial compounds located in Zhongnanhai, a waterside park established by the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century.

There is not even equality within the “red aristocracy”. Gradations are as clear-cut as if there were princes, dukes or marquises. The highest rank is accredited to the offspring of those CCP leaders who participated in the Long March. This iconic fighting retreat to a remote plateau in Shaanxi province followed the defeat of the Red Army in October 1934.

It is perhaps difficult for people in the West to understand the scale of Chinese veneration for the individuals who completed the Long March. With the possible exception of the migratory treks along the Oregon Trail, there is no comparable event in American or European history. Throughout their lives, leaders of the Long March enjoyed unparalleled prestige; it was a prestige that passed down to their children – hence the princelings.

The creation of the red aristocracy started with Mao himself. Within a few years of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao became a de facto emperor. On occasions he even referred to himself as such. He certainly lived the life of an emperor. At his commodious palace in Zhongnanhai, Mao surrounded himself with a harem of dancing girls who would occupy his bed and his swimming pool. In time-honoured fashion, China’s head of security and intelligence, Kang Sheng, procured girls for Mao as well as thousands of volumes of pornography.

[…]

My own experience of the princeling world confirmed that in China, despite its vast population a very small group of families form a governing nexus that has power far beyond its numbers. It is a group that seem to be getting stronger. The princeling proportion of the CCP central committee rose from 6 per cent in 1982 to 9 per cent in 2012. When I spoke to a princeling friend about the politburo standing committee that was elected in 2012, she told me that she personally knew five of its seven members; to her great delight three of them were princelings. It was through her that I met Deng Xiaoping’s daughters and spent a “country house” weekend with them and her princeling pals.

Here it became clear that, while most of the princelings I met were reformists in the Deng mode, there are also factions that are hard-line Maoists, like the one led by Xi Jinping. At the moment it appears that the reformist princelings have gained the upper hand. More light on Xi Jinping’s future and the outcome of this princeling tug of war may be shed at the Fourth Plenum of the 20th CCP Congress starting on October 20.

October 14, 2025

QotD: The trade in fake doctor’s notes

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

A suspended doctor in England is running a company that sells people sick notes to excuse them on medical grounds from their work. “When you’re ill,” said an advertisement for the company, “our prices will make you feel better”.

A reporter for the Daily Telegraph newspaper managed to obtain a certificate from the company to excuse him from work for five months, because he claimed (falsely) to be suffering from the long-term effects of COVID. He obtained the note without providing any medical evidence whatsoever.

The only thing that surprised me about this was that anyone thought that it was necessary in Britain to buy or pay for such a certificate. I thought of the famous lines of Humbert Wolfe, the otherwise all-but-forgotten England man of letters:

    You cannot hope
    to bribe or twist,
    thank God! the
    British journalist.
    But, seeing what
    the man will do
    unbribed, there’s
    no occasion to.

The same might almost be said of British doctors, many of whom, I suspect, issue such certificates incontinently, for one of two reasons: fear of their patients, and sentimentality.

Not surprisingly, doctors do not like unpleasant scenes in their consulting rooms, and refusal of requests for time off sick can easily lead to such scenes, and occasionally to threatened or actual violence.

Naturally, no doctor likes to think of himself as a coward, the kind of person who caves in to such threats. The best way to avoid so humiliating a thought is never to risk having to think it, that is to say by granting the patients’ wishes in this matter immediately.

But in order to do this without feeling self-contempt, it is necessary to rationalize, that is to say to find supposed reasons for why everyone who wants a certificate should be given one. The English philosopher F.H. Bradley once said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, adding however that it was a human propensity to do so. In like fashion, we could say that doctors find bad reasons for giving sick certificates when they suspect that not to do so might lead to a confrontation with a patient.

Thus they convince themselves that if a person tells them that they are unfit for work, for whatever reason, it would be wrong to question it. No one would make a claim to be unable to work unless he were in some way discontented, unhappy, depressed, anxious, stressed, in a word suffering, and it is the object of doctors to reduce human suffering.

The doctor is aided in this train of thought by the looseness of psychiatric diagnosis, so that practically all forms of distress can be fitted into the procrustean bed of diagnosis. Even outright faking can now be construed as an illness or disorder, provided only that it goes on for long enough or is deceptive enough.

Does this mean that the patients seeking sick notes are all faking it? The matter is more complex than this would suggest. There is, of course, conscious, outright fraud, but this is comparatively rare. Just as doctors don’t like to think of themselves as cowards in the face of their patients, so patients don’t like to think of themselves as frauds.

Distress can be conjured out of almost anything and is not necessarily proportional to whatever causes it. Dwelling on the ill treatment one has suffered — and who has not suffered ill treatment at some time in his life? — can magnify something minor into something major, to the point at which it seems almost to have ruined one’s life. And it is certainly capable of rendering a person unfit for work in his own estimation — though in fact continuing at work would be a remedy for, rather than an exacerbation of, the problem.

However, where economic loss is not too severe when stopping work on medical grounds is possible, medical grounds will be both sought and found. In the days of the Soviet Union, the workers had a saying: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In our kinder and more enlightened societies, we pretend to be ill, and they pretend to treat us — except that the word “pretend” does not quite capture the subtlety of the transactions between doctor and patients.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Make Me Sick”, New English Review, 2025-07-04.

October 10, 2025

A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s my strong opinion that Canada is indeed “broken”, and much but not all the blame for that goes to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and increasingly to current PM Mark Carney. It hasn’t all been the direct action or deliberate inaction of the Liberal party and their bureaucratic minions in the civil service, but their fingerprints are on a lot of the damage. Eberhard Englebrecht analyzes Canada using POSWID framing and concludes that “the Purpose Of Canada is What It Does”:

Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.

However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis — something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose — that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.

And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is — and has been for some time — a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.

It is why many Canadians — despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric — remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.

POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s “consensus” of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.

Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment — ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms — something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.

It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists — a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.

The federal government’s gun “buyback” program pilot in Nova Scotia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tim Thurley responds to a report about the gun “buyback” pilot program:

This reads like a government flailing for a message. We know this is incorrect, the Minister knows it is incorrect, and we know the Minister knows it is incorrect, and yet.

(The “Ensure…” section is also painful to read, but that’s another matter.)

https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/federal-minister-denies-political-motivation-in-choosing-cape-breton-to-pilot-gun-buyback-program

He’s suggesting the risk is posed by stolen firearms. Not only do we know this is a small portion of risk — and easily substituted by other sources — but to say we must confiscate your property because someone else might misuse it sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.

Nobody bought an AR-15 under the assumption it was legal when they bought it (unless FRT banned, then it gets complex).

If a licensed user bought and registered it pre-OIC (or just bought if non-restricted) then it was legal when they bought it, period. No assumptions needed.

A rebate is also incorrect. A rebate is something a customer gets back after purchase.

They get to keep both the rebate and the product.

The part about only getting some money back is at least accurate.

The government is not offering full compensation for many users based on the list prices, and has reiterated that it does not plan to offer further compensation once the initial pot runs out.

October 5, 2025

QotD: Why go to the Moon or Mars?

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

This, by the way, is the thing people don’t get about space. Every time humanity takes some tiny step along the path to becoming a multiplanetary species (by which I mean “every time SpaceX does something cool”), someone comes along and complains that it seems kind of pointless. The Moon is very far away, Mars is even farther, and we have this whole big planet right here that’s already full of “uninhabitable” regions like the Sahara or the Antarctic or, uh, the entire American West. Starting there seems easier, since they already have things important elements such as “air” and “water” and “a biosphere”. Play your cards right and you won’t even need a passport, let alone a spaceship. A friend of mine even coined the slogan: “Terraform Terra first”.

But this misses the point. Yes, space colonization appeals because it’s part of the wizardly dream of innovation, of building new and exciting things, and thus has an aesthetic draw that goes beyond practical arguments. Yes, long-term we probably shouldn’t put all our civilizational eggs at the bottom of one gravity well. And yes, many humans have a Promethean (Faustian? Icarusian?) drive to expand, to explore, to see what’s beyond the horizon. All of which is a pull to space.

Now pause for a moment and think about what would actually happen if you decided to set up your terran terraforming in, say, the Owyhee Desert of southwestern Idaho. There’s a river in parts of it. It rains occasionally, and snows in the winter. Whatever techniques you were planning to generate power and conserve water on Mars would certainly work in Idaho — more efficiently, for solar, since we’re closer to the source, and with more margin of error if you can add water to the system. Plus the desert is full of exciting minerals you can mine to sell or even to extract water from! And the second you tried, the Bureau of Land Management (which owns most of the Owyhee, and indeed most of the American West) and the Environmental Protection Agency (which has opinions about mining) and the ranchers (who would also like to use that water, thank you) will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

That’s the push to space.

The dream of space colonization is partly about all the ways it would be cool to live on Mars or the Moon. But it’s also, implicitly or explicitly, a claim that it’s easier to solve enormous technical challenges (air! water! food! solar radiation!) than it is to solve societal challenges on Earth. Terraforming is hard; eunomiforming is harder.1

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.

  1. Though to his credit Corcoran has a diverse portfolio: in addition to the space colonization dreams, he’s tackling the “terraform Terra” angle with an active homestead (he’s written some guides) and the “improve society somewhat” approach through more direct political engagement than I’ve ever done.

October 3, 2025

Adding digital ID to the pocket moloch … what could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s a terrible idea to trust the government — any government — in forcing digital ID on everyone:

An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.

During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his “panopticon”: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.

Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?

I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the “Alexa” voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.

[…]

Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the “nudge unit”, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for “non-essential items” – has hardly helped matters.

To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.

Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?

Tim Worstall adds that “they c’n fuck off ‘n’ all”:

So we’ve that wet dream of Tony Blair raising its ugly head again. There should be a national ID system. Actually, it’s not just Blair, T — the bureaucracy has been right pissed at the erasure of the wartime system since the 50s when it was abolished.

For there are two ways of looking at, thinking about, the whole governance thing. One is — the Blair, bureaucrats’, version — that the population are cattle, kine, to be managed. For the benefit of the bureaucracy of course — or at very least to be forced into doing what the bureaucracy thinks they — we — should be doing.

Then there’s that stout Englishman, the Anglo Saxon, version, which is that government are just the slaves we communally hire to make sure the bins get emptied. Well, OK, maybe raise a bit of tax for a Royal Navy to sink the Frenchies. But even then, not too much of that — the Civil War was, after all, triggered by Ship Money. Did the people who would not be slaughtered by the first wave of invading Frenchies — because they had the silly excuse of living 25 miles inland — have to pay the tax to run the Royal Navy to keep the Frenchies at bay or not? The King said yes — the King was right — and not for the first nor last time in British political history the guy who was right had his head cut off for being so.

Digital ID, so which version should we have? That one beloved of Froggie-type bureaucrats who view La Profonde as kine to be corralled? Or the Anglo Saxon version where we just devolve the scut work to a few slaves?

[…]

The reason this never will be proposed is that it doesn’t fit the reasons why our rulers wish to have an ID system. They’re insistent that we be their kine rather than they our. So, the Hell w’ ’em.

But it could be done. Government simply publishes an interface — an API — which says that proof of identity needs to be presented in this format. We’re done as far as whose kine is whose.

Update 4 October: From Samizdata, another illustration of just how toxic Two Tier Keir has become to British voters:

The Guardian reports:

    “Reverse Midas touch”: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs

    Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

    Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.

    The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

September 27, 2025

Canada’s supply management cartels benefit “an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille explains to an American audience why Donald Trump has been playing hardball with Canada on trade issues:

President Donald Trump justifies his enthusiasm for prohibitively high tariffs by insisting the U.S. is being “ripped off” by other countries. It’s a strange argument, since people only trade with one another if they see benefit in the deal. But the president is right to complain that other governments impose trade barriers of their own that are often every bit as burdensome as the high taxes Americans pay on imports. If foreign officials honestly wish to restore something like free trade, they should emphasize dropping their own barriers in return for lower U.S. levies. Case in point: Canada, which sends three-quarters of its exports across its southern border but imposes damaging restrictions on imports.

In a February proclamation of trade war on the world, Trump announced, “the United States will no longer tolerate being ripped off” and complained that “our trading partners keep their markets closed to U.S. exports”. The first part of that claim is silly. But the second part has a kernel of truth.

A glimpse at that truth came in June when Trump angrily posted that Canada “has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies” and, as a result, “we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada”.

The threat had the desired impact. Canada rescinded the tax immediately before it was supposed to take effect. While nominally targeted at all large tech companies, in practice that meant American companies and everybody knew it, since U.S. firms dominate the industry.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Canada’s trade barriers. Also in June, international trade attorney Lawrence Herman, a senior fellow at Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute, bemoaned proposed legislation in the Canadian parliament that he characterized as “yet another regrettable effort to enshrine Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system in the statute books.”

He added, “the bill would prohibit any increase in imports of supply-managed goods – dairy products, eggs and poultry – under current or future trade agreements”.

The legislation about which Herman complained has since become law.

[…]

More skeptically, Fraser Institute senior fellow Fred McMahon notes, “supply management is uniquely Canadian. No other country has such a system. And for good reason. It’s odious policy, favouring an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners.”

McMahon elaborates that the supply management process is controlled by agricultural management boards which “employ a variety of tools, including quotas and tariffs, and a large bureaucracy to block international and interprovincial trade and deprive Canadians of choice in dairy, eggs and poultry”.

But as we’ve seen so many times over the years, it disproportionally benefits Quebec, and the Liberals desperately need those Quebec votes to stay in power, so the government would rather destroy the national economy rather than give up on our Stalinist supply management cartels.

September 24, 2025

It won’t work – the minister responsible knows it, but they’re going ahead with it anyway

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The “it” in the headline is the federal government’s gun confiscation program, which they claim will reduce crime but they already know it won’t do any such thing. What it will do is take away from literally the most law-abiding, responsible citizens their legally purchased property and leave illegal guns in the hands of criminals … at an ever-increasing estimated cost to the taxpayer. In The Line, Matt Gurney covers the details:

The federal gun confiscation program […] is illogical. It won’t save lives or make the public safer. The federal government doesn’t really even expect it to work, and is only going ahead with it because they’ve been stuck with a dumb proposal the Trudeau government made almost five years ago. If they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t, but they feel like they’ve blocked themselves in and have no choice but to proceed so that they don’t anger part of their electoral coalition, mainly voters in Quebec.

That might sound like a blistering criticism of the program, the kind of thing you’ve read in any number of my columns before. It’s actually what the public safety minister thinks about it. He just didn’t know he was being tape recorded when he said so. In a 20-minute conversation Gary Anandasangaree had with a firearms owner he rents a home to, which was recorded and then leaked, the minister says all of the above things. (He has also confirmed the recording is legitimate.)

Awkward for the minister, clearly, but I actually give him credit. The minister’s comments on tape are a confession, and an admission of defeat. They’re also, hands down, the most honest thing a Liberal government official has said on the gun control file in five years. Given that the minister responsible is freely telling people the program is a bad idea he’s stuck with and that won’t work, a sensible government would probably take this opportunity to walk away from the program.

Unfortunately, that’s not what this PM has chosen. It’s full speed ahead with an idea so bad Anandasangaree wishes he’d never been saddled with it.

Let’s talk about what this program is for a second. And forgive me, there’s quite a bit of history here. During Justin Trudeau’s first term, his only majority, his government had proposed a series of fairly moderate changes to the gun control laws they had inherited from Stephen Harper. As I’ve written often since, the proposals were a mixed bag. Some were okay. Some were bad. But they more or less left the well-functioning Canadian gun control system intact. They nibbled around the edges enough so that they could tell their voters that they had gotten tougher. But they generally didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.

But then politics got in the way, as it always does. Trudeau lost his majority in 2019 and became ever-more dependent on voter efficiency and wedge issues. And then in 2020, there was a horrible massacre in Nova Scotia. That catastrophe had nothing to do with our gun control laws; the weapons used were brought in illegally from the United States, as is typical of guns used in gun crime. But the Trudeau government seized on the opportunity — never waste a crisis, right? — to announce that they were “banning” “assault rifles”.

A lot of quotes above. So let me explain. First of all, there really wasn’t much of a ban. Anyone who owned one of the newly banned rifles was allowed to keep them. And as for assault rifles, actual assault rifles — rifle-calibre weapons that use high-capacity detachable magazines and can fire in fully automatic mode — have been banned in Canada for decades. This isn’t a problem that we actually had. And the government tacitly admitted as much when they began fudging the words they used to describe them. In acknowledgement that there were no actual assault weapons to ban, they started talking about assault-style weapons.

“Style” is a tell. You wouldn’t take medicine-style pills, or munch on a food-style snack. Because you’d know better. Trudeau et al knew better. It didn’t stop them. They needed something to announce, and by God, they were going to announce it!

And as we’ve noted several times, the Trudeau government got addicted to the media high of making big showy announcements. So they started doing repeat announcements over a period of time, and thanks to the spinelessness of Canadian legacy media even before Trudeau started directly subsidizing them, the media sugar high got repeated as well. It didn’t take long for the lesson to be learned that making an announcement was cheaper than doing the thing that was announced, and we quickly transitioned to a world where it was the announcement that mattered, not the thing.

At Junk Economics, Bryan Moir sums up the stupidity:

You want blunt? Fine. Here it is:

Listen: politics is kabuki theater and promises are props. Here we have a government rolling out a nationwide confiscation-style buyback and calling it “voluntary” — which is like calling income tax “optional” if you want to be arrested. The minister tells citizens, in public, “it’s voluntary”, then admits in private he’ll criminalize non-compliance, will “bail you out” if it goes that far, and says the whole exercise exists because the party must keep the promise and because the Quebec caucus wants to show muscle. That’s not statesmanship. That’s PR with a warrant.

They lecture you about being “tough on guns” while refusing to be tough on the people who actually bring violence into our streets. The minister himself says if he could do it over he’d target illegal guns and put criminals in jail — not law-abiding owners. Translation: the policy is ideologically driven and politically performative, not strategically intelligent. You don’t cure gang violence — which the cops tell you comes from illegal trafficking and cross-border smuggling — by borrowing billions to buy back legally purchased rifles. That’s like throwing sandbags into a burning house and patting yourself on the back for “doing something”.

And then there’s the logistics and the cost — the ugly part they don’t want on camera. The federal pot is capped at about $742 million and the program is rolled out in fits and starts. Major police forces are already saying “no thanks”, which means the feds must either stand down, contract a patchwork of municipal services, or try to outsource enforcement. Any of those choices blows up the promise in different ways: it becomes toothless, it becomes wildly more expensive, or it becomes a federal-provincial fight that will make the Notwithstanding clause dust-ups look like backyard squabbles. Pick your disaster.

Remember the math: a capped pool of cash plus a growing list of banned models (hundreds, then thousands) equals many owners getting nothing while the bureaucracy eats up the rest on administration, contracts, security, staffing, and political “bribes” (a nicer word for handouts to get agencies to play ball). If the fund runs out — and the minister openly says “it’s capped; when it’s gone, it’s gone” — you’ll have a bunch of people stripped of legal property, out of pocket, and the state triumphant only in optics. That’s confiscation without fair market compensation; it reads like policy designed by accountants and sold by televangelists.

Worst of all: while Ottawa gamely auctions off the idea of virtue, or was that “Canadian values”, real problems pile up. Fire seasons rage, hospitals are full, kids wait for surgeries, food banks are overwhelmed and the cost of living keeps rising— and Mark and Gary are borrowing money to offer coupons for now-illegal guns. If you wanted a textbook case of political misallocation, this is it: symbolic policy delivered with symbolic money so the party can say it kept a promise, while the public pays the bill and crime networks keep smuggling.

On the gun confiscation program in particular, thank goodness you can always depend on social media to find the funny side of any issue:

September 20, 2025

QotD: Why modern dishwashers suck

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

    The current standards for dishwashers took effect in 2013. The standards, which were based on a consensus agreement between manufacturers and efficiency advocates, specify minimum energy and water efficiency levels. The standards require that standard-size dishwashers use no more than 307 kWh per year and 5.0 gallons of water per cycle.

    In 2024, DOE finalized amended standards for dishwashers based on a joint recommendation from manufacturers and efficiency advocates. The new standards for dishwashers will cost-effectively reduce energy consumption by 15% relative to the current standards while also cutting water waste. Dishwashers

It is a general problem, but what started me thinking about it was being told by my dishwasher that it would take three and a half hours to wash the dishes. That seems, judging by a quick search online, to be longer than average but still within the normal range. I have not been able to find figures online for how long dishwashers took twenty or thirty years ago but, by what I remember, it was substantially less — and the dishes ended up dry, which ours don’t.

The explanation is in the final word of the quote above, “waste”. The owners of dishwashers pay for water and power, so if making them more efficient in those dimensions was costless, did not require giving up something else, there would be no need for the Department of Energy to make the manufacturers do it. I conclude that it was not costless, that it either made dishwashers cost more or do their job less well — take longer, not dry the dishes as well, not clean them as well. Using more power or water to do a better job is not waste.

David Friedman, “Optimizing On A Single Variable”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2025-06-02.

September 18, 2025

Broken feedback paths lead to broken organizations … like government

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby on the ever-increasing dysfunction of most western governments due to the deliberate sabotage of what used to be functional feedback paths:

That institutions within Western democracies have deteriorated in recent decades is clear. That the march of progressivism through the institutions is at the heart of this deterioration is also clear.1

This has been progressives acting like progressives, with all the perverse relationship with information that is at the heart of progressivism. A perverse relationship that leads directly to their degradation of institutions.

Progressives use the imagined future as their benchmark of judgement, but there is no information from the future, so there is no reality-test in their benchmark of judgement. The imagined future can, however, be as glorious as one likes.

Conversely, anything actually created by humans will have downsides and even sins attached. This gives progressives a great rhetorical advantage over anyone who attempts to defend anything humans have actually built. All of the painful history of human achievement is rendered as naught, as mute, in the face of the splendours in their head.

Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model.

If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work.

For using the glorious imagined future as the benchmark of judgement creates the basis for denigrating anything that comes from the past: which is all the information we have about what works and does not. This includes denigrating the embedded learning in institutions. Even fundamental questions about what is required to sustain a social order get written out of acceptable discourse as not fitting with their imagined-future benchmark of judgement, with the splendours in their heads.

Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark of judgement also naturally leads to concluding that one owns morality, as any opposition to the glorious imagined future is clearly immoral. This leads to, at best, comprehensive disengagement with, and at worse, systematic denigration and delegitimisation of, those who disagree. A systematic denigration and delegitimisation that often involves systematic misrepresentation of those who disagree. The consequence of all this is to block feedback about one’s political projects.

The most extreme instance of this has been the UK, where the Blair–Brown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could do their thing, insulated from voters. This made the UK a state, a polity, with broken feedbacks.

Modern Western civilisation is a civilisation with broken feedbacks — as I discuss here, here, here, here and here — but the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism extended that pattern of broken feedbacks systematically to the British state. The consequences have become grimly obvious. Massive waves of unwanted migrants as part of a massively dysfunctional British state.

If you systematically kill feedbacks from voters, you systematically kill accountability. Of course dysfunction will spread across the organs of the state, as it has. (See here for a discussion of aspects of that horrifying dysfunction.)

  1. Feminisation of institutions has also been a corrosive factor, but that is deeply intertwined with the march of progressivism through the institutions.

Update, 19 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

NYC smokers get most of their cigarettes from the black market

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

Smokers in New York City pay very high taxes for their nicotine delivery systems, so it shouldn’t have surprised public health officials that many would turn to the black market … but the state and local taxes add so much to the price of a pack of cigarettes that most of the supply now comes from the black market:

“Enjoyin’ a cigarette at busy Time Square, NYC” by Mel Schmidt is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In 2023, New York raised its cigarette excise tax by $1.00 to $5.35 per pack. New York City imposes its own tax of $1.50 per pack, and that’s before you include federal and sales taxes, making for the most expensive smokes in the country. That is, cigarettes are expensive in New York for those who pay those taxes. But state officials were warned that such a high rate would drive consumers to the black market, and that’s exactly what happened. According to recent research, more New Yorkers than ever are turning to tax-evading illicit sources for their nicotine needs.

Taxes Into Good Health — or Not

When the New York excise tax was hiked, the Albany Times-Union noted, “it’s the nation’s highest and brings a pack of cigarettes at many retailers to about $12 … Health advocates hailed the increase, saying it will lead to fewer smokers and cancer deaths. Anti-tax groups, though, predicted it will increase trafficking in illicit untaxed cigarettes in the state.”

Health advocates like taxing vices on the theory that raising taxes simultaneously generates government revenue while escalating prices for allegedly bad things — like cigarettes — out of reach of many consumers. What they rarely consider is that there are other options, such as buying cigarettes smuggled from jurisdictions with lower levies.

“New York has created a cigarette-smuggling empire, and the worst is yet to come,” Todd Nesbit, an economics professor at Ball State University, and Michael LaFaive, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, warned even before the 2023 tax increase. “It’s the unavoidable consequence of the state’s decades long history of raising the cigarette tax.”

“If enacted, consumers will go across borders to do their shopping or rely on black-market suppliers,” agreed the Tax Foundation’s Adam Hoffer. “Tax revenues will fall, illicit activities will thrive, and law enforcement spending will need to increase.”

In fact, as Nesbit, LaFaive, and Hoffer emphasized, even before the dollar-per-pack tax hike, more than half of cigarettes sold in the state of New York lacked local tax stamps and were smuggled from elsewhere. Since 2023, illicit dealers appear to have claimed even more market share.

September 17, 2025

Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022

A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.

September 13, 2025

QotD: The Peter Principle in football, the military, and life in general

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

There needs to be a word for that inflection point where the “player” and “coach” levels don’t just diverge, but actually seem to become opposites. Is that an organizational thing, a cultural thing, or what? It’s all “football”, and you probably don’t want guys who have never taken a snap to suddenly be calling plays from the sidelines, but it seems like rising to the top of one side almost by definition precludes you from doing well on the other side (for every great player who was a terrible coach, there’s a great coach who was a terrible player. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Bill Belichick is the best coach currently in the NFL, and he’s got to be a strong contender for best coach of all time, but his playing career topped out at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT).

Is that true in other jobs where you need a combo of a certain physique, a certain IQ, and a certain attitude? The military, say, or the police? Would the average platoon sergeant be a better lieutenant than the average lieutenant? (I’m seriously asking, even though I know that the average corporal’s opinion of the average butterbar lieutenant and vice versa makes the town-gown split in college look like a friendly rivalry). What about the best NCO — would he make a good general? How about the best patrolman vs. the best detective?

And of course this is complicated by the outliers. SWAT guys generally don’t become police chiefs, Special Forces guys don’t become generals (that McChrystal bastard being an unfortunate exception), and so on, but those are extreme outliers, like quarterbacks — physical freaks with fast-firing heads; they don’t want desk jobs, I imagine.

The reason I’m rambling on about this (other than “I’m jet lagged and I have the flu”) is that our whole society seems to have fucked up its competence sorting mechanism, and that flaw seems to be structural. You don’t want a coach who never played, or a general who never fought, but at the same time there’s fuck-all relationship between “being good at playing / fighting” and “being good at coaching / strategizing” that I can see. The same applies in all bureaucracies, of course, we call it the “Peter Principle” — the guy who was good at answering phones in the call center might or might not be any good at supervising the call center, but there’s only one way to find out …

… or is there? Football is interesting in that there’s only one metric for success, and it’s easy for everyone to see. There’s absolutely zero question that So-and-So was a good player, in the same way that there’s zero question So-and-So was a good coach. You can always find nerds and lawyers to niggle around the edges — oh, So-and-So is overrated, and here’s my charts and graphs to prove it — but we all know what that’s worth. Figuring out a better way to sort talent in a binary system like football would go a long way to help us figure out how to fix our society’s fucked-up competence sorting mechanism.

Severian, “Friday Etc.”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-04.

September 12, 2025

Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs

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

At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown calls for the end to the Canadian federal temporary immigration scam programs:

It’s not hyperbole to say that Canada has built an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through TWFP, as well as the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreign nationals to work in Canada, with most going to Ontario. But contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to eventually do the jobs in question. Meanwhile, the IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they’re studying in Canada.

Between 2019 and 2023, the TFWP increased by 88 percent and the IMP increased 126 percent. They account for close to 1.58 million work permit holders, equal to roughly 7 percent of Canada’s labour force.

Taken together, the results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreign nationals to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, pressured into not joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. Yes, the IMP is more flexible, but it’s more pernicious because it does not even pretend to address labour shortages.

Both schemes are also of course bad for Canadians themselves. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent.

Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreign nationals at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now.

Addicted to cheap foreign labour

The use of the TFWP in the healthcare sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2000. That dramatic rise has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards and credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had to turn to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to solve this problem by speeding up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late.

Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were working and attempting to settle here, rather than studying at any Canadian university or college. Most were migrants from India, and some were trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage into the U.S. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year, we have reason to believe that this abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale that we understand.

The consequences for young Canadians

Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.

It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs. They face normally insurmountable barriers to joining unions and have no attachment to the community in which they’re expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community.

Young Canadians can afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreign nationals. Employers should instead work harder to invest in and reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour.

To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a de-skilling of the domestic population.

September 9, 2025

Employers insist that there are lots of high-paying “entry level” jobs that Canadians won’t do

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

Canada’s insanely out-of-control temporary foreign worker program hinges on employers being honest about the jobs on offer being impossible to fill with Canadian citizens or legal immigrants. The huge numbers of these jobs — often listed at much higher than minimum wage in areas with very high unemployment — strongly implies that employers are systematically gaming the system:

A selection of jobs subject to active Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA), meaning that an employer has applied for a temporary foreign worker on the grounds that no Canadian is available to fill the position.
Photo by Government of Canada Job Bank.

If public sentiment is turning against the TFW system, it’s partially because of a greater awareness of the conditions under which employers are claiming they cannot find Canadians for their jobs.

Any hiring of a temporary foreign worker has to first be preceded by a “Labour Market Impact Assessment”. It’s effectively a job posting laying out the basic details of the position, and carrying the disclaimer “the employer could not find a Canadian worker for this job and applied for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to hire a temporary foreign worker”.

What’s made many of these LMIAs so controversial is that they often describe quite desirable jobs with minimal qualifications. There are also noticeably high numbers of them being submitted in cities with high unemployment.

Last year, a viral Reddit post featured a heat map of all the Toronto-area employers who had been approved for temporary foreign workers after claiming to find no Canadian applicants. More recently, the website JobWatchCanada has launched a searchable database of active LMIAs, complete with interactive maps and guides to which employers are the heaviest users.

What really bothers a lot of Canadians about the program is the high number of jobs posted with few or no qualifications at well-above market rates at the same time that young Canadians are finding it impossible to get hired no matter how many positions they apply for:

In June, a Calgary auto shop submitted an LMIA for a “motor vehicle mechanic helper”. The job is to essentially act as a “gofer”. The starting wage for the helper job is $36.50 per hour, the employer promises to cover relocation costs, and the “experience” category contains only the words “will train”.

A Langley, B.C., drywall contractor said it can’t find any Canadian drywall installers at $36.75 per hour. A vape shop in Lloydminster, Sask., has filed an LMIA to fill a $36.05 per hour shift supervisor job in which the educational requirement is a high school diploma.

In Woodbridge, Ont., a homeowner filed an LMIA for a $38 per hour housekeeper in which the only qualification is that the applicant has to speak English. “No degree, certificate or diploma”, is listed in the space for educational requirements, and the requirement for work experience is just “will train”.

The useful site fakejobs.ca currently shows three LMIA positions in my small town each paying at least $35 per hour that supposedly can’t be filled by local applicants. The jobs — two food service supervisors and a marketing co-ordinator — can’t possibly have such exotic required qualifications that nobody in the area can match, which is why I strongly suspect they’re fakes.

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