Quotulatiousness

February 2, 2012

In Arizona “any time two or more people work together to influence a vote … they instantly become a ‘political committee'”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

What’s all this about “free speech” if you are legally encumbered with ridiculous regulations even before you speak?

Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of the desert community of Fountain Hills believes you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.

Last October, Galassini became annoyed — like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government — about the city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent emails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”

State law — this is the state of John McCain, apostle of political purification through the regulation of political speech — says that any time two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.” This transformation triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filing forms, establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has raised no money and does not intend to. This must be done before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.

February 1, 2012

University tuition and lower-income student access

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:40

In the Globe and Mail (which seems to be having web authentication issues lately), Stephen Gordon points out that lowering university tuition costs won’t actually address the problem it’s supposed to:

There is a well-documented correlation between family income and university participation rates: people from the top quarter of the income distribution are roughly twice as likely to go to university as those from the bottom quarter. An implication of this imbalance is that the population of people who are attending university is far from being representative of the population as a whole: university students from the top quartile outnumber those from the bottom by a factor of 2 to 1. This imbalance is both the problem and the reason why the problem is so hard to solve.

Reducing tuition fees will do very little to close the gap between university participation rates in people from the higher and lower ends of the income distribution. The direct costs of university — tuition and books — account for only a quarter of the total costs (source), and financial considerations explain roughly 12 per cent of the gap between PSE participation rates of youths from upper- and lower-income households.

[. . .]

A far cheaper, more equitable and more effective way of increasing access to universities is to concentrate public funds on providing support to students in financial need (this group also includes those who have debt problems). But these measures would benefit only a minority of students who are already going to university, while tuition cuts would benefit all students.

Student lobby groups such as the CFS have a mandate to represent the interests of all current students, and this group does not include those who might have gone to university if more financial support were available. They have little interest in targeted programs — see, for example, the CFS’ reaction to the Ontario government’s tuition rebate for students from families earning less than $160,000/year.

January 31, 2012

Homeland Security Theatre: The case of the “Destroy America” Brit twits

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Jim Harper sifts through the evidence in the “Destroy America” Twitter case:

The Department of Homeland Security has been vague as yet about what actually happened. It may have been some kind of “social media analysis” like this that turned up “suspicious” Tweets leading to the exclusion, though the betting is running toward a suspicious-activity tipline. (What “turned up” the Tweets doesn’t affect my analysis here.) The boastful young Britons Tweeted about going to “destroy America” on the trip — destroy alcoholic beverages in America was almost certainly the import of that line — and dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.

Profoundly stilted literalism took this to be threatening language. And a failure of even brief investigation prevented DHS officials from discovering the absurdity of that literalism. It would be impossible to “dig up” Marilyn Monroe’s body, which is in a crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

[. . .]

Other facts could combine with Twitter commentary to create a suspicious circumstance on extremely rare occasions, but for proper suspicion to arise, the Tweet or Tweets and all other facts must be consistent with criminal planning and inconsistent with lawful behavior. No information so far available suggests that the DHS did anything other than take Tweets literally in the face of plausible explanations by their authors that they were using hyperbole and irony. This is simple investigative incompetence.

If indeed it is a “social media analysis” program that produced this incident, the U.S. government is paying money to cause U.S. government officials to waste their time on making the United States an unattractive place to visit. That’s a cost-trifecta in the face of essentially zero prospect for any security benefit.

January 27, 2012

NASA Moonbase by 2020: not likely

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Science, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine:

The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of the moon, in around 2020, as a base for further manned exploration of the solar system.

The problem for Gingrich, a space enthusiast with ideas dating back decades for zero-gravity honeymoons and lunar greenhouses, is that the 2008 financial crisis came along and turned feasible projects into pipe dreams.

“A lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told AFP.

“We got to the moon in the 1960s by spending over 4% of the federal budget on Apollo. NASA’s now at one-tenth of that level.”

The initial problem is both financial and organizational: for all the money being poured into NASA, each dollar is producing much less in the way of science and technology because of the calcified bureaucracy. NASA achieved great things during the Apollo program, but the bureausclerosis was setting in even before the first shuttle flew. To get the kind of results that the “old” NASA achieved, you’d have to blow it up and start from scratch — or better yet, privatize the whole shebang and get the bureaucracy out of the way of the entrepreneurs.

As Robert Zubrin pointed out in the February issue of Reason magazine, NASA has become far too concerned about safety — less out of genuine concern about the astronauts and other employees, but more because of the negative effects of bad PR on the next year’s budget. Under the current NASA management, none of the pre-shuttle launches would have been allowed because they were too dangerous (and we know how dangerous the shuttle was, in hindsight).

January 26, 2012

Ireland’s septic protest

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Elizabeth sent me a link to this Independent.ie article which allowed Lise Hand to dig deep into the Irish septic tank issue while managing not to get too potty-mouthed:

These doughty lads of the West weren’t messing about with a bit of chanting and poster-waving in the manner of an, ahem, bog-standard protest outside Leinster House. Not a bit of it, having driven since dawn in buses up from the corners of Galway, the attitude was, when we’re out, we’re out.

And so the Charge of the Septic Tank Brigade to the gates of Leinster was a colourful affair. They had brought a toilet with them and all, as a pertinent prop to illustrate their admanatine opposition to the introduction of a €50 septic-tank registration charge — a charge which affects rural Ireland, as it’s being imposed on almost half a million households who are not part of a public-sewage scheme.

What’s more, if any tanks fail an inspection, householders will be obliged to upgrade or replace them, which could cost thousands of euro.

And so, the several hundred men (and a few women) from the West were in fighting form on Kildare Street yesterday afternoon. And along with the toilet — which proved a handy seat for the protest’s organiser, Padraig ‘An Tailliura’ O’Conghaola from Rossaveal who was minding the megaphone and trying to keep a bit of order on proceedings.

There was an impressive array of giant paintings on black banners, tastefully depicting images such as sunsets and sailboats and a puzzled-looking lassie sitting on a toilet.

And there was quite a smorgasbord of slogans being waved about: from Winston Churchill’s observation, “We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle”; to more earthy exhortations, such as: “Septic Tank Charges are A Pain in the Hole”; and the bi-lingual “‘Cac’ Hogan RIP — Ireland’s Saddam Hussein”; to the pithy enjoinder, “Get A Grip — Stand Up to Europe”.

A good soundbite, but a very bad idea

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Here is one of the proposals President Barack Obama mentioned in the State of the Union speech that must have played well in the White House, but would be a terrible idea if it really was implemented:

Many soundbites sound good, but have very harmful consequences in the real world. That’s the case for President Obama’s proposal in his State of the Union Address to not allow anyone to leave school until age 18 or graduation. This proposal originated with “the National Education Association, which stands to gain from the idea a measurable boost to its dues-paying ranks, and which has in fact proposed mandatory schooling for nongraduates up to age 21.” This proposal could result in an increase in school violence by bored and frustrated 17-year-olds who hate school but are forced to attend. It would also make it even harder for teachers to maintain order in dangerous schools, contributing to an exodus of talented teachers who would rather teach than be babysitters or policemen. And it could result in truancy charges and arrests for parents who fail to get their stubborn, fully-grown offspring to attend school.

As one commenter notes, “If the union is really pushing something like this, I wonder how many of the members actually welcome it. How many teachers really want to deal with a 17 year old who doesn’t want to be in school? The type that drop out can’t be a joy to teach.” Commenting on the NEA’s ultimate desire to keep people in school until age 21 (Obama wants every American to attend college or at least get “more than a high-school diploma”), another commenter notes, “I suppose Obama would send the cops after those notoriously unproductive dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.”

January 25, 2012

Lorne Gunter: The long-gun registry was broken from the start

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Writing in the National Post, Lorne Gunter points out that the long-gun registry was even less useful than we thought:

Last month, the RCMP and Statistics Canada were forced to admit that they don’t keep statistics relating to the number of violent gun crimes in Canada that are committed by licensed gun owners using registered guns.

“Please note,” Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, “that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police.” Nor does StatsCan’s annual homicide survey “collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide.”

This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.

There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)

Even if you grant the original notion that the government had an overriding need to track gun ownership (over and above the user licensing scheme that pre-dated the registry by decades), this can only count as a waste of time, money, and effort.

January 17, 2012

Details on the British defence cuts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

The unit hardest hit by the reductions will be the Brigade of Gurkhas:

In a statement, the MoD revealed it was looking to shed 2,900 posts from the army, around 1,000 from the RAF and 300 from the Royal Navy.

The total is higher than the first round of the process last year, and there are expected to be more compulsory redundancy notices this time.

The MoD announced it was looking to shed approximately 400 Gurkhas — one in eight of the brigade. Approximately 500 infantry privates with more than six years’ service will also be axed.

The senior ranks of the army have not been spared. Eight brigadiers and 60 lieutenant colonels are expected to go.

The Royal Navy will lose five commodores and 17 captains. Nineteen Royal Marine officers will be shed, but no one from the ranks.

The RAF will lose up to 15 air commodores and 30 group captains. The MoD believes that by slowing recruiting, and not replacing those who leave, the navy and the RAF will be able to achieve the cuts they need without a “tranche 3” of redundancies. The army needs to shed almost 20,000 jobs over the next eight years and will continue to make cuts for years to come.

January 12, 2012

QotD: When a figure is too high to be repaid, it won’t be repaid

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:31

It’s hardly news anymore that public-sector pension promises will be made good (or not) on the backs of taxpayers, but I still think that the average private-sector packmule has no idea of the amount they’re going to have to pony up to vouchsafe the various municipal, state, and federal pension promises. The amount required over the next several decades beggars the imagination. In fact, the amount is preposterous: there’s no way the money is ever going to be paid out as promised. Even if it were mathematically possible (which it isn’t), taxpayers would revolt over the massive increases that would be required. If I were a public-sector worker, I’d be making a point of saving every dime of my own money that I could, because that fat public sector pension is unlikely to ever be paid out in full. (And I’m not even getting into the healthcare benefits, which are even more onerous than the pension benefits.) Basically, the bedrock truth is this: money that can’t be paid out, won’t be, no matter what agreements were signed or what the courts say.

Monty, “The Daily DOOM”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2012-01-12

January 11, 2012

Reason.tv: Three reasons conservatives should cut defence spending now

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

“I don’t know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

The further criminalization of what used to be ordinary childhood behaviour:

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 “Class C misdemeanour” tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

“We’ve taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal,” said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. “They’re kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it’s just rowdy there. I don’t know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws.”

The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK’s justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a “school-to-prison pipeline”. The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that “charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues” is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

January 8, 2012

George F. Will on big government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Even fans of bigger government should recognize the accuracy of this short summary:

Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.

Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.

The left’s centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth — to decrease inequality by increasing government’s redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, the maelstrom of contemporary politics demonstrates that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government transfer payments to preferred groups.

[. . .]

The tax code, government’s favorite instrument for distributing wealth to favored factions, has been tweaked about 4,500 times in 10 years. Generally, the beneficiaries of these changes are interests sufficiently strong and sophisticated to practice rent-seeking.

Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.

January 3, 2012

Security Theatre: “So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

Charles C. Mann visits the airport with security guru Bruce Schneier:

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

[. . .]

From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes — the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives — were subdued by angry passengers.

[. . .]

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets — shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”

January 2, 2012

The least welcome additions to “managementspeak” in 2011

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:48

Macro Man runs down a selection of words and phrases which became common last year:

We are nearly at the end of 2011 and another year of mayhem behind. We will be judging our 2011 Non-Predictions and trying to dream up some new ones for 2012 in the next fortnight or so but this week we have been able to get some long needed admin done. With it came a realisation that even if the financial industry is suffering the creative management community has been in full swing dreaming up new terms and phrases to camouflage the blindingly obvious. The evolution of ‘management speak’ means some phrases die and some survive and flourish. TMM really don’t know what determines the success of one term or phrase over another other than, as with the arts, adoption and patronage by the most respected in the field. TMM hope that this year’s rash of newcomers all die off naturally but we would like to help with a shove into their deserved obscurity.

TMM have noticed that every cause nowadays needs an “Awareness” campaign and though we feel that “doing” is of much greater importance than “awaring”, we will go along with the fashion and launch a Management Talk Awareness Week with the list of phrases and terms we have found most irksome this year.

So here are TMM’s top ten annoying phrases of 2011 (even if some are older) that we would like to see the back of.

“Hi, I hope all is well. We have identified a need to internalise our ideation of the requirements of the Stakeholder Community before we reach out to them.”

December 31, 2011

The “Reverse Pelzman” Effect

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

A semi-serious discussion of a real-world experiment in getting rid of driving licenses:

Those of us who are econ geeks will know about the Pelzman Effect. Regulations that supposedly make us safer (say, seatbelts or cycling helmets) don’t actually make us safer as behaviour changes to take account of the new safety. Almost as if there’s what we consider to be an acceptable risk to take and reducing it in one manner just allows us to be silly in another so as to maintain that risk we’re comfortable with. What I didn’t know (but better econ geeks than I might have done already) is that there is a Reverse Pelzman Effect.

Exploiting an interesting natural experiment, the authors of that paper are able to show that we should abolish driving licences. The various States of Mexico found that bribery was impossible to avoid when attempting to gain a licence. So, to varying degrees, they changed their issuance system, some deciding simply not to have them any more. So, of course, death rates from car accidents went up, didn’t they?

Erm, actually, no, they didn’t. Those places that didn’t bother with licences any more, allowing absolutely anyone at all to get in and drive, saw no change in such death rates any different from those that had now (well, hopefully) incorruptible issuance systems.

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