Quotulatiousness

July 28, 2025

Ontario Premier Doug Ford – threat or menace?

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

In many ways, Ontario’s Doug Ford is a 21st century version of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis … a virtuoso performer of the “talk Conservative, govern Liberal” style that urban Ontario voters really seem to love. It works well for the Laurentian Elite to have a Liberal government in Ottawa and a “Conservative” government in Toronto, as they can argue in public about all sorts of marginal issues, but when it comes down to legislation and regulation, they’re almost indistinguishable from one another aside from party colours.

Last week, Ford announced a plan to hand out provincial work permits to a huge number of “asylum seekers” as the feds seem to be making motions to reduce their support of such irregular immigrants:

One step forward, two steps back? As a card-carrying, self-appointed board member of Team “Please stop making everything worse on purpose,” there are some hard-earned wins and faint movements back towards normal, and then there’s the ongoing screw-jobs that threaten any/all progress.

As we have bemoaned time, and time, and time again around these parts, Ontario has a premier problem. But now, all of Canada has a Doug Ford problem.

I’ve been part of an effort to drag urgent immigration reform into the spotlight, and even into a feature position in the waning days of that ‘first ministers’ meeting in Muskoka, but a certain conservative-in-name-only threatens to make historic problems of immigration and unemployment worse, rather than better.

Conservatives in Canada are about to find themselves in a tricky position with Ford, who has the unique potential to remain one of the last vestiges of the failed Trudeau years — even more so than Carney. And the latter may need defending.

Ford and his deeply conflicted and unethical inner circle may wish to grant provincial work permits to a supply of fake students turned fake asylum claimants, but ordinary folk, concerned parents, our proud immigrant communities who made the grade and never cut corners, and our abandoned workers have other ideas.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @HOCStaffer tries to provide some context:

Asylum seekers, refugees, illegals, whatever you want to call them.

They are filling up hotels, getting money, & doing basically nothing, all the while waiting upwards of 2 years for their application to be approved/denied.

I mean, it’s better than where they came from, which is why they are here.

There’s a massive financial burden to the govt & a huge pool of labour doing nothing which could be serving you your coffee instead of a Temp Foreign Worker.

So Ford’s argument — which I have had made to me in person by hotel, tourism, & restaurant lobbyists — is that why don’t we use these people to do the shit jobs?

***** Especially if we are reducing TFWs.

There is a pretty good logic to it.

“May as well have them do something while they are here waiting.” Right?

But I still disagree with the idea.

Most of these people aren’t refugees. They are economic migrants from terrible places. They came here illegally, often under false pretences, & most should be deported.

The longer they stay the more likely they are to have kids here, to potentially marry a Canadian, and to establish links to the country.

Giving them a job furthers that connection.

The last thing we need is the local Tims owner arguing to keep Abdul in the country because he is the only one who will sling shit coffee on the night shift for shit wages.

Giving illegals jobs just rewards the business owners who take advantage of TFWs with a new pool of labour to exploit.

I get that these are businesses and real people have money and time invested in them.

But if you cannot operate without indentured servants then perhaps we don’t really need your business?

A bunch of Tims will close. McD’s too. Maybe some hotels & other businesses too. It’s sad. No one wants to see that.

But we also can’t keep importing people — and thereby affecting much of the rest of society — in order to keep these businesses open.

So yeah, there’s a sound argument to what Ford is saying.

But what he should be saying is that we need a stronger border, faster processing, less appeals and quicker deportations.

That would save his govt real money.

July 26, 2025

QotD: The accumulated friction of bureaucratic growth

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

Bureaucracies all succumb very quickly to some kind of “Malthusian progression”. I’m not sure what to call it, I suck at naming stuff (please take your shot in the comments), but you all know what I mean: A bureaucracy’s tasks increase arithmetically, but the amount of effort each task requires increases geometrically.

[…] In the early Republic, raising a legion was as simple as a patrician calling his clients to service, or the Senate issuing a conscription decree. One task: the summoning of free men, with their own equipment, and there you go — Legio I Hypothetica.

By the late Empire, though, all those freeholds had been turned into slave-worked Latifundia, so the effort of raising a legion increased enormously. Now the bureaucracy had to go out and hire freemen (if it could even find them), equip them at State expense, train them (again at State expense), and so on. In itself, the number of tasks isn’t that large — we’ve identified three — and they only increase at the rate of n+1.

But the effort each task requires increases to the power of n, such that if you could somehow express the effort expended in physical terms — joules or kilowatts or whatever — you’d see that the creation of Legio I Hypothetica under Scipio Africanus took 10 kilowatts, while raising the same legion under Diocletian took 10,000,000.

This isn’t (just) corruption. Sure, everyone at every level of the Imperial Bureaucracy was getting his beak wet, that goes without saying, but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame.

Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.

July 24, 2025

The vicious competition for Indian civil service jobs

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

Once upon a time in most of the Anglosphere, the advantage of civil service jobs was that they were nearly impossible to get fired from and had a relatively good pension at the end of a long career. Private sector jobs were far less permanent, but paid more, had better benefits, and more prestige. Over the last fifty years, little of that is still true — civil servants still have fantastic job security, but they’re also better paid, have better benefits, and for many there are opportunities to retire and get re-hired back into a similar position with even higher pay while collecting a generous pension. The private sector no longer pays better nor offers significantly better benefits, so lots of people look to get into the civil service who once would have shunned positions like that.

It’s apparently much worse in India:

In India, government jobs pay far more than equivalent jobs in the private sector — so much so that the entire labor market and educational system have become grossly distorted by rent-seeking to obtain these jobs. Teachers in the public sector, for example, are paid at least five times more than in the private sector. It’s not just the salary. When accounting for lifetime tenure, generous perks, and potentially remunerative possibilities for corruption, a government job’s total value can be up to 10 times that of an equivalent private sector job. (See also here.)

As a result, it’s not uncommon for thousands of people to apply for every government job — a ratio far higher than in the private sector. In one famous example, 2.3 million people submitted applications for 368 “office boy” positions in Uttar Pradesh.

The consequences of this intense competition for government jobs are severe. First, as Karthik Muralildharan argues, the Indian government can’t afford to pay for all the workers it needs. India has all the laws of, say, the United States, but about one-fifth the number of government workers per capita, leading to low state capacity.

But there is a second problem which may be even more serious. Competition to obtain government jobs wastes tremendous amounts of resources and distorts the labor and educational market.

If jobs were allocated randomly, applications would be like lottery tickets, with few social costs. Government jobs, however, are often allocated by exam performance. Thus, obtaining a government job requires an “investment” in exam preparation. Many young people spend years out of the workforce studying for exams that, for nearly all of them, will yield nothing. In Tamil Nadu alone, between one to two million people apply annually for government jobs, but far fewer than 1% are hired. Despite the long odds, the rewards are so large that applicants leave the workforce to compete. Kunal Mangal estimates that around 80% of the unemployed in Tamil Nadu are studying for government exams.

Classical rent-seeking logic predicts full dissipation: if a prize is worth a certain amount, rational individuals will collectively spend resources up to that amount attempting to win it. When the prize is a government job, the “spending” is not cash, but years of a young person’s productive life. Mangal calculates that the total opportunity cost (time out of the workforce) that job applicants “spend” in Tamil Nadu is worth more than the combined lifetime salaries of the available jobs (recall that jobs are worth more than salaries, so this is consistent with theory). Simply put, for every ₹100 the government spends on salaries, Indian society burns ₹168 in a collective effort of rent-seeking just to decide who gets them.

The winners are happy but the loss to Indian society — of unemployed young, educated workers who do nothing but study for government exams — is in the billions. Indeed, India spends about 3.86% of GDP on state salaries (27% of state revenues times 14.3% of GDP). If we take Mangal’s numbers from Tamil Nadu, a conservative (multiplier of 1 instead of 1.68) back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that India could be wasting on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually on rent-seeking. (Multiply 3.86% of GDP by 15 (30 years at 5% discount) to get lifetime value, and take 0.025 as annual worker turnover.) Take this with a grain of salt, but regardless, the number is large.

July 23, 2025

Britain’s housing crisis has roots as far back as 1947

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

Tim Worstall on the deep reasons Britain can’t seem to build any new housing:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

The real problem Britain faces is that it’s no longer legal to build the housing we thought was the bare minimum acceptable a century ago.

    The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.

    Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.

As I pointed out:

    But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe – as with so much other land – is there and ripe for the taking.

    It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.

The reason we cannot is that Green Belt, itself stemming from the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The point of which — no, really, the stated purpose — was to make sure that no one would ever be allowed to build housing for proles — sorry, stout Britons — anywhere anyone ever wanted to live.

Which is a bit of a problem. For, outside my own head, there’s no constituency for repealing the TCPA and abolishing the Green Belt.

However, there is a large constituency for plastering farmland with solar cells.

    Waller-Barrett’s farm has been targeted for a massive solar plant, which will be called Glebe Farm, and now his landlord plans to take his land away, replacing potato crops with thousands of giant glass panels.

    The decision, backed by edicts from Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, favouring solar farms over food production on UK farmland, means his flourishing food business will shrink – and staff will be out of work.

    Meanwhile the distant landlord will be quids in, potentially quadrupling their rent with virtually no effort.

Oh.

And now one of those little wrinkles of the law. Those solar farms will last 20 years maximum. No, really, that’s tops. The wrinkle being that the land underneath them will be, in that 20 years’ time, defined as brownfield land. Been previously developed, see? And brownfield land to housing is usually pretty easy as a development path. Certainly wholly unlike greenfield (or even Green Belt) to housing.

The land area Ed wants to cover with these things is 2 to 3% of the land area of the country. Which, as it happens, is about the land area currently covered by housing — including their gardens.

So, therefore we can see that Ed is, in fact, playing the long game. He’s going to solve the housing problem by not having to take on the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and every LibDem middle-ager with too few grandchildren to occupy her time. He’s going to do an end run around that problem by building solar first.

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

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

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

July 21, 2025

QotD: The parasitic classes

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

A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale, the resources of the productive.

Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients”. And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.

“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?

My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.

How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.

And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.

The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.

David Warren, “Answering to a ‘need'”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-18.

July 20, 2025

“[T]he job of a manager [is] to get all C Northcote on bureaucracy”

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

Tim Worstall discusses the recent announcements about the US State Department significantly reducing their staff levels — a “Reduction In Force” or RIF — that is being lamented by the Washington bureaus of all the surviving mainstream media as a world tragedy:

The Guru here, the epitome of the management science, is C Northcote Parkinson. Best remembered for Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But a deeper thinker than that aphorism.

The essential point being that the output of a bureaucracy is bureaucracy. There is nothing measurable that is being done, no financial value being put upon the work. Sure, sure, it might even be that what is being done is of value — we’ve not got a simple measure of it though.

Therefore a bureaucracy measures itself by the budget and staff count. The success of a bureaucracy — a bureau perhaps — is measured by increases in either or better both. Which really does mean that the output of having a bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.

In the private sector this occurs as well. That’s how the power skirts get to take over large corporations. Of course, at some point in that process the company runs out of money and goes bust — the land is cleared for the next attempt to actually add value.

With government that doesn’t happen. Which leads to one of my favourite little thoughts — every civilisation survives until it is parasitised, eaten from within, by its own bureaucracy. We’d probably prefer that this didn’t happen. Yes, anarchy is all very well in theory but no one does like it when the bins aren’t emptied and there’s no state left to keep the French at bay.

The result of this is that the state bureaucracy needs to be pruned. Always. The actual job of a minister is — should be at least — to muse on what shouldn’t be done any longer and who can we fire? As should be the waking thought of any CEO of course.

My preference — because I’m extremist, obviously — is that we just fire them all. Then hire back the 2% we actually do require in order to have a civilisation. Remember, the Empire ran India with 1,000 men. And, well, it’s not wholly obvious that it’s been run any better than that since then.

That’s therefore the job of a manager. To get all C Northcote on bureaucracy. Always and everywhere. If you prefer your phrasing a little more red blooded the answer to bureaucrats is the Carthaginian Solution. Not that anyone would buy them as slaves, not productive enough, but we can try, right?

What do you call 22,000 fewer civil servants in Washington? A good start:

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 16, 2025

Matt Gurney’s “Hollywood Thesis”

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

I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:

… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.

I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.

But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.

Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.

So why? What explains this?

It’s Hollywood. It has to be.

Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.

But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.

It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.

July 12, 2025

Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.

But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.

Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:

    The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …

    The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

    “Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.

Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:

The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.

[…]

But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.

If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.

July 10, 2025

Mandatory online age verification

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist discusses the rush of the Canadian and other governments in the west to try to impose one-size-fits-all age verification schemes on the internet:

The Day I Knew I Was Old 😉 by artistmac CC BY-SA 2.0

When the intersection of law and technology presents seemingly intractable new challenges, policy makers often bet on technology itself to solve the problem. Whether countering copyright infringement with digital locks, limiting access to unregulated services with website blocking, or deploying artificial intelligence to facilitate content moderation, there is a recurring hope the answer to the policy dilemma lies in better technology. While technology frequently does play a role, experience suggests that the reality is far more complicated as new technologies also create new risks and bring unforeseen consequences. So too with the emphasis on age verification technologies as a magical solution to limiting under-age access to adult content online. These technologies offer some promise, but the significant privacy and accuracy risks that could inhibit freedom of expression are too great to ignore.

The Hub runs a debate today on the mandated use of age verification technologies. I argue against it in a slightly shorter version of this post. Daniel Zekveld of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada makes the case for it in this post.

The Canadian debate over age verification technologies – which has now expanded to include both age verification and age estimation systems – requires an assessment of both the proposed legislative frameworks and the technologies themselves. The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House of Commons. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. Once Parliament resumed, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back as Bill S-209.

The bill would create an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.

July 9, 2025

Argentina after 18 months of Milei’s leadership

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

All the mainstream media folks were predicting that Argentina would be an utter economic disaster after the election of Javier Milei. A few of them are starting to come around to admitting that Argentina seems to have made the right move:

What’s happening in Argentina is super impressive, but it’s not a miracle.

Yes, Milei’s reforms are generating great results, but that is exactly what libertarians and small-government conservatives said would happen.

Let’s start with this celebration of the amazing growth of private-sector wages since Milei took office in late 2023.

Or how about the astounding way that Milei has conquered inflation (I also like how this tweet mocks the statists like Piketty who frantically and erroneously warned that Milei’s election would produce an economic catastrophe).

[…]

Let’s close with another tweet.

Here’s Noah Smith, who is not a libertarian, shared two days ago.

Give him credit for acknowledging Milei’s success.

I’ll add two comments about this tweet, one about economic data and the other about predicting whether Milei would get great results.

Regarding data, I don’t think anyone should get overly excited by one month or one quarter of economic data. Even one year of data might create a misleading impression (which is why my Anti-Convergence Club is always based on decades of data). That being said, there is every reason to expect continuing strong results for Argentina.

Regarding predictions, Smith’s tweet asserts that libertarians didn’t expect Milei to be so wildly successful. At the risk of sounding like a politician, I agree and disagree.

  • The “agree” part is that many libertarians were worried at the beginning of Milei’s presidency that he might face immovable opposition from the Peronist-controlled legislature. We also worried that the special interest groups might launch massive – and successful – protests that would derail necessary reforms. So if you asked me in December 2023 for my prediction, I would not have been overflowing with optimism.
  • The “disagree” part is that I have always had total and absolute confidence that radical pro-market policies will produce great results, anywhere and everywhere. And I assume other libertarians (as well as Reagan-type conservatives) share my faith that good policies lead to good outcomes. So if I was told in December 2023 what Milei would have accomplished in his first 18 months, I would have fully expected the great news we now see.

In other words, what’s miraculous is that the reforms happened. The subsequent economic renaissance has been boringly inevitable (but totally wonderful).

P.S. I am cautiously optimistic that Milei will get more allies in the legislature after Argentina’s mid-term elections later this year.

July 4, 2025

Another military procurement cock-up … this time it’s the C-19 rifles of the Canadian Rangers

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

The Canadian Rangers, one of the least-known parts of the Canadian Armed Forces, are a mainly Inuit reserve force operating in the Canadian north. They’d been equipped with WW2-era Lee Enfield rifles since the 1940s and the weapons were getting too old to perform the task so the CAF’s procurement folks settled on a Finnish rifle manufactured under license by Colt Canada. The Rangers, operating primarily as small patrols or as individuals, didn’t need the high firepower of a modern infantry rifle and the harsh climate they work in meant that a bolt-action rifle was desired. Bolt-action rifles are not new technology, so you’d think the CAF procurement would have been pretty straightforward, but no, they managed to miss something critical in the specifications they issued for the contract. And because the rifles met the published specifications, it’s on the CAF rather than the manufacturer to make sure that the weapons are safe to operate by the Canadian Rangers:

A Canadian Ranger handles the military’s new C-19 rifle. Shortly after the rifles were sent to Ranger units, red dye from the stocks started appearing on the hands of the soldiers when the weapons were exposed to wet conditions. (Credit: Canadian Armed Forces)

Canadian Rangers who use their new rifles in the rain are finding their hands covered in red dye because the stocks on the weapons can’t handle moisture, according to newly released military records.

The problem was discovered in May 2018 as the new C-19 rifles were initially being distributed to Canadian Ranger units as part of a $32.8-million contract with Colt Canada. The .308 C-19, which is equipped with a red stock, replaced the Lee Enfield .303 rifle that had been used by Canadian Rangers since 1947.

Under the contract, the new rifles were required to withstand extremely cold temperatures in the Arctic as well as moderate-to-high humidity in the coastal and forested regions of the country.

“Obviously from a health and safety perspective having dye released onto the skin is not a good situation,” Arthur Hall, who is with the Department of National Defence’s small arms program, noted in a May 9, 2018 email regarding the C-19.

Further complaints continued to come in from Ranger units who also found the stocks were cracking.

“The issue is that when exposed to moisture the red dye in the stock will run, and will discolour the hands of the user,” Luke Foster of the Directorate of Soldier Systems Program Management, pointed out in a July 3, 2018 email. “This is also an indication that the stocks are not properly protected from the elements.”

One report from an officer assigned to the Rangers noted he took his new rifle outside in the rain for only five minutes before returning indoors. Once back inside he noticed the weapon was dripping red dye. “I held the weapon for approximately 5-10 mins and it stated to stain my hand,” Captain T.M. Collier wrote in a May 9, 2018 email.

The documents, acquired by the Ottawa Citizen, were released under the Access to Information Act.

Department of National Defence officials, however, say it will be up to taxpayers to cover the costs of replacing the stocks on the 6,800 new rifles. That cost is estimated to be up to $10 million.

June 30, 2025

DOGE couldn’t address the structural problems with the US government

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mohamed Moutii looks at the reasons DOGE was unable to come close to achieving the lofty goals it was launched with:

DOGE’s biggest failure was its inability to deliver its promised sweeping transformation. From the start, its $2 trillion savings target was unrealistic. Cutting nearly 30% from a $7 trillion budget was never feasible, especially with politically untouchable programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense off the table.

Musk’s claim that eliminating waste alone could close the gap didn’t hold up. While most budget experts support cutting inefficiencies, they agree that waste isn’t the main driver of the fiscal crisis. Even slashing all discretionary spending would save only $1.7 trillion. The real pressure comes from mandatory programs, which account for nearly two-thirds of the budget, leaving only a quarter of spending truly up for debate.

As reality set in, Musk’s savings claims shrank from $2 trillion to just $150 billion. While DOGE cites $170 billion saved, independent estimates suggest closer to $63 billion, less than 1% of federal spending, with many claims either inflated or unverifiable. Some savings were credited to long-canceled contracts. Though headline-grabbing layoffs and cuts were made, they were often botched, forcing agencies to rehire staff or reverse course. Meanwhile, federal spending rose by $166 billion, erasing any gains. Trump’s fiscal agenda worsens the outlook with the first-ever $1 trillion defense budget, sweeping tax cuts, and protected entitlements — all while annual deficits approach $2 trillion.

Yet DOGE’s failures ran deeper than mere fiscal naiveté. What began as Musk’s role as a “special government employee” quickly expanded into an unchecked exercise of executive power, raising constitutional alarms. His team reportedly accessed classified data, redirected funds, and sidelined entire agencies — actions taken without Senate confirmation, potentially in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Legal pushback swiftly followed, with fourteen states suing Trump and Musk over the constitutionality of Musk’s White House-granted authority.

Meanwhile, glaring conflicts of interest became impossible to ignore. Musk’s companies — X, SpaceX, and Tesla — hold $38 billion in federal contracts, loans, tax breaks, and subsidies while facing over 30 federal investigations. His push to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — while X launches the “X Money Account“, a mobile payment service subject to CFPB oversight — only deepened concerns. Musk was legally obligated to separate his business dealings from government decisions. One major result has been the impact on Musk’s reputation. Once hailed as a visionary for his promotion of electric cars, he is now viewed unfavorably by many former fans.

QotD: Britons and their NHS

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

Anecdotes, neither positive nor negative, are not the way to assess the performance of the NHS or any other healthcare system. But I suspect that I am not alone in finding it distinctly difficult, intimidating and unpleasant even to get to see a doctor (though I am middle-class and tolerably prosperous).

I have to run a gamut of procedures to do so and face a receptionist who treats me as a fraud trying to get something to which I am not entitled, and I have no practitioner whom I can call my doctor. The NHS has crowded out private competition, and the nearest private doctor is 25 miles away. Suffice it to say that, if I want to see a doctor, it is easier, quicker and more pleasant for me to go to France than to the health centre about 300 yards from my house in England.

I cannot in all honesty say, however, that my health has suffered in any measurable way as a result of this unpleasantness, because my health is good and I am not a doctor-botherer. But it does reveal something about Britain that is not true in France: in our dealings with the NHS, we are a nation of paupers who must accept what we are given by grace and favour of the system. It may be good or it may be bad, but we have to accept it.

Furthermore, under the NHS doctors themselves are becoming ever less members of a liberal profession and ever more executors of orders from on high, with little leeway to consider whether these orders are good or bad in the case of the individual case before them.

This is a problem in all systems in which a third party pays for patients’ treatment, but it is particularly acute in a highly-centralised and dirigiste system such as the NHS, in which uniformity is the goal, even if it be uniformity of error. And increasingly, it creates an atmosphere of technical, managerial and ethical conformity.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

June 26, 2025

QotD: Credentialism versus meritocracy

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

Returning briefly to the running theme of Vietnam, what all the “happy little hotdogs” had in common was: They were all Harvard men. Kennedy was a Harvard graduate. McGeorge Bundy had been a Dean at Harvard. McNamara was a Harvard b-school grad. John McNaughton was a Harvard professor. Maxwell Taylor was a West Pointer, but all the other happy little hotdogs said “he was the kind of general Harvard would produce”; they could think of no higher compliment.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” — truth — but it ought to be “ludificationes pertinet“, which the internet informs me is how you say “delusions of competence” in Latin. I meant it when I said that the “Ministry of Talent”, as these jerkoffs unironically called themselves, actually had some serious brainpower and real accomplishments … but the Peter Principle is also true, and though they had some real brains and actual accomplishments, neither their brains nor their accomplishments at Harvard translated to anything out in the real world, any more than some Late Republic social climber’s “experience” as curule aedile translated to anything real in their world.

Just as the Roman Senate had no idea how to deal with a Julius Caesar, then, despite it all, so no American “leader” had any idea how to deal with a guy like Ho Chi Minh, even though he, like Caesar, had always been perfectly open and forthright about what he was doing and why. It never occurred to “the best and brightest” to even ask the question “What does Ho Chi Minh want?”, because after all, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a Harvard man.

And all this was 60 years ago. These days, the AINO cursus honorum is so widespread that every kid who manages to fill out a college app has a resume that would give McGeorge Bundy an erection lasting more than four hours. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Flyover State — which is respectable but rinky-dink; the kind of outfit where you see their team losing a late December bowl game and you think “Gosh, I guess that state has a third college in it” — had several hundred student organizations …

… all of which seem to exist for no other reason than to have “officers”, to which these little social climbers can be “elected”, the better to pad their law, med, and grad school apps. By the end of my career, probably 3/4 of the students who ever sent me an email had an auto-signature on it, and that auto-signature was longer than my entire CV. President of this, Vice-Treasurer of that, Assistant Grand Poobah (junior grade) of the other thing. Grandpa Simpson was a piker compared to these kids:

    I’m an Elk, a Mason, a Communist. I’m the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance for some reason. Ah, here it is. The Stonecutters!

Instead of giving potential movers and shakers some practical experience, our modern cursus honorum casts the widest possible net for sociopathy. McGeorge Bundy is your absolute best case scenario. He wasn’t actively evil; he was just a goofy egghead who thought he was way smarter and more accomplished than he actually was, because he’d never been in a position to find out otherwise. (An anecdote that tells you everything you need to know, courtesy of Wikipedia: “When applying to Yale, Bundy wrote on the entrance exam ‘This question is silly. If I were giving the test, this is the question I would ask, and this is my answer.’ Despite this, he was still admitted to Yale as he was awarded a perfect score on his entrance exam”).

Think about that the next time you go to the doctor. Even if your MD — or, much more likely these days, PA — isn’t a prize graduate of Bollywood Upstairs Medical College, xzhey most likely spent xzheyr college years as an Elk, a Mason, a Communist …

Your worst case scenario is, of course, another Caesar. A fake and gay one, it goes without saying — this being Clown World — but a fake and gay Caesar can still do tremendous damage, because they’re the worst of both worlds: Bundy-level goofs, and angry ethnic sociopaths with huge chips on their shoulders. These are the kids who have been “team leads” doing “original research” since about age 12. Not only have they never failed, they’ve never been exposed to the merest hint of the possibility of failure. All their “success” is theirs by right. They have Caesar’s vaulting ambition, his utter disregard for tradition, his absolute cutthroat ruthlessness … and none of his experience, to say nothing of his competence.

Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.

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