There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.
Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.
Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.
Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.
But there are two answers.
First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.
Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.
In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court’s decision found that, “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen.”
The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.
When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.
Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.
Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.
A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.
Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.
If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.
That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.
Daniel Greenfield, “Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It”, Sultan Knish, 2019-05-16.
May 22, 2019
May 20, 2019
A “cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic” view of the modern economy
David Warren explains some of his disquietude about our modern world:
Gentle reader may object that none of these entities is a government department, except insofar as it is the subject of taxes and regulations, and as it grows larger, an ever more formidable force in lobbying for subsidies and legislation favourable to itself. Objection sustained. Verily, this is just my point.
Each entity made its way until the gobbling by means of mass consumer advertising, in which morally illegitimate methods of persuasion — principally hype, actual lies, irrelevant claims and endorsements — are instrumental to sales success. Honest advertising (e.g. catalogues with exact descriptions) is theoretically possible but practically extinct; campaigns are based on the tawdry manipulation of human “perceptions” — behaviourist psychology at the level of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but elaborately quantified, with financial and pricing arrangements factored in.
Indeed, one may link most disastrous marketing decisions to the decline of intuitive reasoning, as statistical reasoning takes its place. The manager who knows in his gut, from experience, what might work and what won’t, or can’t, is displaced by the young analyst with computer modelling skills and all the jargon of “science” to express the platitudes he was drip-fed in school.
But here, too, “private” and “public” enterprise are fully integrated. Both are adapted to the “planning” paradigm, and each is utterly dependent on the other, in what is misleadingly called “the mixed economy.” The critics of abstract Capitalism, on the one side, and abstract Socialism, on the other, draw a false contrast between two administrative orders, when they are both bureaucratic in nature, inhumanly oversized, and habitually dedicated to the pursuit of monopoly.
Several of the readers with whom I correspond are under the immovable impression that I am against making money, or improvements in technology, per se. In fact my outlook is cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic. The moral questions are instead such as, How is the money made? And, for what are the improvements to be used? As I must remind e.g. my Chief Texas Correspondent, I am not against electricity or indoor plumbing. But I am against worshipping such things, or making them the criteria for high civilization.
May 19, 2019
Malcom McLean’s container shipping revolution
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Alexander Hammond recounts the tale of a former truck driver who was instrumental in revolutionizing the way we ship products around the world:
Deep-sea containers from China at Ely, Cambridgeshire
Via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1937, McLean made a routine delivery of cotton bales to a port in North Carolina for shipment to New Jersey. As McLean couldn’t leave until his cargo had been loaded onto the ship, he sat for hours watching dozens of dockhands load thousands of small packages onto the ship. McLean realized that the current loading process wasted enormous amounts of time and money, and he began to wonder if there could be a more productive alternative.
In 1952, McLean thought of loading entire trucks onboard a ship to be transported along the American Atlantic coast (i.e., from North Carolina to New York). Although this idea would dramatically reduce loading times, he soon realized that these “trailer ships” would not be very efficient due to the large amount of wasted cargo space.
Mclean modified his original design so that just the containers—and not the trucks’ chassis—were loaded onto the ship. He also developed a way for the containers to be stacked on top of one another. That was the origin of the modern-day shipping container.
In 1956, McLean secured a bank loan for $22 million. He used the money to buy two World War II tanker ships and convert them to carry his containers. Later that year, one of his two ships, the SS Ideal-X, was loaded with 58 containers and sailed from New Jersey to Houston, Texas. At the time, McLean’s shipping company offered transport prices that were 25 percent lower than those of his competitor as well as the ability to lock the containers in order to prevent cargo theft, which also appealed to many new customers.
By 1966, McLean launched his first transatlantic service and three years later, McLean had started a transpacific shipping line. As the advantages of McLean’s container system became clear, bigger ships, more sophisticated containers, and larger cranes to load cargo were developed.
Update 21 May: Here’s a breathtaking example of just how much McLean’s containers changed the world:
In 1956, hand-loading cargo onto a ship in a U.S. port cost $5.86 per ton ($55.58 in today’s money). By 2006, shipping containers reduced that price to just 16 cents per ton ($0.21 in today’s money). https://t.co/zuMMqOuiAl #HumanProgressData
— Timothy Aeppel (@TimAeppel) May 20, 2019
QotD: The purpose of the corporation
The key is that the purpose of the firm is set by the folk who created it and those who own it. If it meets customers’ needs it will thrive, and if it doesn’t, it goes out of business. If you and I, dear reader, found a business to sell chocolate ice cream, at what point do we suddenly become “responsible” in some sense to “society” or “the environment” or “God” in how we run things unless we have expressly chosen to make those considerations part of our business mission?
It is crucial to be clear on this point. If a group of individuals band together to create a corporation that expressly states that it shall distribute 30 per cent of profits to a specific charity/cause, or that it will source its supplies from a particular group on ethical grounds, or hire as equal a balance of men and women as possible, regardless of other considerations, then anyone who becomes, say, a shareholder in that business cannot complain if things go wrong. And in fact there are more and more cases of firms that go out of their way to brandish their ethical principles, with varying levels of credibility or cant. Also it turns out that firms which are run by honest people, publish transparent accounts and don’t treat staff like crap tend, according to some metrics, to outperform their peers over the long term (see a study claiming this here). As Adam Smith might have noted, if people pursue their rational self-interest it tends to be the case that dealing with decent, honest people tends to work out better than dealing with shysters.
Johnathan Pearce, “Corporate social responsibility – is it socialism by the back door?”, Samizdata, 2019-04-18.
May 12, 2019
Mechanisms for redressing employment gender imbalances
We’ve often been told that too many men occupy positions of power and influence in the working world, but what would it take to meaningfully address those imbalances?
Equity … is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome — educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.
[…]
Now it doesn’t seem like mere imagination on my part that all the noise about “patriarchal domination” is not directed at the fact that far more men than women occupy what are essentially trade positions. Nor does it seem unreasonable to point out that these are not particularly high-status jobs, although they may pay comparative well. It is also obvious that none of these occupations and their hierarchies, in isolation, can be thoughtfully considered the kind of oppressive patriarchy supposed to constitute the “West,” and aimed at the domination and exclusion of women. By contrast, the trade occupations are composed of cadres of working men, with difficult and admirable jobs, who keep the staggeringly complex, reliable and essentially miraculous infrastructure of our society functioning through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night and who should be credited gratefully with exactly that.
Let’s assume for a moment that we should aim at equity, nonetheless, and then actually think through what policies would inevitably have to be put in place to establish such a goal. We might begin by eliminating pay scales that differ (hypothetically) by gender. This would mean introducing legislation requiring companies to rank-order their sex representation at each level of the company hierarchy, adjust that to 50:50, and then adjust the pay differential by gender at every rank, so that the desired equity was achieved. Companies could be monitored over a five-year period for improvement. Failure to meet the appropriate targets would be necessarily met with fines for discrimination. In the extreme, it might be necessary to introduce staggered layoffs of men so that the gender equity requirements could be met.
Then there are the much broader social policy implications. We could start by addressing the hypothetical problems with college, university and trade school training. Many companies, compelled to move rapidly toward gender equilibria, will object (and validly) that there are simply not enough qualified female candidates to go around. Changing this would mean implementing radical and rapid changes in the post-secondary education system, implemented in a manner both immediate and draconian — justified by the obvious “fact” that the reason the pipeline problem exists is the absolutely pervasive sexism that characterizes all the programs that train such workers (and the catastrophic and prejudicial failure of the education system that is thereby implied).
The most likely solution — and the one most likely to be attractive to those who believe in such sexism — would be to establish strict quota systems in the relevant institutions to invite and incentivize more female participants, once again in proportion to the disequilibria in enrollment rates. If quotas are not enough, then a system of scholarship or, more radically (and perhaps more fairly) women could be simply paid to enroll in education systems where their sex is badly under-represented. Alternatively, perhaps, men could be asked to pay higher rates of tuition, in some proportion to their over-representation, and the excess used to subsidize the costs of under-represented females.
May 6, 2019
QotD: Political scandals
If you say “Clinton scandal,” the first thing that comes to mind for most people, at least for those of us old enough to have been around for Bill Clinton’s presidency, is Monica Lewinsky. That’s a shame: I am convinced that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cattle-futures shenanigans were in fact a much more serious offense as a matter of public corruption. But most people don’t understand futures trading. Everybody understands diddling the interns. Nobody understands finance. Everybody understands sex.
(Except Objectivists.)
That’s why financial scandals rarely end political careers, but sex scandals often do, especially for Republicans.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Fanciful Trump ‘Scandals'”, National Review, 2017-04-16.
May 5, 2019
The MG Midget Story
Big Car
Published on 18 Mar 2019The MG Midget is all about fun! It’s a simple, cheap little car that promises open-top thrills which it delivers in spades. It’s a story that spans seven decades from humble roots in Oxfordshire to a world-beating car that conquered America. It was loved by weekend tinkerers, American G.I.’s coming home from the war and F1 racers. This is the MG Midget Story!
May 1, 2019
Feds impose media ban on companies taking part in “the largest single outlay of tax dollars in Canadian history”
Ted Campbell understands that governments need to keep some information secret (like the capability of weapon systems or details of naval radar implementations), but that our current federal government is going far beyond any reasonable definition of secrecy:
Type 26 Global Combat Ship — selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant program’s design winner.
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)
But, that sort of really SECRET stuff aside, we, citizens, do have a right to know how the government is spending our money and that, in my opinion, includes understanding “details about the industrial benefits and jobs supposedly to be created by the surface combatant project.” After all, it was our government, the Harper Conservative government to be clear, that selected, in that case, Irving Shipbuilding (Halifax) to be the supplier of new destroyer-frigate type warships, and they did so after what was described in a 2010 press release by then Public Works and Government Services Minister Rona Ambrose as developing a
Strategy [that] promotes the regional distribution of work and opportunities to shipyards across the country. Shipyards that are selected to build the combat and non-combat packages will have to subcontract vast amounts of work to the broader marine industry and suppliers of this industry. Subcontracting in any of the three streams encompassed by the Strategy will be of notable benefit small and medium enterprises … [and] … The Government of Canada is committed to getting the best value for Canadian taxpayers. Under the Strategy, shipbuilding projects that are similar in nature will be grouped together to reduce production costs. This type of strategic sourcing will create the conditions for the effective and efficient delivery and support of the federal fleet over the long term.
That’s all pretty good stuff and I’m pretty sure that most Liberal ministers are still toeing that same line today. They promised industrial benefits and jobs; we, taxpayers, have a right to know if they are delivering.
But, in an article in the National Post, defence correspondent David Pugliese tells us that
The Liberal government has brought in yet another media ban, this time affecting companies seeking work on a warship project that involves the largest single outlay of tax dollars in Canadian history … [in this case] … In a new directive, firms interested in maintenance work on the $60 billion Canadian Surface Combatant program have been told they can’t talk to journalists and instead must refer all inquiries to Public Services and Procurement Canada … [and] … At the same time, a public interest researcher who is seeking details about the industrial benefits and jobs supposedly to be created by the surface combatant project has been informed by government it will take at least three and a half years to get any such documents under the Access to Information law.
Mr Pugliese says, and these are two very worrying points, that:
- The media ban imposed by Procurement Canada on firms interested in maintenance work on that fleet is the fifth such order in the last year involving the purchase of military equipment or ships, according to documents compiled by Postmedia; and
- Industry representatives have sent the news organization the documents, warning about the growing secrecy at Procurement Canada. The records include a ban on firms talking to journalists about the Canadian Surface Combatants, the purchase of next generation fighter jets, a light icebreaker, a Defence department satellite, as well as a military pilot training contract. Industry executives point out the secrecy is not based on security concerns but on worries the news media will be able to use the information to keep close tabs on the problem-plagued military procurement system.
The Trudeau regime seems obsessed with secrecy and wants to bend all factual information to suit its narrative that it is spending our money as we might wish … which is, of course exactly what the Trudeau campaign said about Prime Minister Stephen Harper
To the surprise of nobody, Ontario’s cannabis stores are still struggling
The Ontario government created a tightly restricted retail market regime for newly legal cannabis sellers, with a tiny number of licenses issued and highly bureaucratic “safeguards” for the retailers’ guidance and control. The city of Toronto, for example, with a population in the 2.7 million range, was allocated a whopping five stores. Only one of those stores was allowed to open on the first day of legal retail sales, and today there are three in operation, despite penalties and potential loss of licenses at stake for those who haven’t opened yet. The chorus of complaints from would-be customers has not diminished much, if at all since day one:
With legalization day long come and gone (and the euphoria of being able to spark a joint in public gone with it), the turtle-paced roll-out of Toronto’s weed retail scene goes to show the government and the OCS have some work to do before purchasing legal weed can be completely glitch-free (and lineup free, too).
Here are a few of the lows of getting high, courtesy of Toronto weed stores since buying pot became legal.
Weed prices are up
According to Statistics Canada, prices for weed have steadily been on the up and up since legalization last year.While Nova Cannabis is trying to tackle its biggest competitor (illicit weed stores) with Black Market Buster deals, people who are buying their cannabis from the OCS are now paying an average of about $9.99 per gram—that’s roughly $3 more than those buying their bud from illegal stores.
Black market weed is still thriving
There’s still around 20 illegal dispensaries operating in the city, and at least 100 illegal marijuana delivery services. Why? See above: unlicensed weed stores are significantly cheaper than the legal ones, and loopholes in the city’s laws allow them to operate pretty much undisturbed, save for the occasional raids.[…]
OCS packaging
Aside from the fact every product coming out of the OCS comes triple-wrapped in excessive, sometimes non-recyclable polypropylene packaging, the containers are just plain confusing.Lack of packaging standards means your order comes in all shapes and sizes, regardless of whether you’re getting bud or pre-rolled joints, which is as confusing for buyers as it is for those behind the counter.
And that doesn’t even include the even louder chorus of complaints about the quality of the legal product…
April 29, 2019
Cannabis stores struggling against cheaper black market weed outlets
In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:
How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?
How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?
Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.
It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.
So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.
Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.
You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.
It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.
The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.
“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.
QotD: Prostitution
I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.
“Dominatrix,” she said.
She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.
This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?
Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.
April 27, 2019
QotD: When McDonald’s came to Moscow
[In an NPR broadcast] McDonald’s is positively portrayed as being an excellent, almost heroic, force for good. McDonald’s manner of doing business is celebrated as changing social norms for the better – for making the world (or at least Russia) not only a more consumer-friendly place, but also a more pleasant, a more polite, a more respectful, and a (yes) more happy place.
Listeners are reminded at the start of the clip that Americans smile a lot, including at strangers. Russians – and, especially, Russians under Soviet domination – did not smile very much. Then McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990. McDonald’s trains its workers to smile at customers, and to be polite and friendly. We then learn – from one of the Russians who worked at that McDonald’s in Moscow – that that restaurant became a place of pleasant refuge for Muscovites. The simple, smiling friendliness and politeness that Americans take for granted was, in Russia, actively sought after by many Russians and embraced by their choosing to dine at McDonald’s.
Commerce – voluntary exchange – is essential for what Deirdre McCloskey calls “market-tested betterment.” This betterment, however – and Deirdre would agree – is manifested not only in new and better material products but also in the ways in which businesses treat consumers. In market economies consumers are valuable to businesses; in these economies consumers are treated by businesses as respected guests. In contrast, in non-market economies – in economies in which prices and profits are prevented from moving in market-clearing directions – consumers are treated by ‘businesses’ as repellant pests.
Don Boudreaux, “Doux Commerce, avec Sourires“, Café Hayek, 2016-06-17.
April 24, 2019
Opponents claim Doug Ford is using booze liberalization as a distraction … if so, it’s working well
Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:
A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.
I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)
I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.
[…]
On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?
Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?
Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).
April 22, 2019
Internal challenges to Microsoft’s current discriminatory hiring practices
At Quartz, Dave Gershgorn looks at how Microsoft is facing internal dissent over their current hiring practices, which actively encourage discrimination against certain racial and gender groups:
Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella.
Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response.
“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees.
“I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department.
When contacted by Quartz, Microsoft pointed to comments by three company officials in the message-board threads. A member of Microsoft’s employee investigations team responded to the initial post in January, writing that the company does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. Another Microsoft staff member, who leads the team that helps the board of directors determine executive pay, explained the diversity-based compensation initiative. “Our board and executive leadership team believe diverse and inclusive teams are good for business and consistent with our mission and inspire-to culture,” she wrote. “Linking compensation to these aspirations is an important demonstration of executive commitment to something we believe strongly in.
April 16, 2019
‘Tis Eastertide, and so the professional miserablists are going after Easter Eggs, of course
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall tells the worried environmentalists that no, it does not make sense to ban Easter eggs — for their “wasteful” packaging — on environmental grounds:
One of the more silly of the current environmental concerns is the worrying about the quantity of packaging that goes into – or around – Easter eggs. There’s an underlying mistake being made here, one which none of the proponents of action have bothered to recognise, let alone think about. Which is, well, what’s the purpose? The point of all this human activity we call an economy?
As any economist could and would tell you we’re after the maximisation of human utility. Given the constraints placed upon us by reality – the availability of stuff with which to do things, technologies we know about to do things to stuff with – we want humans to be as happy as they can be. We want, in short to maximise the amount of joy in the world.
At which point, packaging. Sure, no doubt there’s a certain harm that befalls us all from the creation of packaging and its disposal. Why not? There are costs and benefits to everything of course. But that’s the point, while there may be costs there are also benefits. So, yes, OK, there are costs to packaging.
[…]
At no point is even consideration given to the idea that the packaged egg might produce that joy. Which, given that we do indeed go buy these things each year to give to each other, is odd, isn’t it? Why are we giving each other expensive – as opposed to cheap – chocolate? Because, obviously enough, the dressing of the chocolate is something that produces that joy.
We can even have a stab at quantifying matters.
The cost is 3,000 tonnes of packaging. We know what that costs us, the value of the landfill tax. Around £80 a tonne. So, call it quarter of a million pounds. Spending upon Easter eggs is some £400 million a year. The joy produced must be of greater value than that £400 million otherwise we’d not be spending it in the first place. And yes, £400 million is more than £250,000.
We thus have our answer to the prodnoses worrying about the cost of Easter egg packaging. Piss off matey, you’ve missed the point entirely.
