Quotulatiousness

December 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau at bay

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

However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:

Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.

On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.

On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.

“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.

The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].

Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.

QotD: Western shaming – the grass is always greener overseas

Filed under: China, Economics, History, Japan, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.

By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.

Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.

After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Cult of Western Shaming”, Townhall.com, 2020-01-29.

December 17, 2024

Canada’s deputy prime minister heads for the exits

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

After being informed by Justin Trudeau that he no longer wanted her to be the finance minister on Friday, but still apparently expecting her to present the fall economic statement on Monday, Chrystia Freeland instead submitted her resignation from cabinet:

In the National Post, John Ivison calls it her “gangster move” against Trudeau:

Who saw Chrystia Freeland pulling a gun, after Justin Trudeau unsheathed a knife?

The finance minister is an unlikely champion of the Chicago Way, but she has just pulled off a coup that may end up toppling this government.

Just hours before she was due to give her fall economic statement, she quit.

Despite the widespread media speculation about a falling out between Freeland and Trudeau, it’s a good bet that no one was more surprised at the finance minister’s gangster move than the prime minister.

Her resignation letter was savage. She said that on Friday, Trudeau had told her he no longer wanted her as finance minister and offered her another job in cabinet.

She said that she concluded she had no option but to resign because she had lost the prime minister’s confidence.

The casus belli was the multi-billion-dollar affordability package that included a two-month GST holiday and mailing $250 cheques to nearly 19 million working Canadians.

As the National Post reported late Sunday, Freeland had already reversed the government’s position on the rebate cheques that would have cost an estimated $4.68 billion. One person with knowledge of the plans said that the measure will not be in the fiscal update but the government hopes to take another look in the new year, if it can find another party to support it.

Oh, and the financial update Freeland was still expected to deliver after being underbussed by Trudeau? It apparently did get released:

You can always count on the Babylon Bee to find the most accurate and tasteful way to present the news:

QotD: Capitalism is a combination of laziness, stupidity, and greed

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… But we can approach this the other way too, looking at capitalism rather than engineering. As Adam Smith didn’t quite say (but as I do, often) capitalists are lazy, stupid and greedy. Finding that new way to make money is really difficult. So, very few try. Once someone does try and find then all the lazy — and greedy, did I mention that? — capitalist bastards copy what is being done. This hauls vast amounts of capital into that area, competition erodes the profits being made by the pioneer and the end result is that it’s consumers who make out like bandits. The result (here) is that the entrepreneur makes 3% or so of the money and the consumers near all the rest. This is the very thing that makes this capitalist and free market thing work.

Tim Worstall, “Folks Are Copying SpaceX – That’s How Capitalism Works”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-09-16.

December 16, 2024

Winners and losers from free trade

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Patrick Carroll responds to a recent Robert Reich rant about the winners and losers under free trade:

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot – Robert Reich

Myth #6 on Robert Reich’s list of economic myths is called “Global Trade Benefits Everyone”.

“Have you heard this lie?” Reich opens. “‘Global trade is good for everyone.'” His pants then light on fire. “Ahh!” he screams. “That’s bunk!”

Watching that opening sequence was an immediate déjà vu moment for me, because I had recently come across an article making the same claim as Reich. The article argued that free market economists are simply wrong to claim that “everyone gains” from free trade, because clearly there are some losers.

The ironic part is, that article was written by none other than Bryan Caplan, one of the world’s leading free market economists.

“What makes me so sure that ‘Everyone gains from X’ is invariably a blatant falsehood? Because every change causes price movements, which are automatically bad for someone or other,” Caplan writes. “The Industrial Revolution was great overall, but hurt traditional craftsmen. The Internet is great overall, but hurt travel agents. Congestion pricing is great overall, but bad for cheapskates with high traffic tolerance. Free trade is great overall, but not for workers and investors in industries that can’t survive at world prices.”

[…]

This would be a rather short article if Reich were simply making the same point as Caplan. “I agree, but Caplan said it better,” would probably be my thesis. But alas, Reich goes in a rather different direction than Caplan does, and that’s where some more rigorous analysis is needed. Here’s how he presents his argument:

    Many economists believe in the doctrine of comparative advantage, which posits that trade is good for all nations when each nation specializes in what it does best. But what about costs to workers and the environment? What if a country’s comparative advantage comes from people working under dangerous or exploitative conditions, or from preventing them from forming labor unions, or allowing employers to hire young children? Or from polluting the atmosphere or the ocean, or destroying rainforests and polluting groundwater?

Reich makes a fair point that global trade isn’t all sunshine and roses. Working conditions in some places are atrocious, and environmental damage is also a very real problem. But the fact that working and environmental conditions are far from ideal in many parts of the world does not mean that restricting trade will necessarily make things better. In fact, it’s quite likely that less trade would make things worse, because it would cut off the global poor from opportunities for production and economic growth.

Reich highlights the costs of trade, but there are also immense benefits that the global poor reap from the arrangement. If these benefits outweigh the costs — as they likely do in most cases — then who’s really the advocate of the downtrodden: the ones cheering on mutually beneficial trade, or the ones trying to stop it because they can only see the downsides?

To be fair, Reich doesn’t come out and advocate for cutting off trade. But this raises the question: what exactly is he advocating for? Anyone can point out problems, but the real question is: what solution are you proposing? Maybe he’ll tell us in the next section:

    My old boss Bill Clinton called globalization “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”. But globalization is not a force of nature. Global trade is structured by rules negotiated between nations about which assets will be protected and which will not. These rules determine who benefits and who is harmed by trade. Over recent decades, trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and agreements under the World Trade Organization (WTO) have protected the assets of US corporations, including intellectual property.

Reich goes on to list a few ways that these rules have helped large corporations, such as oil companies, financial institutions, Big Pharma, and Big Ag.

Watching this part of the video ushered in a second instance of déjà vu. I remembered reading somewhere, just recently, that NAFTA was rotten to the core, just like Reich was saying.

Yet again, it was a staunch free market economist making this point — Murray Rothbard, in a number of incisive articles that were part of his 1995 anthology Making Economic Sense. The problem, said Rothbard, is that NAFTA was really the opposite of free trade.

The academic battle over the legacy of the British Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Washington Examiner, Yuan Yi Zhu reviews The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British Colonialism edited by Alan Lester:

… the story fitted awkwardly with the new dominant historical narrative in Britain, according to which the British Empire was an unequivocally evil institution whose lingering miasma still corrupts not only its former territories but also modern-day Britain.

When Kipling lamented, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” he was not being elegiac as much as describing a statistical fact. Contrary to modern caricatures, apart from episodic busts of enthusiasm, Britons were never very interested in their empire. At its Victorian peak, the great public controversies were more likely to be liturgical than imperial. In 1948, 51% of the British public could not name a single British colony; three years later, the figure had risen to 59%. Admittedly, this was after Indian independence, but it should not have been that hard. Proponents of the “imperial miasma” theory are right in saying that British people are woefully ignorant about their imperial past; but that was the case even when much of the world was colored red.

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is a collection of essays edited by Alan Lester, an academic at the University of Sussex who has been at the forefront of the cultural conflict over British imperialism on the “miasma” side — though, like all combatants, he denies being a participant. Indeed, one of the book’s declared aims is to show that its contributors are not engaged in cultural warring.

Their nemesis, whose name appears 376 times in this book (more often than the word “Britain”) is Nigel Biggar, a retired theologian and priest at the University of Oxford. In 2017, Biggar began a project to study the ethics of empire alongside John Darwin, a distinguished imperial historian. The now-familiar academic denunciations then came along, and Darwin, on the cusp of a quiet retirement, withdrew from the project.

Lester was not part of the initial assault on Biggar but has since then emerged as his most voluble critic. He disclaims any political aims, protesting that he and his colleagues are engaged in a purely scholarly enterprise, based on facts and the study of the evidence.

Yet some of Lester’s public interventions — he recently described a poll showing that British people are less proud of their history than before as an “encouraging sign” — are hard to square with this denial. Biggar, by contrast, is refreshingly honest that his aims are both intellectual and political. I must add that both men are serious scholars, which is perhaps why neither has been able to decisively bloody the other in their jousts.

[…]

“What about slavery?” asks Dubow’s Cambridge colleague Bronwen Everill. Unfortunately, her four pages, which read like a last-minute student essay, do not enlighten us. The most she can manage is to point to an 18th-century African monarch abolishing the slave trade as evidence that the British do not deserve any plaudits for their abolitionist efforts across the world, whose cost has been estimated at 1.8% of its gross domestic product over a period of 60 years.

Meanwhile, Abd al Qadir Kane, Everill’s abolitionist monarch, only objected to the enslavement of Muslims but not to slavery generally, his progressive reputation resting mainly on the misunderstandings of Thomas Clarkson, an overenthusiastic English abolitionist. (Either cleverly or lazily, Everill quotes Clarkson’s misleading account, thus avoiding the need to engage with the historiography on Islamic slavery in Africa.)

Everill’s central argument is that abolitionism allowed Britain to rove the world as a moral policeman and to overthrow rulers who refused to abolish slavery. It is never clear, however, why this was morally bad. If anything, Britain did not go far enough: Well into the 1960s, British representatives still manumitted slaves on an ad hoc basis in its Gulf protectorates, when the moral thing would have been to force their rulers to abolish slavery, at gunpoint if necessary.

December 15, 2024

“Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators”

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Economics, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You have to admit that Lorenzo Warby has a way with words to introduce a new essay, yes?

Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures — both genetic and cultural — have almost always been about dealing with other humans.

We are the cultural species par excellence. Cultures can be reasonably thought of as collections of life-strategies. Culture tends to be persistent — aspects of culture can be highly persistent.

It is worth keeping in mind that genetic selection can occur surprisingly quickly — i.e., in a relatively short number of generations, depending on the intensity of the selection pressures. A very clear example of this is the evolution of lactase persistence in pastoralist, or agro-pastoralist, populations. (The decades-long experiment in domesticating silver foxes is an extreme example.)

The great advantage of cultural selection is that it is faster than genetic selection but culture still has to show some “stickiness”, some persistence, to be useful. Especially in the evolution of signals, norms and social strategies.

The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest — or most thoroughly — are Europe, particularly North-West Europe, East Asia and India (especially by high-jati Indians). So, those are the areas where natural and cultural selection has been most focused on selection for dealing usefully with other humans. Those populations have also been the most successful in dealing with the modern world, wherever they go. This hardly seems a coincidence.

The regions where dealing with the local physical environment has been most salient are Sub-Saharan Africa — all those co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores — and Australia — which is full of deserts and spiky things likely to poison you. Much of Africa is also semi-desert forager lands, while the tsetse fly stopped the central African plains generating the equivalent of the connecting — for good or ill — pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Both continental-scale regions therefore historically had low human population densities.

The consequence in Africa was that Sub-Saharan Africa has, for millennia, been a region of endemic slavery. Labour was more valuable than land, which led — as it usually did historically — to labour bondage: the violent/coercive extraction of labour’s scarcity value. In this case, the low population density meant that folk were regularly seized and transported, thus requiring the level of domination for folk to be moved at will — i.e., slavery rather than some form of serfdom.

Increased selection to deal with the physical environment meant comparatively less selection to deal with other humans. Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal populations have been rather less successful at dealing with the modern world than have other populations. (Claims about the success of recent African immigrants seem to be overstated.) The key element of the modern world is domination of social outcomes by human interactions to the greatest extent yet achieved in history. Again, that relative lack of success hardly seems like a coincidence.

Yes, it is true that selection for transportation across the Atlantic as slaves was negative in all sorts of senses. The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions (which are highly heritable). Nevertheless, with the partial exception of recent African immigrants — who are selected for initiative and education — both populations have been markedly less successful than other groups.

There are certainly factors which affect that either way. Not inflicting on Australian Aborigines the dual metabolic disasters of the farming and processed-food revolutions at the same time would be good. Not under-policing the localities in which folk live is also good.

Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that capacities — which are a genetic, epigenetic and cultural matter — will be evenly distributed across all populations. Indeed, we have very good reasons to think that that will not be the case, due to the variations in selection pressures — whether genetic, environmental or cultural, including interactions between the three. It is not a good idea, for instance, to spend 1400 years marrying your cousins.

Even when means and medians are the same in the distribution of some trait across groups, differences in the size of tails — i.e. the number of extreme outliers — can lead to differences in the distribution of outcomes. Any population with a persistently larger tail of high physical robustness and lower executive functions — which can be an ethno-racial pattern but also a class pattern — will tend to have higher rates of violent crime. Conversely, any population with a smaller tail of lower executive functions — for example, East Asians with a long history of underclass males not breeding but selection for reproductive success through passing examinations and cooperative farming — will tend to have lower rates of violent crime.

Sufficient variance in traits — so having a larger “right tail” of positive-for-human-flourishing characteristics — can be enough on its own to increase a group’s success. Tail effects matter.1

The persistence of gene flows across human populations does undermine any strong notion of human subspecies among Homo sapiens. It does not imply equal distributions of capacities across human populations.

Hence, evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting.

    1. Given that human males — like males across species — have a flatter distribution of traits — so more positive and negative outliers — having equal numbers of males and females at the top ends of hierarchies suggests some level of discrimination against males. Conversely, having female prison populations begin to approach male populations in size suggests some level of discrimination against, even persecution of, females.

December 13, 2024

QotD: Nostalgia, or “they were better people back then”

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s the thing about nostalgia: It assumes constant material progress. One can debate the origins and etymology of the term “nostalgia” – back in the 16th century, I think it was, they used it a few times to describe what we might call PTSD among soldiers – but it’s really a modern phenomenon. A Postmodern one, in truth — I’m talking late 20th century here. Humans have always longed for “the past”, but until the middle of the 20th century the “past” we longed for was mythical – the Golden Age, as opposed to our current Brass one.

The Golden Age was better because the Golden Men were better, not because their lives were materially better. There’s a reason all those medieval and Renaissance paintings show “historical” figures in contemporary garb, and it’s not because the Flemish Masters didn’t know about togas. Though they assumed the men of the Classical Past were better men, they assumed material life back then was pretty much the same as now, because it was pretty much the same as now. One can of course point to a million technological changes between the Roman Republic and the Renaissance, but life as it was actually lived by the vast majority of people was still basically the same: Up at dawn, to bed at dusk, birth and death and community life and subsistence farming, all basically the same. A world lit only by fire.

The modern age changed all that. At some point in the very near past, we started assuming tomorrow would look very different from today. And I do mean the very near past — there are probably people still alive today who remember people who assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much like today. Because, then, our lives are so materially different from even the very recent past, we tend to assume that our nostalgia is for material things. It’s very hard to put a name to something like the feeling “I wish we could have family Christmases again, sharing that one joke we had about how Uncle Bob always sends you goofy socks.” It’s very easy to put a name to something like “vinyl records” or “the Bob Newhart show” or “Betamax tapes”, so we use those as synecdoche.

In other words: Even though we could actually recreate the material world of 1983, and even though we think we want this, we don’t. We wish we could live like we lived in 1983, but very little of that has any relationship to the material culture of 1983.

Severian, “Nostalgia”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-19.

December 11, 2024

Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:

No doubt, many of you already have an idea.

The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.

The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.

Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.

Let’s not forget foreign influence.

The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.

This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.

Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.

And now, there’s India.

Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.

India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.

The result? A disaster.

In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.

And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.

In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.

But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.

Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.

And then there’s the economic misery.

The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.

55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.

The final insult: demographics.

Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.

Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.

This is where we are.

Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.

December 10, 2024

Countering the “Managerial Revolution”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses the rise of the managerial class — described in 1941’s Managerial Revolution by James Burnham — and how detrimental to individual enterprises and the wider economy managerialism has been:

This, rather joyously, explains a lot about the modern world. We could go back to the mid-1980s and the bloke who ran the ‘baccy company written up in Barbarians at the Gates. In which he, as CEO, had a fleet of private planes, the company paid for his 11 country club memberships and so on. His salary was decent, sure, but the corporation rented him all the trappings of a Gatsbyesque — and successful — capitalist. Until the actual capitalists — the barbarians — turned up at those gates and started demanding shareholder returns.

Or we can think of the bureaucratic classes in the UK in more recent decades. Moving effortlessly between this NGO, that quasi-governmental body and a little light sitting on the right government inquiry. All at £1500 a day and a damn good pension to follow.

Or, you know, adapt the base idea to taste. There really is a bureaucratic and managerial class that gains the incomes and power of the capitalists of the past without having to do anything quite so grubby as either risk their own money or, actually, do anything. They, umm, administer, and the entire class is wholly and absolutely convinced that everything must be administered and they’re the right people to be doing that.

You know, basically David Cameron. Met him once, when he was just down from uni. At a political meeting – drinkies for the Tory activists in a particular council ward, possibly a little wider than that. Hated him on sight which I agree has saved me much time over the decades. And I was right too. There is nothing to Cameroonism other than that the right sort of people should be administering — the managerial revolution.

Sure, sure, we used to have the aristocracy which assumed the same thing but we did used to insist that they could chop someone’s head off first — show they had the capability. Also, they didn’t complain nor demand a pension when we did that to them if they lost office.

But the bit that really strikes me. France — and thereby the European Union — seems to me to be where this Managerial Revolution has gone furthest. Get through the right training (the “enarques“) and you’re the right guy to be a Minister, run a political party, manage the oil company, sort out the railways etc. You don’t have to succeed or fail at any of them, you’re one of the gilded class that runs the place. Because, you know, everything needs to be run and one of this class should do so.

The divergence or even active conflict of interests between the owners and the non-owning managers is part of the larger Principal-Agent Problem.

December 8, 2024

How it started – Blame Canada. How it’s going – Annex Canada?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper has some fun imagining what the Dominion of Canada would have written in its diary over the last week after President-elect Donald Trump joked about making it the 51st state:

TUESDAY
Don’t get me wrong; annexation would be thrilling. What could be naughtier than abolishing the world’s longest undefended border? Or getting a Chik-Fil-A in all 10 provinces? Or watching CNN as a swing voter, instead of just as a voyeur. Or screaming “I know my rights!” at a cop and having it mean something.

Who among us doesn’t want to lock up serial child molesters in a Supermax instead of sending them to a healing lodge? Or strap a revolver to one’s belt just to see what it would feel like to be an armed citizen at the mall. Or go to a store that sells booze, cigarettes, firecrackers and shotguns all in the same place.

I’m not ashamed to say it all gives me goosebumps. I’ve resented you, looked down on you, claimed to hate you, but I’ve never said I wasn’t attracted to you.

WEDNESDAY
And the lifestyle benefits; my god. A four-lane interstate to Alaska. Flyovers at CFL games that consist of an entire formation of fifth-generation fighters, instead of just a search and rescue helicopter. Hell, maybe they wouldn’t even *be* CFL games?

A dollar that’s worth … a dollar, rather than 60 cents. Books that can be purchased at the actual price, instead of the “in Canada” price. Productivity and per-capita GDP to burn, and all with lower taxes.

The thought is always there. Every time I’m clipping coupons or subsidizing some foreign automaker just so they’ll build me a battery plant, there’s always that weak moment where I think, “You wouldn’t need to be doing any of this if you’d just let America take care of you.”

THURSDAY
And yet, even when I lay out all the material benefits of statehood, I know it’s not for me.

Snoop Dogg has a net worth of $150 million. You know what his favourite snack is? Hard-boiled eggs like his mom used to make. You can offer me the world, but it’s not what I know.

I like giant monopolistic, uncompetitive corporations. Sure, my cell phone bills are high and my butter doesn’t spread at room temperature, but at least the logo on the package never changes. I like government programs that offer me benefits in theory, even if not in practice: I can’t find a family doctor or a daycare spot, but I can dream. I like making unrealistic international pronouncements, because no one would ever expect me to back it up with aid or military force.

December 7, 2024

Rediscovering the legacy of “Silent Cal”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jacob M. Farley recently discovered the history of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency and the economic policies he pursued to such good effect in the 1920s (although Herbert Hoover’s energetic turn as Commerce Secretary for Harding and Coolidge strongly indicated that the benign laissez faire approach would be changed once Coolidge left the Oval Office):

Calvin Coolidge, Governor of Massachusetts, 1919.
Photo by Notman Studio, Boston, restored by Adam Cuerden via Wikimedia Commons.

In the pantheon of American presidents, Calvin Coolidge, or “Silent Cal”, often plays the role of the overlooked extra in the corner of history’s grand narrative. I can attest to this, as my first real exposure to him occurred recently during a visit to a museum whilst travelling in the US. Having spent some time since then reading up on everything Cal-related, I’ve become increasingly convinced that there’s a compelling case to be made that Coolidge’s approach to governance, particularly his economic policies, should be dusted off and revisited, not just for historical curiosity but as a lodestar for free marketeers far and wide.

Before I go any further, let’s set the scene of Coolidge’s era. The 1920s is often remembered for jazz, flappers, and the stock market’s dizzying heights. But beneath the cultural tumult, Coolidge was busy orchestrating what can quite fairly be called a symphony of minimalistic governance. His philosophy was profoundly simple: government should do less, not more.

Whilst this may seem extraordinarily mundane to you, consider that this wasn’t simply cheap talk on the campaign trail designed to get a nod of approval from over-50s. His ideas weren’t born out of laziness or disinterest but from a profound belief in the efficacy of the market’s invisible hand over the visible, often clumsy, hand of government intervention.

Coolidge’s administration slashed taxes like a bootlegger cuts whiskey – to make the good times flow more freely, notably through the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926. This wasn’t just about giving the rich a break; it was about stimulating economic activity by leaving more money in the pockets of Americans. By leaving more money in the pockets of Americans, he was essentially saying, “Here’s your allowance, now go make some noise at the stock market”.

The result? A crescendo of consumer spending, industrial growth, and a stock market that seemed to reach for the stars.

Coolidge believed in setting the rules of the game and then letting the players play. This isn’t to say there was no regulation, but rather, it was about not over-regulating, about allowing businesses to innovate, expand, and yes, even fail, without the government always having its finger on the scale. Imagine if the conductor only pointed out the tempo and let the musicians interpret it – that was Coolidge’s regulatory approach.

Under Coolidge, the U.S. economy boomed. Unemployment dipped to levels we can only dream of today, and real GDP growth was robust. If the economy were a piece of music, it was hitting all the right notes. But here’s where the narrative often shifts to a sombre tone – the Great Depression. While Coolidge left office before the market crashed, the seeds of economic disaster were arguably sown in the very success of the 1920s, exacerbated by policies that followed his term, particularly those of the Federal Reserve.

This is where the story of Coolidge’s economic policy gets nuanced. The Federal Reserve, relatively new on the scene, played its own tune by the late 1920s. Its policies, intended to stabilise the economy, are often critiqued for contributing to the eventual bust. Coolidge’s hands-off approach might have been a wise nod to market self-correction, but the Fed’s actions, flooding the number of dollars in circulation to stimulate the market’s trajectory in a way they deemed desirable, led to an artificially manufactured drunkenness, leading to a nasty hangover – The Great Depression.

After Coolidge, the economy didn’t just crash; it was like the Charleston dancer tripped over its own feet.

There had been a brief, nasty recession following the end of the First World War, but Harding and Coolidge responded not by muscular government action but by letting the market sort things out. Hoover, as Coolidge’s successor, was not cut from that cloth. Hoover was a believer in the progressive big-government approach to just about everything and his attempts to respond after the 1929 crash absolutely made things much, much worse. Later historians have chosen to forget Hoover’s actual policies and pretend that he followed Coolidge’s lead (most historians over the next couple of generations were pro-Roosevelt, so portraying Hoover as a conservative non-interventionist allowed them to contrast that with Roosevelt’s even more centralizing, interventionist policies).

December 3, 2024

“Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his weekend round-up, Niccolo Soldo pokes a bit of fun at Justin Trudeau’s federal government for apparently being surprised that First Nations are looking to deal directly with China for their natural resources, rather than through the feds:

Canada continues to be unintentionally hilarious, all thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

The Great White North was forever a boring place politically, but the arrival of Trudeau Jr. on the scene shook things up. One of the first things that he and his government committed themselves to was to work to improve the country’s relations with its Native tribes, both politically and especially economically. The Trudeau government invented a genocide narrative based around residential schools.1 Canada too wanted a dark aspect to its own history, so that it could share in the self-flagellation that has coloured the recent history of its neighbour to its immediate south.

Maybe the intention here was to show these Native communities that Canada really, really did care and that by doing this, everything bad that had happened would be forgiven and forgotten? I dunno … what I do know is that Native bands are now seeking to directly do business with China, whereby they would sell natural resources under their control to Beijing:

    Canada’s indigenous communities are seeking deals with China that could give Beijing access to the country’s natural resources, despite warnings from Canadian security services over doing business with Xi Jinping’s government.

    This week the Canada China Business Council indigenous trade mission is in Beijing to discuss potential energy and other business deals in a trip that could put Canada’s national “reconciliation” with its First Nation communities at odds with its national security priorities.

    Karen Ogen, the trade mission’s co-chair and chief executive of the First Nations Liquefied Natural Gas Alliance, said her goal on the trip, which starts on Wednesday, was to sell LNG for the benefit of the Wet’suwet’en communities in Canada’s western province of British Columbia.

    “We’ve been oppressed and repressed by our own government,” she said. “I know the history with China is not good but we have an understanding of what we need and what they need.”

Canada purposely degraded its own national sovereignty in parts of its own country in the name of “reconciliation”. Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?

Clever Chinese:

    China has spotted an opportunity in the sometimes fraught relations between Canada’s national and provincial governments and indigenous groups.

    In 2021, shortly after Canada imposed sanctions on Beijing over the treatment of its Uyghur population, Chinese officials began to object to the “systemic violations of Indigenous people’s rights by the US, Canada and Australia” at the UN’s Human Rights Council.

    “The PRC tries to undermine trust between Indigenous communities and Canada’s government by advancing a narrative that the PRC understands and empathises with the struggles of Indigenous communities stemming from colonialism and racism,” said a spokesperson for Canada’s security intelligence service.

    A 2023 CSIS report accused China’s government of employing “grey zone, deceptive and clandestine means” to influence Canadian policymaking, including Indigenous communities.

    “China knows how sensitive Indigenous reconciliation is to the Trudeau government,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS intelligence analyst.

A lot of these First Nations (Native bands) reside in the west of the country. Coincidentally, Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver (located in Canada’s west), is roughly one-third Chinese in composition.

First Nations will continue to pursue these deals with the Chinese:

    But CSIS remains concerned over Beijing’s possible access to resource-rich areas or geopolitically important waterways and regions such as the Arctic through First Nations groups.

    “It not only undermines the government but is a way to potentially embarrass them on Canada’s past,” said Gurski.

    But Matt Vickers, from Sechelt Nations land in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, who first visited China in the 1990s and is part of the CCBC delegation heading to Beijing this week, rejected the concerns of the security services.

    “China now understands that for any major project to receive approval in Canada, you need First Nation consent, and not only consent but the First Nations require a majority equity play in those projects,” he said.

    The CCBC is a bipartisan organisation consisting of Canada’s biggest companies, including Power Corp, which is the main sponsor of the Indigenous event.

    This week’s trip marks the third time a group of Indigenous officials has travelled with the council to China in an effort to identify export markets, sources of capital and potential tourism projects.

    “These missions have been developed in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, to help delegates better understand how China’s economy and economic development influences its desire for imports and investment opportunities,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the CCBC.

It gets even funnier:

    Deteriorating relations between Ottawa and Beijing meant this year’s CCBC meeting would likely be “sombre”, said former Canadian ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques.

    First Nations leaders should have “very limited expectations” from the trip. “I don’t expect big business coming out of it,” he said.

    But Ogen, of the First Nations LNG Alliance, said she would put the controversy surrounding the trip to Beijing aside. “I … look at the global energy sector, China’s need for our gas, and how I can make the best deal for my people,” she said.

Trudeau scored an own-goal.

    1. From wiki (because I am lazy): “The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Euro-Canadian culture.”

QotD: Old fashioned communists

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

In my youth, I shared a house with some communists of the very old-fashioned variety. They believed in industrial production because it inevitably resulted in that finest flower of humanity, the factory worker, who would, ex officio, be a foot soldier of the Revolution. No Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart for them! They believed, rather, in the Soviet Union’s ever-rising production, or at any rate graphs of ever-rising production, of something called pig iron, which at some point would overtake that of the United States and Western Europe combined, to the enormous benefit, of course, of the indigenous people of the Siberian tundra. They couldn’t see a landscape without wanting to garnish it with a factory chimney belching smoke, the blacker the better, as a symbol of what they called Man’s triumph over Nature (early communist propaganda and iconography were full of chimneys belching black smoke). They thought of Nature as an enemy, as a malign obstacle to be wrestled with and overcome, or as an evil conscious force obstructing Mankind’s progress to a glorious and infinitely abundant future. The extinction of animal species was welcome to them, not only if they, the extinct species, were in some way noxious to Man or deleterious to his advance, such as flies and snakes, but as symbolizing his increasing mastery over the surface of the Earth. Knowledge is power, and power is what they cared about.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Matter of Respect”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-31.

December 1, 2024

“Fellow Canadians, forget your dire financial plight … it’s only a ‘vibecession'”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper imagines what Chrystia Freeland might be confiding to her diary after she blithely assured struggling Canadians that no, really, everything’s just fine and dandy and you’re being deceived by “bad vibes”:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking.

Monday

As a former journalist, I am fully aware of the awesome power of the press to distort and pervert reality. Here we all are in 2024 Canada. There is food. There is shelter. There is breathable air. The vast majority of us will go through the rest of the fiscal year without being stabbed on public transit.

And yet, to hear the misinformation and disinformation trafficked by the media, you would think we live in some kind of violent, economically depressed hellscape.

Well, this kind of mendacity has consequences: A nationwide hysteria of bad feelings and negative energy. A fanatical devotion to bad vibes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I don’t purport to know how to cure such irrational malaise, but I will be very surprised if $250 each and some tax-free liquor and Christmas shopping doesn’t do it.

Tuesday

Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs is easily the most serious challenge I have faced as Canadian finance minister. The United States is our largest trading partner, and the suspension of free trade across our shared border would invite economic ruin the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Worse, Trump is immune to our usual strategies. We suggested sending his tariff threat to committee, or having it reviewed by a Crown inquiry, but neither offer was accepted. Rather, they want us to stem the tide of illegal migrants using Canada as a base to enter the United States. They are under the impression — let’s call it “bad vibes” — that this is a problem.

But let nobody say that the integrity of our trade flows are not my department’s top priority. As such, we are immediately introducing a one-time bursary of between $150 and $240 paid to any resident of Canada who can prove they have not attempted illegal entry of the United States within the past 12 months.

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