Quotulatiousness

August 25, 2020

The Russian Revolution 1917

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Epic History TV
Published 4 Aug 2016

Everything you need to know about the Russian Revolution in a 13 min video. Produced in partnership with Bridgeman Images http://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/

We explain all the major events of Russia’s TWO revolutions of 1917 – the February Revolution that ended Tsarist rule in Russia, and the October Revolution, that brought the Bolsheviks to power. We explain the causes of Tsar Nicholas II’s growing unpopularity – the role of the mysterious Siberian mystic Rasputin, Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One, and the events on the streets of Petrograd that led to the Tsar’s abdication. That summer Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, with a Provisional Government that faced riots (the July Days), military revolt (the Kornilov Affair), economic chaos, and constantly dwindling support. Socialist Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, once hailed as Russia’s great hope, was unable to restore order, or, in October, prevent the Bolsheviks from launching a coup, organised by Leon Trotsky and led by Vladimir Lenin, that overthrow the Provisional Government and brought the Bolsheviks to power. A brutal civil war followed, leading to the death of more than 10 million Russians – amongst them Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed by Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. From the wreckage emerged the Soviet Union, formed in 1922, and destined to be one of the 20th century’s two superpowers.

Please help me make more history videos by supporting me at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/epichistorytv

#EpicHistoryTV #HistoryofRussia #RussianRevolution

Recommended books on the Russian Revolution (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases):
S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction http://geni.us/RzOAk2U
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution http://geni.us/UIxyirj
Robert Service, The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/A89T
Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/bME0unl

August 24, 2020

How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:

Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:

    “They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.

For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.

But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.

Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.

To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?

August 23, 2020

The right of asylum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall is writing here about the situation in the United Kingdom, with would-be asylum claimants risking their lives to cross the English Channel so they can legally claim asylum in Britain, but exactly the same situation should apply with claimants entering Canada from the United States:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone at even risk – let alone reality – of substantial discrimination in their home country has the right, the right, to asylum. This is one of those international things that we should indeed agree with too. Few of us have anything but contempt for those who wouldn’t let Holocaust fleeing Jews (and or gypsies, gays, whatever, it’s just that we have substantial documented evidence about Jews who were turned away) tarnish their national doormats. Few of us think those who abused such limitations are anything but heroes. I even know of one monk who married Jewesses multiple times to bring them out by train. Umm, married multiple people, not one many times. People working within the too restrictive rules even gave us one of the finest moments of TV ever.

So, asylum, good thing.

And here’s the next thing. That right is restricted. To claiming it in the first safe place you get to. This has some oddities, if you leave Sudan by plane and step off at Heathrow then the UK is where you can – righteously – claim asylum. If you come by land then you have passed through many safe places before reaching the UK. You don’t have the right to asylum in the UK and, to be strict about it, don’t even have the right to apply.

So, people drowning in the Channel because they have to make their asylum application once in the UK? This could be true of those who are being oppressed in France. It’s not true of anyone not being oppressed in France. So there is not that need to take the open boat the 26 miles.

Sure, there’s the desire, we all understand that. But that’s a desire, not a right to asylum.

Here in Canada, we had this arrangement with the American government under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which our Federal Court struck down last month — incorrectly, in my opinion — as being in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court allowed six months for the federal government to act, but as we all know, the federal government is unlikely to do anything as politically radioactive as passing legislation that could — and would — be seen as anti-refugee.

Trudeau’s hopes for re-election hinge on promising “an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed”

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

The Line wonders who the hell the Liberals think they are:

It may have been easy to miss amid the news coming out of Ottawa, but as the government lost its finance minister, appointed Chrystia Freeland to yet another job, prorogued parliament, halted testimony into its latest scandal, prepared for the announcement of a new Conservative Party of Canada leader and braced for a likely second wave of COVID-19, the prime minister promised to announce a transformative agenda. One that promises sweeping social change, and a wholesale re-invention of our economy in line with the greenest ambitions. We here at The Line have but one question.

Who the hell do these people think they are?

It is obvious to anyone who has been reading the news and possesses even residual brain function why the prime minister would like to be talking about a plan for transformative change. Talking about all the amazing things he could do for Canadians with borrowed money beats talking about his government’s bumbling of the WE file and the departure of now-former finance minister Bill Morneau.

Promising an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed is obviously more appealing to Trudeau than repeating the last month. But it is astonishing to us — as jaded as we have undeniably become — that the government is talking about this instead of the necessary steps needed to shore up this country ahead of a likely second wave of COVID-19.

This government has a mandate to respond to the emergency, by mere unlucky virtue of being in power at the moment the virus hit. It is the duty of every Canadian government to safeguard the wellbeing of the population, full stop. But the emergency, contrary to what you may believe if you’ve been reading Liberal Party HQ memos, is not over. We have an urgent need to secure more medical equipment, to harden our long-term care facilities, to prevent any further lockdowns from derailing a fragile economic recovery, to ensure the resiliency of critical supply chains, and to shore up our health-care system. This is what every Canadian official should be focused on right now.

[…]

But can anyone maintain faith that the Liberals will stick to their knitting when we hear buzzwords like “transformative” social change? Sweeping climate-change reforms? Engineering a new green economy? They are all fine notions — let’s put them to the people and vote on them. Until calling that election is feasible (mid-pandemic, it is not) this government simply does not have the mandate to undertake such far-reaching efforts.

It’s easy to forget now, but only nine months ago this government was reduced to a minority of seats in parliament. The Liberals lost the popular vote, and saw one million of their own prior voters abandon them. They are only in government because the Conservatives, to the surprise of no one, found several novel and exciting new ways to fail.

QotD: Herbert Hoover and the American tourists

Filed under: Britain, France, Government, History, Quotations, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Count up the victims of World War I, and American tourists will be pretty far down the list. But victims they were. When the conflict broke out, thousands of Americans were overseas visiting the cathedrals of Florence or the museums of London. They woke up one morning to find the ships that were supposed to take them back had been conscripted into the war effort, or refused to sail for fear of enemy fire. The banks that were supposed to cash their travelers’ checks were panicking, or devoting all their funds to the war effort, or dealing with a million other things. The hotels that were supposed to house them were closed indefinitely, their employees rushing to enlist out of patriotic fervor. And so thousands of frantic Americans, stuck in a foreign continent with no money and nowhere to stay, showed up at the door of the US Embassy in London and said – help!

The US Consulate in London didn’t know how to solve these problems either. But Herbert Hoover, still high on his decision to pivot to philanthropy and public service, calls them up and asks if he can help. They say yes, definitely. Hoover gets in touch with his rich friends, passes around the collection plate, and organizes a Committee For The Assistance Of American Travelers. Then he gets to work, the way only he can:

    Within 24 hours, Hoover’s committee had its own stationery, and within forty-eight it was operating a booth in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel as well as three other London locations. Through his business connections, Hoover managed to bypass restrictions on telegraph service and open a transatlantic line to allow Americans to wire money to stranded friends and relatives. In a city suddenly flooded with refugees, he reserved for American travelers some two thousand rooms in hotels or boardinghouses. He issued a press release proclaiming that his Residents’ Committee was assuming charge of all American relief work in the city, and that in doing so it had the blessings of its honorary chairman, Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador to London.

… which is totally false. Hoover is starting to display a pattern that will stick with him his whole life – that of crushing competing charities. He begins a lobbying effort to get the US Embassy to ban all non-Hoover relief work, focusing on the inefficiency of having multiple groups working on the same problem. When the US Assistant Secretary Of War arrives in London to coordinate a response, he is met on the dock by Hoover employees, who demand he consult with Hoover before interfering in the US tourist issue. Eventually the Embassy, equally exasperated by Hoover’s pestering and impressed with his results, agrees to give him official control of the relief effort.

After two months of work, Hoover and his Committee have repatriated all 120,000 US tourists, supporting them in style until it could find them boat tickets. All of its loans and operating costs have been repaid by grateful tourists, and its budget is in the black. The rescued travelers are universal in their praise for Hoover, partly because Hoover has threatened to ruin any of them who get too critical:

    Other complainants were received with less patience, including a hotheaded professor of history from the University of Michigan, who wrote to accuse the Residents’ Committee of mistreatment. Hoover refuted his charges indignantly and comprehensively, copying his response to the president of the university and its board of regents. After a meeting with his employer, the professor returned Hoover an abject retraction and apology.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

August 22, 2020

John Cabot’s patent monopoly grant and the rise of the modern corporation

Filed under: Britain, Business, Government, History, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes traces the line of descent of modern corporate structures from the patent granted to John Cabot to explore (and exploit) a trade route to China:

The replica of John Cabot’s ship Matthew in Bristol harbour, adjacent to the SS Great Britain.
Photo by Chris McKenna via Wikimedia Commons.

I discussed last time [linked here] how the use of patent monopolies came to England in the sixteenth century. Since then, however, I’ve developed a strong hunch that the introduction of patent monopolies may also have played a crucial role in the birth of the business corporation. I happened to be reading Ron Harris’s new book, Going the Distance, in which he stresses the unprecedented constitutions of the Dutch and English East India Companies — both of which began to emerge in the closing years of the sixteenth century. Yet the first joint-stock corporation, albeit experimental, was actually founded decades earlier, in the 1550s. Harris mentions it as a sort of obscure precursor, and it wasn’t terribly successful, but it stood out to me because its founder and first governor was also one of the key introducers of patent monopolies to England: the explorer Sebastian Cabot.

As I mentioned last time, Cabot was named on one of England’s very first patents for invention — though we’d now say it was for “discovery” — in 1496. An Italian who spent much of his career serving Spain, he was coaxed back to England in the late 1540s to pursue new voyages of exploration. Indeed, he reappeared in England at the exact time that patent monopolies for invention began to re-emerge, after a hiatus of about half a century. In 1550, Cabot obtained a certified copy of his original 1496 patent and within a couple of years English policymakers began regularly granting other patents for invention. It started as just a trickle, with one 1552 patent granted to to some enterprising merchant for introducing Norman glass-making techniques, and a 1554 patent to the German alchemist Burchard Kranich, and in the 1560s had developed into a steady stream.

Yet Cabot’s re-certification of his patent is never included in this narrative. It’s a scarcely-noted detail, perhaps because he appears not to have exploited it. Or did he? I think the fact of his re-certification — a bit of trivia that’s usually overlooked — helps explain the origins of the world’s first joint-stock corporation.

Corporations themselves, of course, were nothing new. Corporate organisations had existed for centuries in England, and indeed throughout Europe and the rest of the world: officially-recognised legal “persons” that might outlive each and any member, and which might act as a unit in terms of buying, selling, owning, and contracting. Cities, guilds, charities, universities, and various religious organisations were usually corporations. But they were not joint-stock business corporations, in the sense of their members purchasing shares and delegating commercial decision-making to a centralised management to conduct trade on their behalves. Instead, the vast majority of trade and industry was conducted by partnerships of individuals who pooled their capital without forming any legally distinct corporation. Shares might be bought in a physical ship, or even in particular trading voyages, but not in a legal entity that was both ongoing and intangible. There were many joint-stock associations, but they were not corporations.

And to the extent that some corporations in England were related to trade, such as the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, or the Company of Merchants of the Staple, they were not joint-stock businesses at all. They were instead regulatory bodies. These corporations were granted monopolies over the trade with certain areas, or in certain commodities, to which their members then bought licenses to trade on their own account. Membership fees went towards supporting regulatory or charitable functions — resolving disputes between members, perhaps supporting members who had fallen on hard times, and representing the interests of members as a lobby group both at home and abroad — but not towards pooling capital for commercial ventures. The regulated companies were thus more akin to guilds, or to modern trade unions or professional associations, rather than firms. Members were not shareholders, but licensees who used their own capital and were subject to their own profits and losses.

Before the 1550s, then, there had been plenty of unincorporated business associations that were joint-stock, and even more unincorporated associations that were not joint-stock. There had also been a few trade-related corporations that were not joint-stock. Sebastian Cabot’s innovation was thus to fill the last quadrant of that matrix: he created a corporation that would be joint-stock, in which a wide range of shareholders could invest, entrusting their capital to managers who would conduct repeated voyages of exploration and trade on their behalves.

August 20, 2020

QotD: Manipulating minimum wage laws to harm your competitors

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

I would be very surprised if careful research of the history of this Oregon statute did not reveal a producer group — or producer groups — who benefitted materially from the minimum-wage-induced stifling of competition.

The logic of such rent-creating legislation is plain: producer group A competes for many of the same customers against producer group B. Producer group A, however, uses for its production a mix of inputs (most importantly, capital and labor) that differs from the mix used by producer group B. Also, producer group B might compete most effectively against producer group A not by producing outputs as nearly identical as possible to that of A but, instead, by producing “substitute” goods or services that sell at prices lower than those charged by producer group A.

For example, producer group A might consist of locally owned restaurants with tablecloths and serving food freshly prepared by skilled chefs, while producer group B consists of chain restaurants serving food less exquisite but priced much lower. Members of producer group A are upset that producer group B is competing successfully for some diners who would likely otherwise eat more frequently at the restaurants of producer group A. What are the members of producer group A to do?

They could accept the fact that competition is not tortious — indeed, that economic competition is healthy for the economy at large — and do nothing other than compete harder to win more consumer patronage. That’d be the honest and honorable path to take. But government is in the picture, standing ready to escort those with little interest in honesty and honor down the rent-seeking path.

“So just pass legislation outlawing chain restaurants in our state,” suggests the leader of producer group A.

“Wish I could,” responds Sen. Slimey, “but that’s too blatant. Plus, it might not pass muster with the courts. But I’ve got an alternative plan that’s just as good.”

“Do tell!” exclaims the leader of producer group A.

“Well, I understand,” replies Sen. Slimey, “that the restaurants run by producer group B use many more low-skilled workers in their kitchens than your restaurants use.”

“That’s correct. We serve only fine food, so we hire experienced, high-skilled chefs, whose market wages are high.”

“So,” observes Sen. Slimey, “let’s enact a statute that raises the minimum wage above the average wage now paid to the average worker in producer group B’s restaurants, but lower than the average wage paid to workers in your — producer group A’s — restaurants.”

“Brilliant!” declares the leader of producer group A, who sees immediately that, while the minimum-wage legislation will on its face — de jure — apply to all restaurants, it will in fact have a differentially harsh effect on the restaurants in producer group B. The minimum wage will artificially raise producer group B’s costs of operation, causing them to reduce their outputs. One consequence of producer group B’s reduced outputs will be artificially increased demand for meals served at producer group A’s restaurants.

Sen. Slimey smiles, knowing that the news media, as well as most of the intellectuals in town, will applaud him for his apparent humanity and “Progressive” values. It’s a win-win for Sen. Slimey and for members of producer group A. And too few people will pay close-enough attention to the members, workers, and customers of producer group B to suspect that Sen. Slimey is anything other than a socially conscious public servant.

Don Boudreaux, “Doing Bad By Pretending to Do Good”, Café Hayek, 2018-05-13.

August 19, 2020

He calls it “unintended consequences”. I disagree … these consequences are very much intended

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brad Polumbo is being far too generous to Californian politicians by saying the impending collapse of the state’s entire gig economy was not the intended result of passing “worker protection” laws that penalized success:

UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.

Here’s how we got to this point.

In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.

Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.

Here’s why.

AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.

Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”

Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.

QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The CBC was conceived 90 years ago to give the country a national broadcaster and to help Canadian regions understand each other better. It has often lived up to that mandate and in places still does.

But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?

Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.

August 18, 2020

Don’t worry your pretty little heads, normies, the enlightened ones are planning “The Great Reset” for 2021

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

Mark Steyn on how the great and the good of the world are figuring out the road ahead of us:

… most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you’ve never heard of — by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids’ schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you’ve never heard of turn up in this video from the “World Economic Forum” — ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you’ll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of “The Great Reset”:

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the “World Leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ Plan“. But, if by “leader” you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it’s a melancholy reflection on the state of “world leadership” that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people’s representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he’s just another guy who’s a “world leader” because he gets invited to Davos and you don’t — and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you’d need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world’s airports are ghost towns.

As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. “Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis,” says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren’t closed.

But, why is it history’s job to say something about this crisis? Why, don’t you “world leaders” of the here and now say anything about it? “It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world,” declares the UN Secretary-General.

That’s almost a full set, but he forgot “redefined”. “Possibilities are being redefined each and every day,” says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he’s in any business other than petroleum.

There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the “China Green Finance Committee”. He’s there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis – and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I’ve mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing — from widgets to “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts, that’s never coming back; from now on, we’re going to be “the knowledge economy”. Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.

August 16, 2020

QotD: Labour is now the “party of government” even when they’re not in power

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

Labour, it seems to me and to many others I’m sure, has mutated from once upon a time being the party speaking for the poor, often against the government, to being the party of government, even when they aren’t the politicians in titular charge of that government. These people are now “supportive of the state”, to quote Hartley, even when they’re not personally in charge of it. It’s the process of government, whoever is doing it, whatever it is doing, that they now seem to worship. It is, as similar people in earlier times used to say, the principle of the thing, the principle being that they’re in charge. Many decades ago, Labour spoke for, well, Labour. The workers, the toiling masses. Now they represent most determinedly only those who labour away only in Civil Service offices or their allies in the media, in academia, and in the bureaucratised top end of big business.

Anyone official and highly educated sounding who challenges whatever happens to be the prevailing supposed wisdom of this governing class, on Coronavirus or on anything else, must be scolded into irrelevance and preferably silenced. The governors must be obeyed, even if they’re wrong. In fact especially if they’re wrong, just as the soldiers of the past were expected to obey their orders, no matter what they thought of the orders or of the aristocratic asses who often gave them. Whether they were good orders was an argument that those giving orders could have amongst themselves, but that orders must be obeyed was a given. “Capitalism” isn’t worth dying for, but this new dispensation is, right or wrong.

Our new class of entitled asses, together with all those who have placed their bets for life on carrying out their orders or trying to profit from them, seems now to be the limit of the Labour Party’s electoral ambition. And who knows? The awful thing is that this class and its hangers-on could be enough, in the not too distant future, to get them back into direct command of the governmental process that they so adore.

Brian Micklethwait, “Mick Hartley on the politics of the Lockdown”, Samizdata, 2020-05-15.

August 10, 2020

Russia in Asia (for now)

Filed under: Asia, China, Government, History, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell looks at some long-frozen geopolitical forces that may become more active in coming years:

The Jamestown Foundation, which some experts describe as mainly non-partisan and relatively unbiased, has published an interesting article by Paul Goble in which he reminds us that “Russia east of the Urals comprises more than two-thirds of the Russian Federation but has only about one-fifth of that country’s population. It is where most of Russia’s natural resources are to be found, though the earnings from their extraction largely go to Moscow and not to local people. The region is located three to ten time zones east of Moscow and is linked to the center by few roads or rail lines. Its people are far closer to China and other Pacific rim countries — including the United States — than to the core of the Russian Federation. Because of their roots in explorers, those fleeing oppression, and those sent there by the state for punishment, eastern Russians have always been more independent minded and entrepreneurial than Russians in central and western Russia. Perhaps the most important measure of this cultural divide is that Protestant faiths dominate the religious scene there, not the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.”

It is related to something I have been saying for a long time: Siberia (essentially everything East of the Yenisei River (some say everything East of the Urals) is Asia …

… while Russia, per se, is an Eastern European country.

[…]

A few years ago a couple of middle-ranked Chinese officials suggested to me that one of China’s long-term strategic plans was (and I’m guessing still is) to encourage separatist movements in Siberia which, they hoped, will succeed in creating three or four (maybe even five or six) “autonomous” states in Siberia which will, like Mongolia, look, primarily to China for trade and support.

China covets needs the resources, including water, that Siberia has. I have, in the past, forecast a Sino-Russian “Water War” in Siberia. But, speaking broadly and generally, the Chinese don’t like wars: they are expensive and unpredictable. They would much rather play a modest, behind the scenes role in creating a handful of weak, independent Siberian states with which they can trade to their advantage. They do not, I was told, wish to annex Siberia ~ some Chinese feel that the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) went too far when it annexed what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (新疆维吾尔自治区) in 18th century.

(Tibet is a different matter and most of the Chinese people I know who might wish that Xinjiang was a more autonomous place, more like Kyrgyzstan, for example, believe that Tibetans are Chinese (and Uighurs are not) and Tibet is a “natural” part of China.)

I said a couple of days ago, that “Russia is a pariah state that is flailing about as it withers and dies.” But Putin is flailing about in the wrong directions. The Chinese are, I believe, cultivating and fertilizing Siberian separatist movements with a view to dismembering Russia and “liberating” Siberia. When that happens, and I’m confident that it is NOT an IF, the world will be a much different place.

Donald MacLean: The First of the Cambridge Five

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

The Cold War
Published 22 Jun 2020

Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the famous Cambridge Five and Donald Maclean in particular — a real Cold War-era spy story

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FDR’s “New Deal” and the Great Depression

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

The Great Depression began with the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and was made worse by the frantic attempts of President Hoover to fix the problem. Despite the commonly asserted gibe that Hoover tried laissez faire methods to address the economic crisis, he was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive and a life-long control freak (the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which devasted world trade was passed in 1930). Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election by promising to undo Hoover’s economic interventions, yet once in office he turned out to be even more of a control freak than Hoover. His economic and political plans made Hoover’s efforts seem merely a pale shadow.

For newcomers to this issue, “New Deal” is the term used to describe the various policies to expand the size and scope of the federal government adopted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a.k.a., FDR) during the 1930s.

And I’ve previously cited many experts to show that his policies undermined prosperity. Indeed, one of my main complaints is that he doubled down on many of the bad policies adopted by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover.

Let’s revisit the issue today by seeing what some other scholars have written about the New Deal. Let’s start with some analysis from Robert Higgs, a highly regarded economic historian.

    … as many observers claimed at the time, the New Deal did prolong the depression. … FDR and Congress, especially during the congressional sessions of 1933 and 1935, embraced interventionist policies on a wide front. With its bewildering, incoherent mass of new expenditures, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and direct government participation in productive activities, the New Deal created so much confusion, fear, uncertainty, and hostility among businessmen and investors that private investment, and hence overall private economic activity, never recovered enough to restore the high levels of production and employment enjoyed in the 1920s. … the American economy between 1930 and 1940 failed to add anything to its capital stock: net private investment for that eleven-year period totaled minus $3.1 billion. Without capital accumulation, no economy can grow. … If demagoguery were a powerful means of creating prosperity, then FDR might have lifted the country out of the depression in short order. But in 1939, ten years after its onset and six years after the commencement of the New Deal, 9.5 million persons, or 17.2 percent of the labor force, remained officially unemployed.

Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Professor Vincent Geloso also finds that FDR’s New Deal hurt rather than helped.

    … let us state clearly what is at stake: did the New Deal halt the slump or did it prolong the Great Depression? … The issue that macroeconomists tend to consider is whether the rebound was fast enough to return to the trendline. … The … figure below shows the observed GDP per capita between 1929 and 1939 expressed as the ratio of what GDP per capita would have been like had it continued at the trend of growth between 1865 and 1929. On that graph, a ratio of 1 implies that actual GDP is equal to what the trend line predicts. … As can be seen, by 1939, the United States was nowhere near the trendline. … Most of the economic historians who have written on the topic agree that the recovery was weak by all standards and paled in comparison with what was observed elsewhere. … there is also a wide level of agreement that other policies lengthened the depression. The one to receive the most flak from economic historians is the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). … In essence, it constituted a piece of legislation that encouraged cartelization. By definition, this would reduce output and increase prices. As such, it is often accused of having delayed recovery. … other sets of policies (such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act) … were very probably counterproductive.

Here’s one of the charts from his article, which shows that the economy never recovered lost output during the 1930s.

August 9, 2020

QotD: The economic concept of “revealed preferences”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Economists have a handy term called “revealed preferences”. In colloquial English it means “look at what people do, not what they say, and certainly never take notice of what they say others should do”.

Now, you can’t help but notice that there is a disparity between those who say that taxes should be higher and those who act as if they should be. Clearly, an individual who really believes that the Government is more effective at spending his money would voluntarily offer up more than the legal minimum of taxation. That we have fewer people acting in this manner than are to be found writing columns and making speeches calling for higher taxation shows a certain gap, does it not, between public utterances and private actions? Why, we could make such donations a litmus test for those believers in higher taxation and state spending who want to compel all of us to pay more. Only those who show their commitment by sending a cheque to the Treasury should be treated seriously.

Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.

Tim Worstall, “Show us your cheques”, Times of London, quoted in Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-07.

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