Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2020

The Trial of Charles I (1649)

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

Historia Civilis
Published 6 Feb 2020

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Sources:
T. B. Howell “A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783,” Volume IV | https://bit.ly/2Q9tPOS
“The Sentence of the High Court of Justice upon the King,” January 27th, 1649 | https://bit.ly/2rooZVC
—
Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History | https://amzn.to/36YHkrb
Leanda de Lisle, White King: Traitor, Murderer, Martyr | https://amzn.to/2Qen9ir
Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, King Charles the Martyr: 1643-1649 | https://amzn.to/36XFvLg
Allan Massie, The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain | https://amzn.to/2SonMZz
Michael B. Young, Charles I | https://amzn.to/35Jm9t7
John MacLeod, Dynasty: The Stuarts 1560-1807 | https://amzn.to/2MiJGt2
C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I | https://amzn.to/372MDWy
Maurice Ashley, The House of Stuart | https://amzn.to/2PMvU42
Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660 | https://amzn.to/2tKZNJP
Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649 | https://amzn.to/36WWOMz
J. P. Kenyon, The Civil Wars of England | https://amzn.to/2EIAJW3
Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 | https://amzn.to/371CSs0
Sean Kelsey, Politics and Procedure in the Trial of Charles I | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4141664
Clive Holmes, The Trial and Execution of Charles I | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40865689

Music:
“Heliograph,” by Chris Zabriskie
“John Stockton Slow Drag,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Your Mother’s Daughter,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund

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Switching over from internal combustion vehicles to electric won’t be cheap … it really won’t be cheap!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Rob Lyons looks at the British government’s recent decision to ban sales of internal-combustion cars in 2035 rather than the earlier target date of 2040:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

First, at present, electric vehicles cost a lot more than those with internal-combustion engines. For example, one car-buying advice website notes that the Peugeot e-208 is as much as £6,200 more than the standard 208 model. There are government subsidies to help with the cost of electric cars (currently £3,500), but can this be sustained if we all switch? It has already been cut from £4,500 in 2018.

That said, while the purchase price of an electric car may be higher, charging is a lot cheaper than fuelling a regular car. Electric vehicles cost between £4 to £6 per 100 miles to charge at home and £8 to £10 using public charge points, while petrol and diesel cars cost £13 to £16 per 100 miles in fuel (although 60 per cent of the fuel cost is tax).

In theory, maintenance should be cheaper, too, given that electric motors have fewer moving parts than petrol or diesel engines. But to further complicate matters, batteries gradually lose their capacity to hold charge over time. They have to be replaced at the cost of thousands of pounds every few years. (The warranties covering battery replacement varies by manufacturer: Tesla, for instance, offers an eight-year warranty, but the Renault Zoe is covered for just three years.)

Electric cars may be cheaper to own overall, but this is largely down to subsidies and tax breaks, including lower vehicle duties and not having to pay charges in low-emission zones. Still, with the entire car industry throwing its efforts into making electric cars cheaper and increasing battery capacity, costs may well come down somewhat, reducing the need for such breaks. Fingers crossed.

The cost to individual owners will be higher, but the costs to build up the electric charging infrastructure will be distributed among all consumers, not just the owners of vehicles:

This brings us to perhaps the biggest problem: where will the power come from and how will it reach us? Eventually shifting all the energy for cars from oil to electricity means producing much more electricity. Greens are pleased that electricity use is currently decreasing, and a greater proportion of electricity is coming from renewable sources. But the arrival of electric cars en masse would demand a whole lot more electricity, mostly to be used at night.

Unless we want to coat the landscape in wind turbines, which are unreliable in any event, we’ll need other sources of power. More nuclear? Fine by me. But will eco-warriors stand for that? Even if we can produce the juice, having lots of cars charging in the same area may overwhelm the local electricity networks. Who is going to pay for the upgrade?

When all of these factors are considered we have to ask if all this effort will really reduce greenhouse-gas emissions anyway. Digging up the resources required to create all those batteries will be hugely carbon-intensive. Perhaps the most likely outcome of banning sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles is that demand for second-hand vehicles will go up. We could end up like Cubans, nursing venerable old cars for years, way beyond their intended lifespans.

QotD: Canadian peacekeeping, myth and reality

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

In fact, why don’t we practise anything we preach? As of May 2005, the top contributors to UN operations were Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal at Number 4, good grief, and they’re practically on the brink of civil war. Well, okay, we’re not in the Top 10 with all that expendable Asian manpower but c’mon, we must be in there somewhere … Number 20) France; 24) Ireland; 29) United Kingdom; 30) United States … hey, how’d those two warmongers make the Top 30 peacekeepers? Wait a minute, here we are: Canada, rocketing into the Hit Parade at 33 with a lack of bullet, right between Togo and Turkey. But, to the best of my knowledge, Togo and Benin (28) and Senegal (12) don’t regard peacekeeping as so indispensable to their self-image that they stick it on their currency and brag about it in beer commercials.

So we’re no longer a great military nation. But nor are we a great peacekeeping nation: we do less than notorious sabre-rattlers like Britain and America. Compared to the Scandinavians and the other niceniks we’re a poor aid donor, and our immobile rapid-reaction force is of no practical use in humanitarian crises. M. Chrétien’s legacy-building Africa initiative of 2002 is known only to Canadians. Everywhere else, it’s credited as Tony Blair’s Africa initiative. We have less influence internationally than we did in the 1940s — before we had a flag, an anthem, or our own citizenship. Even if the Trudeaupian vision of Canada were sufficient for a national identity, it suffers from the basic defect of being a bald-faced lie.

Mark Steyn, “Nothing to see here”, Western Standard, 2005-08-08.

February 7, 2020

Modern day Kremlinology and show trials

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why the Soviet Union’s Moscow Trials were so important well outside the borders of the USSR:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Moscow Trials set the course of 20th century history. If you want to be a dictator in peacetime, this is pretty much how you have to do it — see e.g. every other Communist regime ever. The downside, though, is that you cost yourself a lot of irreplaceable technical expertise. I’m not saying Hitler would’ve called Barbarossa off if Stalin hadn’t purged all his generals — Hitler was, of course, crazy — but he surely would’ve thought twice about it, the plan relying as it did on the utter incompetence of the now-leaderless Red Army.

The show trials also gave birth to “Kremlinology”, the art and science of reading Soviet tea leaves to find out who’s really in charge. Stalin didn’t invent “elimination by promotion”, but he was a master of it. In Stalin’s USSR, being “promoted” to some big, important-sounding position was an all-but-guarantee that you’re going to get shot. Seemingly minor functionaries, on the other hand, really ran things in the countryside. E.g. Khrushchev, a Red Army commissar — not an unimportant position by any means, but hardly a glory post either. Stalin’s generals knew who he was, but few outside the Red Army’s high command did. And since Stalin liked to signal major policy shifts with articles in obscure publications — he once wrote an article on lingustics that previewed some huge change — you had to be very wired in to figure out who was really a comer.

Let’s imagine, then, that somehow the Moscow Show Trials failed. That Zinoviev, say, was acquitted, because (take your pick) he’d obviously been tortured, the charges were ludicrous, there was zero hard evidence against him, or any combination of the above. Stalin staked his entire position on the outcome of the Trials. What if he’d lost? How long do you think the Boss would’ve remained Boss? A few weeks? A few days? Hours, maybe?

Nancy Pelosi is no Stalin, of course, but whoever survives November’s electoral bloodbath had better start working on Secret Speech 2.0 the very second the last vote is counted. I was doubtful about the 2020 presidential election until they actually decided to show-trial Donald Trump. Since there’s no way in hell they’re going to get a 2/3 majority to vote to convict, the whole thing looks like not just a witch hunt, but a botched witch hunt. No one, not even Koba the Dread, is politically strong enough to survive one of those.

QotD: The negative economic and human value of foreign aid

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’d like nothing better than to be proven wrong, but I’m gloomily confident that my prediction of failure will be verified. History and sound economics both warn that foreign aid is far more likely to harm than to help economies.

During the past four decades, Western governments have lavished on Africa nearly a half-trillion dollars in aid. But to no good effect. Everyone agrees that Africans remain desperately poor.

Academic studies confirm aid’s ineffectiveness. In his celebrated 2001 book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, former World Bank economist William Easterly carefully reviews aid’s history and concludes that it is one of abject failure.

Indeed, many studies find that aid harms economies. For example, University of Regina economist Tomi Ovaska, writing in the Cato Journal, finds that “a 1 percent increase in aid as a percent of GDP (gross domestic product) decreased annual real GDP per capita growth by 3.65 percent.”

The reasons for this dismal record should be plain to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics. Failure of economies to develop is not because of lack of resources. Instead, it’s because of overbearing and corrupt governments, as well as to the dysfunctional social and cultural institutions that keep such governments in power and that are themselves fostered by such governments.

As long as a country is cursed by a malignant government and dysfunctional institutions, no amount of foreign aid will help it.

Don Boudreaux, “Faulty Band-Aid”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-06-18.

February 5, 2020

“On this issue, Canada’s two solitudes could hardly be more starkly apparent”

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

Chris Selley on the vastly different reaction from Quebec media to the Trudeau government’s notion to turn the country’s news organizations into a modern version of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus, pumping out approved-by-the-Liberals story lines:

On Sunday, when CTV’s Evan Solomon pushed Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on the issue of issuing journalism licences to foreign media outlets, Guilbeault eventually just shrugged: “I’m not sure I see what the big deal is.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

The minister tried to walk it back on Monday, but the fact is many of his fellow Quebecers will also struggle to discern a big deal. There is simply much more tolerance of this sort of cultural gatekeeping among francophone Quebecers than in the Rest of Canada, and the tolerance extends well into the realm of journalism.

“In reading the (report’s) 260 pages and 97 recommendations, one word comes to mind” Sunday’s editorial in La Presse gushed: “Finally!”

Opposition to government regulation of journalism is firmly entrenched not just in anglophone Canada, but across the anglosphere. When the 2011 Leveson Inquiry proposed the British government create a powerful new press regulator, nearly every major outlet rejected the idea. Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, famously vowed the magazine “will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces.”

The same year, Laval University professor Dominique Payette’s report into Quebec’s struggling news media recommended the government legislate a “professional journalist” designation. The province’s largest journalists’ trade organization and the Quebec Press Council happily sat down with the government to bash out a power-sharing agreement on deciding who’s a proper journalist and who isn’t.

The English-language Montreal Gazette was dead-set against the idea, but Le Devoir called it a “logical outcome.” (The power-sharing discussions eventually fell apart, and the idea died a merciful death.)

February 4, 2020

“Who could oppose such an obviously sound idea?”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few pithy comments from Twitter on the Trudeau government’s apparent surprise that a few Canadians don’t think their regulate-the-internet plan is brilliant:

Fellow Rush fan Matt Gurney finds the perfect lyrics for the occasion:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

CRTC regulating the internet – “Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell suggests that the Canadian government most recent brainfart is a “Tea Party moment” for Canadians:

One commentator on social media dubbed this […] the moment when Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said that the Trudeau regime plans to license news websites as a “Boston Tea Pary moment.”

N. Currier. Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor, 1846. [New York: N. Currier]
Retrieved from the Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/

She was referring to the protest, in December of 1773, when angry American colonists (many dressed as Native Americans to try and hide their true identities) dumped several hundred chests of tea, imported by the East India Company, into Boston harbour to protest the taxes, on almost everything, that had been imposed, by Westminster to pay for the Seven Years War. Westminster felt it was only fair to tax the colonists equally, along with the people of the British Isles, because much of the war, called the French-Indian War, now, by Americans, was fought to protect them and their vital commercial interests. The American colonists disagreed, many on the principle that they should not be taxed without being represented in parliament. We know where it all ended.

It’s a good question. Most commentators seem to agree with me that the Trudeau regime has seriously overreached in supporting the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel’s recommendations that, somehow, the distribution of “news” should be regulated by the government. That is a far, far greater intrusion into the liberty of free Canadian citizens than a tax on staples was to Americans in 1773.

Andrew Coyne, writing in the Globe and Mail, opines that “The whole thing is just breathtaking – a regulatory power grab without precedent, either in Canada or the democratic world. Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane. This kind of bureaucratic micromanagement, with its obsession with ‘cultural sovereignty’ and ‘telling ourselves our own stories,’ would have been hopelessly outdated in 1990. In 2020, it’s just embarrassing.” He’s right to use the word “insane,” ~ the proposal is quite possibly unconstitutional, just for a start, it is, certainly based on a deeply mistaken idea of what the internet actually is ~ and he’s equally right to say that every Canadian who doesn’t, actively, protest against this must be embarrassed because each is, for no good reason at all that I can see, supporting a proposal that makes Canada less, far less, of a liberal democracy and more like Ethiopia and Senegal (both with scores below 6.0, the threshold for a Flawed Democracy in the well regarded Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest democracy index) where he will visit this week … perhaps to learn from the leaders of authoritarian regimes what his next steps should be to embarrass Canada further.

Michael Geist on the jaw-dropping performance of Trudeau’s Canadian Heritage Minister last weekend:

In June 2017, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage committee recommended implementing tax on Internet services in a report on media. Within minutes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the proposal at a press conference in Montreal. Trudeau’s answer – which literally came as committee chair Hedy Fry was holding a press conference on the report – was unequivocal: No. The government was not going to raise costs of Internet services with an ISP tax. The committee recommendation was minutes old and the government wasted absolutely no time in killing the proposal.

Last week, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel proposed a far broader regulatory vision for the Internet. Indeed, it is difficult to give the full breadth of this plan its due. I will be posting this week on some of the most harmful aspects of the plan, including regulating media organizations around the world with penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to obtain licences, regulating streaming companies despite their massive investment in Canada, regulating everything from app stores to operating systems, creating liability for harmful content that violates Canada’s commitments in the USMCA, undermining net neutrality, and increasing the costs of Internet-based services for Canadian consumers.

Over the weekend, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was asked about the proposal. In particular, he was asked about the proposal to licence foreign news sites (the example used was Breitbart but it could just as easily have been the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Fox or MSNBC). The answer should have been easy: no.

Instead of “no”, Minister Guilbeault’s response was that it was “no big deal.”

On Monday morning, the minister appears to have reconsidered being quite so blatant in indulging his inner authoritarian control freak:

Guilbeault walked back the comments on Monday, stating that the government had “no intention to impose licensing requirements on news organizations,” nor will the government “regulate news content.”

“… Our focus will be and always has been that Canadians have diversity to high-quality news sources,” said Guilbeault to reporters in Ottawa.

This announcement comes after deep criticism of a previous announcement by the Liberal government, where they said they would force news organizations to apply for a licence.

Guilbeault’s announcement faced intense scrutiny from across the political spectrum with some commentators suggesting that it would be a dangerous attack on the freedom of the press.

February 3, 2020

“The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent.”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reacts to the changes (or lack of changes) on Brexit Day:

London on the morning after Brexit Day, according to the BBC and other mainstream media.

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday evening — that is, the 31st January 2020 — at 11pm GMT, my country left the European Union. We did so after four years of heated and often hysterical argument. Nothing much seemed to have changed this morning. I went out shopping, to see the same people buying the same things at the same prices. Since we are now in a transition period, lasting till the end of this year, in which we remain within the Single Market and subject to the rules of the European Union, it would have been odd if anything visible had changed. Yet, if nothing visible had changed, one very important thing has changed.

The ruling class has suffered its first serious defeat in living memory. The coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, media people and associated business interests who draw wealth and power from an extended state was committed to European Union membership. This coalition was never uniformly committed to membership. Some elements were strongly committed, others only mildly. But all were agreed that membership was good for them, so far as it blurred the lines of accountability and gave the exercise of power a supranational appearance. This was the position before the 2016 Referendum, which was not expected to go as it did. When the result was to leave, ruling class support for membership strengthened. Long before it ended, the referendum campaign had become a vote of confidence in the ruling class. Losing this vote was a shock. The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent. Give them that, and they would start believing they lived in a democracy where votes counted for something. If this happened, the people might be inclined to start asking for other things – all things variously unwelcome within the ruling class.

The ruling class response to losing fell under two headings. One was to deny the validity of the vote and to demand another, and to make sure that this one was rigged in favour of remaining. The other was to deliver an exit so partial that it amounted to continued membership, and that could be upgraded to full membership after a few years of propaganda. These responses eventually merged into a single project of dragging things out so long that the people would get bored and stop demanding that their voice should be heard.

These responses failed. The people had spoken, and they continued speaking — eventually giving the Conservatives their biggest majority in a generation. Because of this, our departure yesterday was more definite than had previously been imagined. Immediately after the Referendum, I think most of us would have accepted a slow disengagement — perhaps including ten or twenty years of remaining within the Single Market, though out of the customs and political union. The next three years of bad faith killed any taste for gradualism.

Emphasis added.

February 2, 2020

“The European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem”

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

Mark Steyn shares some thoughts on the now-diminished European Union from his 2006 book America Alone as the United Kingdom exits the European Union:

The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union’s governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism — which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading “nation state” in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.

It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we’d be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European “constitution,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.”

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU’s rulers were keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent’s peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal wackos champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I’m not unsympathetic to. But it’s a curious rationale to pitch to one’s electorate: vote for us; we’re the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. In the end, the French and Dutch electorates voted no to the new constitution. One recalls the T-shirt slogan popular among American feminists: “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?” In the chancelleries of Europe, pretty much every part. At the time of the constitution referenda, the rotating European “presidency” was held by Luxembourg, a country slightly larger than your rec room. Jean-Claude Juncker, its rhetorically deranged prime minister and European “president,” staggered around like a collegiate date-rape defendant, insisting that all reasonable persons understand that “Non” really means “Oui.” As he put it before the big vote: “If it’s a yes, we will say ‘on we go,’ and if it’s a no we will say ‘we continue.'”

And if it’s a neither of the above, he will say “we move forward.” You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, “President” Juncker covers his ears and says, “Nya, nya, nya, can’t hear you!”

Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a pre-ordained correct answer. Yet President Juncker distilled the great flaw at the heart of the EU constitution into one disarmingly straightforward expression of contempt for the will of the people. For his part, the architect of the constitution — the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing — was happy to pile on: why, even if the French and the Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing, as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text,” declared M. Giscard. During his labors on the constitution, he’d told me he saw himself as “Europe’s Jefferson.” By referendum night he’d apparently become Europe’s Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is that his ingrate subjects had no need to read beyond the opening sentence: “We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people.”

After that, the rest doesn’t matter: you can’t do trickle-down nation-building. The British, who’ve written more constitutions for more real nations than anybody in history and therefore can’t plead the same ignorance as President Juncker, should be especially ashamed of going along with this farrago of a travesty of a charade.

QotD: The role of government, as seen by fans of government

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

It seems to me that many people believe that we human beings left undirected by a sovereign power are either inert blobs, capable of achieving nothing, or unintelligent and brutal barbarians destined only to rob, rape, plunder, and kill each other until and unless a sovereign power restrains us and directs our energies onto more productive avenues. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be monarchial; in the 19th, 20th, and (so far) 21st centuries it is believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be “the People,” usually in the form of democratic majorities. We moderns applaud ourselves for having discarded our ancestors’ unenlightened attachment to monarchy and for our having replaced that attachment with an attachment to majoritarian nationalist democracy. We moderns do not understand that our attachment to nationalist sovereignty itself is a far more dangerous superstition than is an attachment to a variety of sovereignty other than majoritarian nationalist democracy.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-11-25.

February 1, 2020

Trudeau government’s unwillingness to define what they mean by “middle class”

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

The phrase has taken on almost an Alice in Wonderland quality for Justin Trudeau and his recently created “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity”:

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

It could be addressed, says Chris Selley … and really should be:

In the meantime, the Liberals have another problem. It is far less important than Iran or China, but it’s also far more embarrassing than either, because it is entirely of their own making and so easily fixed. It is as follows: Trudeau has given Ottawa MP Mona Fortier the new cabinet title of “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity,” but no one in the government has yet bothered to define “middle class.” And everyone is laughing at them.

Mona Fortier, Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance.
© HOC-CDC. Photo by Christian Diotte, House of Commons Photo Services, November 2019.

Fortier has tried to explain herself. “We have to make sure we represent the realities in a rural, remote or even urban setting, (and) regional differences,” she told CTV upon her appointment. “The income required to attain a middle-class lifestyle can vary greatly based on Canadians’ specific situation,” she told the same network this week.

She’s right! Pack up your middle-class lifestyle in Small Town A, and you might well not recognize it when you unpack in Big City B. The thing is, though, statisticians — including scores of them in the federal government’s employ — are across this. They know very well that a Canadian dollar does not purchase the same quantity of goods and services in every part of the country, and they have all sorts of ingenious ways to compensate.

If it were true that “middle class” can’t be defined because it connotes different things in different places, then the same would go for “poverty.” But Canada has never had any problem defining poverty on a relative basis. And in 2018, this very Liberal government adopted an absolute measure of poverty as well: the Market Basket Measure, which estimates the cost of “a modest standard of living” in any given place, and calculates how many of us can’t afford it.

So the “poverty line” in Small Town A is not the same as it is in Big City B, and … sorry, this very simple concept doesn’t need to be explained to National Post readers any further. The point is, defining poverty was a good thing. Defining the middle class obviously doesn’t matter as much, but since this government seems utterly obsessed with it — and with evidence-based policy! — there is no good reason for it not to do likewise.

Cursus honorum – Consuls

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 18 May 2015

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Music is “The Life and Death of a Certain K. Zabriskie, Patriarch” by Chris Zabriskie. (http://chriszabriskie.com/)

QotD: Justifying tyranny

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In [Adam] Smith’s time, and now again in the regulatory state, few believed that a masterless society would be possible. The haunting fear by governing elites supported by worried citizens stirred up by an antitrade clerisy was then, and still is, that ordinary people will do bad things if left alone. Unless overawed by the threat of state violence in police or planning or regulation, ordinary people, especially the lower classes, will spurn priests, stop paying their rents and taxes, not save enough for old age, kill each other, not buy enough insurance, speak against the government, appear with hair uncovered, refuse military service, drink to excess, commit unnatural acts, use naughty words, chew gum, smoke marihuana – committing in sum, as Bill Murray put it in Ghostbusters, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.” A progressive or a conservative program of heavy regulation is a first-night-in-Ferguson-Missouri notion of keeping order. It is the justification of all tyranny, hard or soft.

Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, 2016.

January 29, 2020

“CanCon” rules for internet streaming services will be “inevitable”

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

Yes, the federal government is serious about extending the moronic “Canadian content” regime to internet streaming companies (like Netflix). Canadians are too blind to be allowed to select all of their own viewing without the paternal hand of government jiggling those choices in a politically desired direction, as Michael Geist explains:

Later this week, a government appointed panel tasked with reviewing Canada’s broadcast and telecommunications laws is likely to recommend new regulations for internet streaming companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon that will include mandated contributions to support Canadian film and television production. In fact, even if the panel stops short of that approach, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission chair Ian Scott have both signalled their support for new rules with Mr. Guilbeault recently promising legislation by year-end and Mr. Scott calling it inevitable.

My Globe and Mail op-ed notes that the new internet regulations are popular among cultural lobby groups, but their need rests on a shaky policy foundation as many concerns with the fast-evolving sector have proved unfounded.

[…]

Third, the not-so-secret reality of the Canadian system is that foreign location and service production and Canadian content are frequently indistinguishable. Qualifying as Canadian requires having a Canadian producer along with meeting a strict point system that rewards granting roles such as the director, screenwriter, lead actors, and music composer to Canadians.

Yet this is a poor proxy for “telling our stories”. The rules mean foreign companies can never produce Canadian content leading to the absurd outcome that revivals of Canadian programs such as Trailer Park Boys and Degrassi will not meet the qualification requirements if Netflix is the sole funder and producer. Moreover, programs such as The Handmaid’s Tale may be based on a Margaret Atwood novel, but using one of Canada’s best known novelists as the source doesn’t count in the Canadian points system.

So what is Canadian? A quick scan of Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office data turns up Blood and Fury: America’s Civil War, The Kennedys, Murder in Paradise, Natural Born Outlaws, Who Killed Ghandi?, and dozens of other programs that are Canadian in regulation-only. Further, there are also “co-productions”, in which treaty agreements deem predominantly foreign productions such as The Borgias or Vikings as Canadian.

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