Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2020

Those damned unintended consequences

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the differences between intention and the real world:

Unintended consequences are the bane of social engineers. They are why the “Scientific” and centralized method of governance never worked and will never work. (Sorry, guys, it just won’t.)

Part of it is because humans are contrary. Part of is because humans are chaotic. And part of it is because like weather systems, societies are so complex it’s almost impossible to figure out what a push in any given place will cause to happen in another place.

This is why price controls are the craziest of idiocies. They don’t work in the way they’re intended, but oh, they work in practically all the ways they’re not. So, take price controls on rent. All they really do is create a market in which housing is scarce, landlords don’t maintain their property AND the only people who can afford to live in cities that have rent control are the very wealthy.

BUT Sarah, you say, aren’t rent controls supposed to make them affordable. Yeah. All that and the good intentions will allow you to go skating in hell on the fourth of July weekend.

Let’s be real, okay? I saw rent control up close and personal in Portugal. Rents were controlled and landlords were penalized for “not keeping the property up”.

In Portugal at the time, and here too, most of the time from what I’ve seen, the administration of property might be some management company, but that’s not who OWNS the damn thing. The owners are usually people who bought the property so it would support them in old age/lean times.

To begin with, you’re removing these people’s ability to make money off their legitimately owned property. And no, they’re not the plutocrats bernie bros imagine. These are often people just making it by.

Second, people are going to get the money some other way, because the alternative is dying. And people don’t want to die or be destitute. So they’re going to find the money. I have no idea what it is in NYC, etc, but in Portugal? it was “key buying.” Sure, you can rent the house for the controlled price, but you have to make a huge payment upfront to “buy the key.” From what I remember this was on the order of a small house down payment. And if you couldn’t do that, you were stuck getting married and living with your parents. And if you say “greedy landlords” — well, see the other thing you could do was leave the lease in your will. So the landlord didn’t know if they’d ever get control of their property back, and they needed to live off this for x years (estimated length of life.) So, that was an unintended consequence. The kind that keeps surfacing in rent-controlled cities in the US.

The same applies to attempts to “help” the homeless. Part of this, as part of all attempts to “fix” poverty is that the people doing it, usually the result of generations of middle class parents and strives assume the homeless and the poor are people like them.

To an extent, they’re correct. The homeless and the poor are PEOPLE. But culture makes a difference, and culture is often based on class and place of upbringing. And the majority of humanity, judging by the world, might be made to strive but are not natural strivers. Without incentive, most of humanity sits back, relaxes and takes what it’s given.

March 14, 2020

The still-secret “settlement” between the federal government and five hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley points out some of the disturbing features of the as-yet-unrevealed agreement between Her Majesty’s Canadian government and five unelected First Nation chiefs that eventually got the railways running again:

“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

For starters, we still don’t know the details of the arrangement, struck earlier this month between Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and federal and provincial government officials, that allowed for pipeline work to resume. Those details could well represent positive progress on establishing just what the Wet’suwet’en’s legal claim on their lands — affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997 — really means. But did the government have any business negotiating with the chiefs in question in the first place?

Tait-Day doesn’t think so. The Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en, she told the committee, is “not accountable to the (Wet’suwet’en) nation.”

“By refusing to hear from elected councils, these governments have without merit prevented the most credible current governing voices from being heard,” she told the committee. “The Indian Act system must be reformed, but that does not invalidate the role of the elected councils. While imperfect, they continue to speak for the people until a better model is implemented.”

Even setting aside the exclusion of elected councils, the negotiations were of dubious legitimacy. They weren’t with the hereditary chiefs per se; rather, they were with the hereditary chiefs who oppose the pipeline. Not all do, and some support it — including Tait-Day, Gloria George and Darlene Glaim, founders of the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition. For their apostasy, male chiefs simply stripped them of their titles. This is not in dispute: “We’ve stripped the names from three female hereditary chiefs for supporting the pipeline,” John Ridsdale, whose hereditary title is Chief Na’Moks, told APTN News in 2018. “A name is more important than money.”

Using the title of Chief Woos, Frank Alec has become the leading public face of the anti-pipeline hereditary chiefs. On his behalf, Canadians both Indigenous and non-Indigenous have shut down rail lines and blocked access to the B.C. legislature and marched in the streets. Until 2018, the title of Chief Woos belonged to Glaim. He took it from her precisely because she dared support the pipeline and the benefits that will flow from it to her people.

“By negotiating directly with (the Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en), Canada and British Columbia give legitimacy to a group of bullies and abusers of women,” Tait-Day told the committee. “We cannot be dictated to by a group of five guys.”

March 12, 2020

The Road to the Holocaust – Kristallnacht | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 3 of 4

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

TimeGhost History
Published 11 Mar 2020

After years of gradually increasing persecution, the Nazis institute a nationwide pogrom on the night of November 9, 1938. It will signal the end of Jewish life in Germany.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Sources:
Bundesarchiv_Bild:
102-04051A, 102-14469, 102-16475, 119-03-16-06,
119-04-29-36, 119-04-29-38, 119-2671-07, 119-5592-03A,
133-075,_Worms, 146-1970-041-46, 146-1970-061-65,
146-1979-046-22, 146-1982-174-26, 146-1982-174-27,
146-1984-092-26, 146-1988-078-07, 146-1989-071-05,
152-64-25A,_Wien, 152-64-29A,_Wien, 152-65-04,_Wien,
183-1982-0809-502, 183-1987-0703-514, 183-2006-0429-502,
183-R99542, 183-S21437, 183-S72707, 183-86686-0008,

From the Noun Project:
noun_Government by Adrien Coquet,
noun_jail by Strongicon,
noun_Death by Icon Island,

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Imperious” – Bonnie Grace
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “An Ancient Dome” – Trabant 33
– “Death And Glory 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “First Responders” – Skrya

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

March 11, 2020

Canadian National’s perfect storm

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

In Trains, Bill Stephens highlights the terrible time Canada’s largest railway has been having since the beginning of the year:

“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

It would be hard to imagine a worse start to the year for Canadian National, whose volume is down 16% due to a string of events that’s mostly odd, unrelated, and unrelenting. CN is taking it on the chin, as no other North American railroad has seen its volume fall by more than 10% this year and rival Canadian Pacific’s traffic is up 10%.

First, there was Mother Nature. Winter arrived in January with eight days of deep cold in Western Canada, forcing CN to restrict train length. Then powerful rainstorms lashed southern British Columbia starting Jan. 30, washing out CN’s main to Vancouver for six days.

The major washouts occurred in the rugged Fraser River canyon directional running zone where CN and CP share trackage, with CN hosting westbounds and CP carrying eastbounds. The railways had to resort to running directional fleets of 15 to 20 trains at a time over CP’s line. The single-track bottleneck caused eastbound traffic to stack up at the Port of Vancouver and westbounds to be staged as far away as the Prairies. The directional running zone ranks among the top three freight mains by tonnage in North America, alongside BNSF Railway’s Southern Transcon in the Southwest and Union Pacific’s triple track across Nebraska. So this blockage was, by itself, a big deal.

Then came nearly a month of civil protests. On Feb. 6, as CN began digging out from the washout backlog, the first of several First Nations blockades set up camp on CN’s tracks. The blockades, protesting a proposed natural gas pipeline in British Columbia, halted traffic on CN’s Montreal-Toronto mainline in the East. Also ultimately affected: CN’s line to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, which was blocked by protests for six days. Other protests came and went in Edmonton, Alberta; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Quebec; and British Columbia. CP was affected, too, but to a much lesser extent. CP even hosted detour traffic for CN between Montreal and Toronto.

As if that wasn’t enough, then came regulatory woes. The same day the protests began, a CP crude oil train derailed and caught fire in Guernsey, Sask., the second such wreck in the area since December. Hours later Transport Canada issued a ministerial order that restricted key trains – those with 20 or more cars of hazardous materials – to 20 mph in metropolitan areas and 25 mph elsewhere. With the stroke of a pen, Transport Minister Marc Garneau’s knee-jerk reaction effectively reduced CN’s overall capacity by a third. You could call this slowdown “Whoa Canada!”

March 10, 2020

QotD: Free trade versus protectionism

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

It is a myth that free trade is unproven in practice. Forget that countries with freer trade have both higher per-capita incomes and faster rates of economic growth. Look instead at the essentials of the case. Each and every day you trade freely with many merchants. Do you think that you and your family would be enriched if your neighbor extracted punitive payments from you whenever you buy some item that your neighbor judges to be from a seller located too distant from your neighborhood? Every day Arizonans trade freely with Texans and Rhode Islanders. Do you think that Arizonans would be enriched if the government of that state obstructed their ability to trade as they choose with people located in other states?

People trade freely countless times, each and every day. Yes, yes, I’m well aware that such trade isn’t ideally free. Occupational-licensing restrictions, for example, unjustly and harmfully obstruct domestic trade. But the fact remains that today within each country – including within the U.S. – trade is not typically obstructed based on geographic location or political boundaries. And therefore people buy and sell freely within countries. If the case for a policy of free trade were not practical – if it were only a theoretical curiosity – then it would be true that ordinary people would be even richer if the state obstructed their abilities to trade with each other domestically.

It’s a myth also that the economic case for a policy of free trade in any one country requires that other governments also practice free trade. The case for a policy of free trade is, at bottom, a case for unilateral free trade: while nearly everyone in the world would be better off if all governments adopted policies of free trade, nearly everyone in the home country would be better off if the home government adopts a policy of free trade regardless of the policies of other governments.

Protectionism is a nasty mash of logical fallacies, half-truths, hubris, economic ignorance, and cronyist apologetics.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-12-18.

March 6, 2020

“[A] decision of such absolutely mind-boggling stupidity and irresponsibility that it could only have come from Justin Trudeau, himself”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell on the Trudeau government’s apparent abject surrender to the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs (“apparent” because we still don’t have any details of the “deal”):

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ agenda seems simple enough to me. They don’t like the notion that the Wet’suwet’en people can elect band councils that might act for the good of the people and < quelle horreur > the people might even disagree with the hereditary chiefs. Some (male) hereditary chiefs seem to have managed to strip some other (female) chiefs of their titles because they, the female chiefs, sided with the elected councils. This is, in 21st century British Columbia, something of a replay of 17th century Europe and the end of the divine right of kings, except that the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs might succeed where Charles I and Louis XVI failed because they have the dimwits in the Trudeau cabinet on their side.

To make matters worse, as John Morris of the Canadian Press points out in an article published in the Globe and Mail, the government negotiated with the hereditary chiefs, only ~ with the people who broke the law; and they ignored the elected leaders ~ the people who played by the rules.

How typically Trudeau: he surrenders, cravenly, to the reactionary, anti-democratic lawbreakers and, simultaneously, shuts out the elected representatives of the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Is that the Canada in which we all want to live? Is that the sort of “leadership” for which millions of Canadians voted in 2019? I think not. Justin Trudeau is both a fool and a coward and his party, the Liberal Party of Canada, has a duty to Canada: throw the bum out!

But, not to worry, the Trudeau regime’s propagandists press agents will tell us that it’s all good, we “won,” something or other … didn’t we? And who cares if we lost something nebulous like honour and responsibility? It’s all about reconciliation, isn’t it? What do trivialities like democracy and the national interest matter when really important things, like preserving the power of hereditary chiefs over elected councils, are at stake? But that reactionary system seems to have been strengthened, and so “It was a famous victory.”

QotD: Mercantilism

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

The “mercantile system” is […] what we today commonly call “protectionism” or “economic nationalism.” By duping the general public into believing that the artificially promoted and protected profits and wages reaped by a handful of highly visible and politically powerful firms and workers are the same as — or are evidence of — a high standard of living for ordinary people nationwide, mercantilists convince members of the general public to accept government-imposed restrictions on their freedom to trade with foreigners. More succinctly, protectionists pull off the rather amazing feat of convincing ordinary people that their standard of living rises when government artificially increases the scarcity of the goods and services that they wish to consume.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-12-17.

March 4, 2020

Sir Philip Rutnam, former civil servant and new hero of the resistance

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

Brendan O’Neill on the unlikely new hero of the British bien pensant classes:

The liberal-left and even some on the supposedly radical left have a new hero: Sir Philip Rutnam. Yes, they’re now worshipping functionaries. They’re now falling at the feet of starched, bureaucratic civil servants. Worse, they seem to have completely forgotten about the Windrush scandal and the hostile environment policy – both of which were overseen by Sir Philip in his role as permanent secretary at the Home Office – in the rush to make him the hero of the hour. Why? Because Rutnam has crossed swords with Priti Patel, and the EU-pining, Boris-hating, populism-fearing left loathes nobody more than Priti Patel. Genghis Khan could have a pop at Priti and they’d be calling him a legend, such is the depth of their dislike for that “nasty woman”.

Official portrait of the Right Honourable Priti Patel, MP.
Photo by Richard Townshend.

The speed and obsequiousness with which leftish people canonised Rutnam following his resignation on Saturday was alarming. Most of them probably hadn’t heard of him prior to his flounce, but suddenly he was a cross between Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill, the bestest civil servant of our time, the steady, wise, clever counter to the rabid ideologism of the Boris mob. A breathless Guardian editorial likened Boris Johnson’s government to the Jacobin terror, with its use of “studied recklessness” to “disrupt [and] demoralise” representatives of “the ancien regime“, like Sir Philip, the People’s Civil Servant, the Bureaucrat of our Hearts. Steady on, Guardianistas: Rutnam has only lost his job, not his head.

The rash, highly political beatification of Sir Philip hasn’t only airbrushed out of view the various screw-ups he has overseen, from fairly mundane screw-ups (while he was in transport) to truly immoral ones (like the Windrush scandal while he was at the Home Office). No, it also turns a blind eye to the unusualness and the cynicism of his extravagant resignation. Civil servants have been falling out with governments for as long as both have existed. But normally the civil servant in question would take it on the chin, slink off into obscurity (or maybe the Lords), and live out a plush retirement. Not Rutnam. He made his resignation into a political weapon. He seems to be out to undermine the elected government. That is more scandalous than Priti Patel allegedly asking civil servants why they are all so “fucking useless”.

The Patel / Rutnam clash is more than a personality problem. It’s about politics, and democracy. According to reports – and we must wait to see how true all this is – Rutnam “obstructed” Patel. He reportedly thought she wasn’t up to the job of home secretary and allegedly tried to hinder some of her priorities. If this is true, it looks like the unelected wing of government – the machinery of the civil service – seeking to block the wishes and programme of the elected wing of government. And now Rutnam is threatening to sue the government for constructive dismissal, which would further weaken Patel’s position, potentially hamper her Home Office work, and posit the bureaucracy against elected ministers.

March 3, 2020

QotD: Public service and competitive private enterprise

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

Anyone who deals with the general UK public (coercive) sector regularly, knows it is a cesspit of laziness, incompetence, arrogance and corruption, riddled with civil servants that are neither civil nor servants.

And I’m not suggesting that the levels of corruption and incompetence are comparable to those found in third world hellholes. A local official in your county council is very unlikely to demand a bribe and then have your daughter raped by his buddies if you decline. He’s especially unlikely to get away with it, and then douse your family in petrol and burn them alive if you complain – those are the levels of corruption found elsewhere in the world, so we need to retain some perspective here.

But those countries have not benefited from a thousand years of sacrifice to earn us a culture that has learned through bitter experience how to run a country. Our civil servants should be performing at the highest standard and be the best in the world, because what they inherited was a culture that conquered that world, and brought civilisation and progress (often at great cost) to every corner of it.

That they have fallen from these heights and now occupy such low places should be a matter for great national shame. And yet they continue to lord it over those they pretend to serve – try calling your local planning department if you want instruction in how supercilious a local functionary feels able to be when speaking to those he claims to serve. If you just want them to do their job, you better be prepared to beg.

Whereas on the flip side, we might agree that the private (voluntary) sector is largely filled with honest and hardworking people and entrepreneurs, but there are crony capitalists out there too.

Your local butcher and baker (those that have survived the regulatory avalanches under which the crony capitalists have begged their pet politicians to bury them) remain staunch servants of their customers (through regard to their own interests), whereas oligoplists (supermarkets, telcos, insurance companies, banks, energy suppliers or transport companies) deliver to us just what the monopolists of government do – an icy contempt that would soon turn to withering small arms fire if the laws allowed it.

Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.

March 2, 2020

The Trouble With Tumbleweed

Filed under: Environment, Government, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

CGP Grey
Published 1 Mar 2020

Director’s commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbHQO…

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Wikipedia says:

A tumbleweed is a structural part of the above-ground anatomy of a number of species of plants, a diaspore that, once it is mature and dry, detaches from its root or stem, and rolls due to the force of the wind. In most such species, the tumbleweed is in effect the entire plant apart from the root system, but in other plants, a hollow fruit or an inflorescence might serve the function. Tumbleweed species occur most commonly in steppe and arid ecosystems, where frequent wind and the open environment permit rolling without prohibitive obstruction.

Apart from its primary vascular system and roots, the tissues of the tumbleweed structure are dead; their death is functional because it is necessary for the structure to degrade gradually and fall apart so that its seeds or spores can escape during the tumbling, or germinate after the tumbleweed has come to rest in a wet location. In the latter case, many species of tumbleweed open mechanically, releasing their seeds as they swell when they absorb water.

The tumbleweed diaspore disperses seeds, but the tumbleweed strategy is not limited to the seed plants; some species of spore-bearing cryptogams — such as Selaginella — form tumbleweeds, and some fungi that resemble puffballs dry out, break free of their attachments and are similarly tumbled by the wind, dispersing spores as they go.

[…]

In the family Amaranthaceae (i.e. broadly defined to include Chenopodiaceae), several annual species of the genus Kali are tumbleweeds. They are thought to be native to Eurasia, but when their seeds entered North America in shipments of agricultural seeds, they became naturalized in large areas. In the cinema genre of Westerns, they have long been symbols of frontier areas. Kali tragus is the so-called “Russian thistle”. It is an annual plant that breaks off at the stem base when it dies, and forms a tumbleweed, dispersing its seeds as the wind rolls it along. It is said to have arrived in the United States in shipments of flax seeds to South Dakota, perhaps about 1870. It now is a noxious weed throughout North America, dominating disturbed habitats such as roadsides, cultivated fields, eroded slopes, and arid regions with sparse vegetation. Though it is a troublesome weed, Kali tragus also provides useful livestock forage on arid rangelands.

February 29, 2020

“And then, somewhat astonishingly, the Ontario Provincial Police actually upheld the law”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley calls for some answers in the still-not-fully resolved railway disruptions by First Nations and climate activists and the calling-it-spineless-is-a-compliment reactions of various levels of government to widespread contempt for the law:

Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario.

When Canada’s ongoing spate of rail blockades finally peters out, this country has some work to do. A parliamentary committee might be up to the job, but even a full-on independent inquiry might not be excessive. A small group of Mohawks in Tyendinaga, Ont., in solidarity with an even smaller group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs, managed to blockade the Canadian National Railway for two weeks, not just holding hostage a chunk of the country’s economy, productivity and mobility, but demanding as ransom the cancellation of a liquefied natural gas pipelines that all First Nations affected by it, and it seems a comfortable majority of their residents, support.

It’s not a national disaster or anything. But as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau belatedly realized, it’s simply not an acceptable outcome in a democracy operating under the rule of law. And there is every reason to believe it could happen again — especially because we don’t really know how or why it ended when it did.

Operating at peak obnoxiousness, Trudeau had scolded those who demanded enforcement of a court order against the Tyendinaga blockade as boors, violence-mongers and idiots: “We are not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do,” he huffed. And then, frustrated by a lack of Sunny Ways among the federal government’s negotiating partners, he suddenly told the police what to do — or at the very least what he thought should happen.

[…]

The relatively undramatic end to the Tyendinaga blockade, after two weeks of dire warnings about Oka and Ipperwash reruns, raises another key question: Is there any reason we should believe it was safer to enforce the injunction on Day 14, as opposed to Day One or Two or Six?

Attempting negotiations was a perfectly sensible approach, even though it was very difficult to discern any room for compromise when one of the blockaders’ demands was so simple, blunt and inconceivable: shutting down the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. But the government is likely to face similarly unbending demands from future blockaders: Shutting down the Trans Mountain pipeline project, for example. Surely we can’t establish “two weeks of futility and then enforcement” as a policy moving forward. (Some might argue it was already established by a 13-day blockade of CN tracks near Sarnia, Ont., in 2013 — but that wasn’t nearly as crippling a blow to the railway’s operations.)

Police in Quebec were perfectly happy to enforce an injunction against a blockade on Montreal’s South Shore, which ended swiftly and without incident. Another on Mohawk territory in Kahnawake remains in place, and Premier François Legault has been excoriated for suggesting police face a heavily armed populace there — but at least it’s an attempt at an explanation. When it comes to the OPP’s inaction, we have none. For that matter, we probably deserve some insight into how protesters were able to set a roaring bonfire next to a moving train in Tyendinaga, wholly unmolested, just a couple of days after the blockade came down.

The metallic nickname of Henry VIII

Filed under: Britain, Germany, Government, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes outlines the rocky investment history for German mining firms in England during the Tudor period:

Cropped image of a Hans Holbein the Younger portrait of King Henry VIII at Petworth House.
Photo by Hans Bernhard via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s an especially interesting case of England’s technological backwardness, given that copper was a material of major strategic importance: a necessary ingredient for the casting of bronze cannon. And it was useful for other industries, especially when mixed with zinc to form brass. Brass was the material of choice for accurate navigational instruments, as well as for ordinary pots and kettles. Most importantly, brass wire was needed for wool cards, used to straighten the fibres ready for spinning into thread. A cheaper and more secure supply of copper might thus potentially make England’s principal export, woollen cloth, even more competitive — if only the English could also work out how to produce brass.

The opportunity to introduce a copper industry appeared in 1560, when German bankers became involved in restoring the gold and silver content of England’s currency. The expensive wars of Henry VIII and Edward VI in the 1540s had prompted debasements of the coinage, to the short-term benefit of the crown, but to the long-term cost of both crown and country. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the ostensibly silver coins were actually mostly made of copper (as the coins were used, Henry’s nose on the faces of the coins wore down, revealing the base metal underneath and earning him the nickname Old Coppernose). The debased money continued to circulate for over a decade, driving the good money out of circulation. People preferred to hoard the higher-value currency, to send it abroad to pay for imports, or even to melt it down for the bullion. The weakness of the pound was an especial problem for Thomas Gresham, Queen Elizabeth’s financier, in that government loans from bankers in London and Antwerp had to be repaid in currency that was assessed for its gold and silver content, rather than its face value. Ever short of cash, the government was constantly resorting to such loans, made more expensive by the lack of bullion.

Restoring the currency — calling in the debased coins, melting them down, and then re-minting them at a higher fineness — required expertise that the English did not have. From France, the mint hired Eloy Mestrelle to strike the new coins by machine rather than by hand. (He was likely available because the French authorities suspected him of counterfeiting — the first mention of him in English records is a pardon for forgery, a habit that apparently died hard as he was eventually hanged for the offence). And to do the refining, Gresham hired German metallurgists: Johannes Loner and Daniel Ulstätt got the job, taking payment in the form of the copper they extracted from the debased coinage (along with a little of the silver). It turned out to be a dangerous assignment: some of the copper may have been mixed with arsenic, which was released in fumes during the refining process, thus poisoning the workers. They were prescribed milk, to be drunk from human skulls, for which the government even gave permission to use the traitors’ heads that were displayed on spikes on London Bridge — but to little avail, unfortunately, as some of them still died.

Loner and Ulstätt’s payment in copper appears to be no accident. They were agents of the Augsburg banking firm of Haug, Langnauer and Company, who controlled the major copper mines in Tirol. Having obtained the English government as a client, they now proposed the creation of English copper mines. They saw a chance to use England as a source of cheap copper, with which they could supply the German brass industry. It turns out that the tale of the multinational firm seeking to take advantage of a developing country for its raw materials is an extremely old one: in the 1560s, the developing country was England.

Yet the investment did not quite go according to plan. Although the Germans possessed all of the metallurgical expertise, the English insisted that the endeavour be organised on their own terms: the Company of Mines Royal. Only a third of the company’s twenty-four shares were to be held by the Germans, with the rest purchased by England’s political and mercantile elite: people like William Cecil (the Secretary of State) and the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley (the Queen’s crush). It was an attractive investment, protected from competition by a patent monopoly for mines of gold, silver, copper, and mercury in many of the relevant counties, as well as a life-time exemption for the investors from all taxes raised by parliament (in those days, parliament was pretty much only assembled to legitimise the raising of new taxes).

February 28, 2020

A history lesson from Roman Thessalonika

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

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin recounts a story that has some interesting modern parallels for those who choose to look:

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

It happened in Thessalonika near the end of the Roman Empire.

The empire had been in trouble for some time. It was not reproducing itself – “The human harvest was bad” (Seeley). “Agri Deserti” – once-cultivated lands now abandoned for lack of people to till them – could be found in every province.

Internally, the empire tried its usual solution: more government, more laws, more force. Legislation to reward large families and tax bachelors was kept on the statute books for centuries although “successful it was not” (Power). As the empire waned, laws to deal with the consequence of this failure were added: binding cultivators to the soil (the origin of serfdom) was merely the most common example of assigning a hereditary obligation to more and more of the professions the state relied on as soon as a shortfall appeared in them, legally punishing any son who did not follow in his father’s footsteps. To draft and regulate these laws, the numbers and privileges of bureaucrats ballooned from Rome’s former proportion (though still small by our standards).

Successful all these laws were not – so, externally, the empire addressed its chronic shortage of manpower by immigration,

    to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more

Goths arrived, first as recruits to Roman army units, then as foederate units under their own leaders, growing like a cancer within the armed forces until an Egyptian mother quite naturally wrote the emperor to return her citizen son who “has gone off with the barbarians” – by which she meant he had joined the “Roman” army.

Emperor Theodosius made the Goths obey him, but his was an insecure authority over them. He used Gothic troops in battles where pyrrhic victories may have been welcome. As one summary of the costly victory of Frigidius (394 AD) puts it,

    The loss of 10,000 Goths cannot have distressed Theodosius unduly.

Theodosius also had little choice but to use some of their leaders as governors. Mostly, the empire’s soldiers were also its police – so the leaders of those who were now increasingly providing those soldiers had to be both rewarded by, and used in, such posts. Thus did Butheric the Goth became governor (magister militum) over Illyricum, which included Thessalonika.

The urban elite of Thessalonika were university-educated Greeks.

    It would be hard to imagine an education less suited to help them understand the dangers they faced. The study of rhetoric, its links with reality long severed, …

So Eileen Power described the “learned” of the dying Roman world. (Today, 8 decades after she wrote those sentences, it is easier to imagine an education even less suited to helping elite intellectuals understand the dangers facing them, one whose links with reality are even more completely severed.) In the empire’s second century, Hadrian had dispersed those Jews he did not kill around the empire, confident they’d soon lose their primitive prejudices and assimilate to being broad-minded Graeco-Roman intellectuals like himself. Fourth/fifth century Graeco-Roman intellectuals thought the same of the immigrants. Sidonius Appolinaris wrote a “good-natured” description of the “embarrassing friendliness” of the new barbarian neighbours he encountered on a fifth-century visit to Lyons:

    “How can he be expected to compose six-foot metres”, [Sidonius] asks, “with so many seven-foot patrons all around him, all singing and all expecting him to admire their uncouth stream of non-Latin words.”

The shrug of the shoulders, the genial contempt of one conscious of an infinite superiority – how familiar it all seems.

Perhaps the Thessalonikan city leaders greeted their new governor in this spirit, as sure as Hadrian was about the Jews that this uncouth Goth would soon lose his barbaric prejudices.

February 26, 2020

The Home Office – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”

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

From Stephen Pollard, one gets the sense that no rational politician would ever want to be Home Secretary in a British government:

Official portrait of the Right Honourable Priti Patel, MP.
Photo by Richard Townshend.

Here’s a trick question: which Home Secretary has been subject to hostile briefings from within the department that they are too Right-wing, too populist, too lazy, too stupid and a bully?

It’s a trick because the answer is: almost all of them. You can pretty much take your choice from any of those who have arrived at the Home Office with a definable agenda, and one that differs from the received Home Office wisdom.

The briefings currently being meted out against Priti Patel are certainly severe. She has been accused of creating an “atmosphere of fear” by officials, an allegation strongly denied by ministers. But in the sweep of recent political history, they are entirely normal. The Home Office has always played dirty when a minister attempts to overturn its shibboleths. The moment its mandarins sniff trouble, stories start appearing in the press about how the new minister is out of his or her depth, unthinking, posturing and — always the same — a variation on stupid.

[…]

The list of the Home Office’s responsibilities is ludicrously large, including: illegal drug use; alcohol strategy, policy and licensing conditions; terrorism; crime; public safety; border control; immigration; applications to enter and stay in the UK; issuing passports and visas; policing; fire prevention; fire rescue. In addition it is responsible for more than 30 agencies and public bodies.

John Reid infamously described its immigration department as “not fit for purpose”, and that quote has often been — understandably — misapplied to the Home Office as a whole.

The likes of Michael Howard and David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary in 2001, were political heavyweights with enough nous to get a grip of the hostile department. In preparing my biography of Blunkett, I spent months in and out of the Home Office when he was running the department, observing and speaking to officials — some who were supportive of their boss but others who clearly regarded him as an irritant.

One adviser to Blunkett recalls that the feeling was mutual. Blunkett wanted to replace the senior civil servants from top to bottom, and he and his aides were shocked at just how chaotic and inefficient the department was. “Nothing had prepared us for it,” recalled one adviser. “It was worse than any of us had imagined possible. God alone knows what Jack [Straw] did for four years. I am simply unable to comprehend how he could have left it as it was. At least Howard had the alibi that he was attempting a wholesale culture shift. In the Home Office, doing nothing means going backwards. It was a mess. A giant mess.”

February 25, 2020

“Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking”

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

David Solway outlines some of the serious issues Canada needs to tackle … but many of which are issues that the current federal government is striving to avoid tackling:

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity — although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

Quebec separatists don’t need to do much more than sit back, put their feet up, crack a few beers, and watch Justin Trudeau drive the country toward dissolution. Their job is so much easier now…

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe — North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble. And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

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